Student Stories

Why did I come to UC Santa Cruz and how has UCSC affected my life? WOW! I learned about UCSC from a high school friend, fellow Crown ‘71 alum Kathy Henry. Her father worked on the financing of UCSC at UCOP, University Office of the President. He brought his family to...

Basketball Junkie Finds a Niche My family lived over the hill in San Jose, and I had been visiting the beaches of Santa Cruz since I was in 4th grade, so I instinctively knew that there were good reasons to be in Santa Cruz. And, my older sister had transferred there...

dbleakly@pacbell.net I should be embarrassed to say that I didn't know much about UCSC when I applied there. It was the only UC campus I applied to, along with one out-of-state university and one private university. But it was the obvious choice when I was accepted by...

arthur.bridge@gmail.com To live is to grow, to grow is to learn I first encountered Santa Cruz in 1967 when I was seventeen – that immortal summer from which I emerged unscathed yet fashioned for adulthood. That was the summer in which young women sprinkled my cosmos...

charlie.channel@gmail.com Appreciation Failed out of community college. Drafted in 1964 but joined U.S.N. to survive (and avoid) being on the ground in Viet Nam. 1967 returned to community college. Got an A.A. on Dean's List. Another student and Vet (Steve Brown) said...

UC Santa Cruz here I come In the midst of my senior year at Loyola High School, in the fall of 1966, as all my classmates considered our next educational steps (Loyola is a college preparatory school where nearly 100% of graduates went on to college) I considered my...

How did I get to Santa Cruz? Simple answer: Gideon Rappaport, metaphorically and literally. 1. Metaphorically I first met Gideon at after-school Hebrew when we were both eleven. After my bar-mitzvah in the 8th grade, I didn't see him again until we started high school...

r5crane@att.net Coming to UCSC by a different path My journey to UCSC was a bit different from students there. I began college as a student in physics at the California State Polytechnic University in 1964. A year and half later a selective service board error...

As for my own coming to UCSC story, I lived in Oakland, and it was the perfect distance away from home (Berkeley was my second choice). Just as important was UCSC's unique constellation of features. Although at 17 I was a Total Scientist (nerd), I have a...

Sadly, Glory passed away in August 2020 right after she submitted her memory below and her blog post about the 1968 Yearbook. Her final words to us were: "Our school was the only place in my life that felt like a second home. It nourished imagination and spirit...

How and why I came to UC Santa Cruz and Crown College I came to Santa Cruz in large part because my mother was a huge fan of Dean McHenry, who founded the campus with Clark Kerr and served as our first chancellor.  McHenry ran for Congress in 1952 in a district...

email@zenmudra.com In the summer of 1967, I went to Oregon State at Corvalis for a math-intensive for high school students. There, I learned about Godel’s incompleteness theorems, which fascinated me. I think I was admitted to Crown College because I had good marks in...

I was a lonely boy at the USC School of Architecture, the sole member of SDS, being vehemently against the Vietnamese war. A high-school friend told me about UCSC and Mike Kagen and I went up for a visit. We instantly fell in love with the pioneer spirit and both...

I'm not sure you'd really like to know about how I got to UCSC. I really was dumb as a bucket of rocks on the subject of college choice. I wanted to go to an East Coast school. Dad nixed that. I liked Berkeley. My mother nixed that (Mario Savio had made a very...

phahn50@gmail.com I came to UCSC for the same reasons that most people did. I was attracted to the idealism of a new cutting-edge university focused on undergraduate education. The vision was that students could be motivated by ideas and aesthetics instead of grades....

