It's true, though, that as great as the city is, it's mostly just a colorful and exciting backdrop for my studies. So I guess it's UCLA that I love. But UCLA is a pretty big place itself, with more students than the largest city in Europe during the whole first millennium A.D., and more knowledge stored here than existed in the whole world two hundred years ago. All I really know of UCLA is its neuroscience community. And while that's as big, and as diverse, as I could wish, it's also so closely knit and informal that it feels like a family.
Nothing brings people together more closely than the neuroscience core curriculum.
During the first year, we take courses in neuroanatomy, cellular physiology, molecular biology, developmental neurobiology, and behavioral neuroscience. These courses aren't easy, so the students join forces and tackle them together. Because people come to this program from different educational backgrounds, each person brings individual strengths and weaknesses to the classroom. This diversity allows us to help each other learn. I feel that I learned more in one year of graduate school than I did in four years of college, and a large part of this was due to the help of my friends in the first year class.