In the Fall of my senior high school year, my dad mentioned a new UC Campus, small classes, innovative, in Santa Cruz. It sounded interesting as it was smaller than my high school. I applied. My high school counselor said, "Oh, that is very difficult to get into,...

write12kmh@comcast.net What Brought Me to UCSC and Crown College & What I Got Out of It As a native of the SF Bay Area, our family took day trips to Santa Cruz. I grew up loving Santa Cruz. As I write this I can feel the sand between my toes. My father worked...

char797@aol.com Growing up in the Bay Area, I had visited Santa Cruz numerous times for vacations or just for a day at the beach. When it came time to choose a college, I researched UCSC. I looked forward to having evaluations in place of grades and loved the setting....

gary.karnes@comcast.net I pulled into Nazareth Well...I was a shy nobody of a kid who had little experience in the outer world. Then I came to UCSC. Wow! Besides the academics, the students helped me grow and blossom. For special mention were my roommates Mike Kagan...

david@karnos.net Steppin in My arrival to UCSC started with leaving the USNA in Annapolis. I had to hitchhike home to LA, in uniform, military rides from various bases, including a private jet ride with a general from Colorado Springs at the Air Force Academy to...

I chose to apply to UCSC because I fell in love with the redwood trees on a visit to the campus in the summer of 1967. In the fall of 1968, when I arrived at Crown College, it was about the size of my high school graduating class in San Diego. I loved walking the...

jtlapsley@gmail.com  I was born to go to “Cal.”  Although both my parents were from southern California, they each had headed north to “Cal,” as they referred to UC Berkeley, for college.  They met after graduation during the war, when my dad, an...

sam@sammagill.com On strike. Shut it down. Hell no, we won't go. Frisbee in the mud of the upper quad. Surrounding the UC Regent's bus. College night dinner - wearing a necktie. And now, Black Lives Matter. Whatever innocence we had, whatever innocence we have held...

sunerton@yahoo.com If you go to UC Santa Cruz you will lose your motivation–WHAT? This was a quote from one of my high school counselors. I attended a 4-year high school and was assigned a different counselor each year. Because my family was working class, I was...

mgnewman@mac.com I have no idea how I found out about UCSC, but I do remember wanting to go nowhere else in spite of some nice offers from other universities. I decided on Crown because I thought it would be cool to be in the first four-year class. Sadly, once I got...

How I got to UCSC I graduated from high school in 1968. Based on his own experience, my grades, and finances my father stipulated that I was going to the University of California and that I would live away from home. In the summer of 1967, we made a tour of UC...

windypoint@juno.com How I came to Crown College, and how Animal got his name As a high school senior, I was accepted at UC Santa Cruz but chose to go to Raymond College, part of the University of Pacific, in Stockton. At the time, I intended to get a PhD in science....

How I Came to UCSC and Crown I was born and raised in the upper Sacramento Valley—hot in the summer and tule fog/cold weather in the winter. I was psychologically predisposed not to want to attend college in Southern California. Although I danced to the Beach Boys, I...

lisajanrose@gmail.com In the summer of 1967 between my junior and senior years in high school, I attended the NSF Summer Science Training Program in Field Ecology at the Foresta Institute in Nevada. In those days, the word “ecology” wasn’t part of the vernacular. But...

msstonum@yahoo.com While going to junior college, I was fortunate to have a part-time reporting job with the Riverside Press-Enterprise, a newspaper that won the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in 1968. Then there was only one woman who held a hard news...

How I Chose Crown College When it came time to pick a college, the University of California campuses already loomed large. I was a fourth-generation Californian and my father had gone to Berkeley. I briefly considered Stanford and universities in other states, but...

diannesue@gmail.com I was a military brat and unlikely candidate to have ended up in Santa Cruz in 1967. I was one of 79 graduating seniors at a high school on an Air Force base in Tokyo. My father was a career Army officer but neither of my parents knew anything...

pjswift@sbcglobal.net My parents, working-class people from the Bay Area, were not too keen on my going away to college. At the beginning of the process, they drew a 100-mile circle around Walnut Creek and said that I could go to any public college I could get into...

bthornton@assetstewardship.com After the mud..... Although I graduated in 1969 with a degree.... I made up the title.... in Urban Environmental Studies, I arrived in 1997 after 2 years in an Ohio college ostensibly studying astronomy. I encountered the world's worst...

cavu.flying@gmail.com I came to UCSC under the influence of my parents. I wanted to go to UCLA; they thought I'd be lost there. I'm so glad I came to UCSC. I'm still not sure how I got in because I was a B student in high school. Most of my classmates at Crown were A...