In the center of campus there is a small, colorful, one-story building with a great green lawn. It’s old and shabby, paint chipping and doors creaky. Most people refer to it as “the ugly building by the library.”
Little red building, home to CCS.
Usually when I tell people that I’m in the College of Creative Studies (CCS), I’m met with one of two responses: an excited “whoah, that’s cool!” or a confused “what’s CCS?”
In simple terms, CCS is one of UCSB’s three colleges (alongside The College of Letters & Sciences and The College of Engineering). On a more sentimental note, however, CCS is my home on campus. Applying was perhaps the best thing I have ever done for myself.
To be frank, I was not particularly excited to apply to UCSB. I had my eyes set on different schools, and to apply to UCSB was to check a box; when it prompted me to submit a second application for CCS, the same applied. I had never heard of the program and I didn’t know anything about it when writing the Letter of Intent for my portfolio. To prepare myself, I did some research.
There are nine majors offered in The College of Creative Studies: Art, Biology, Chemistry & Biochemistry, Computing, Marine Science, Mathematics, Music Composition, Physics, and Writing & Literature (my major!).
There are 385 students in the college, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 8:1. My classes average about 12 students, and these are the same students I have been with since my first quarter here at UCSB. We will continue alongside each other until we graduate.
Each major is different; they have different course progressions and different end goals. For Writing & Literature, we will focus our years here on a creative project and a research project.
Some will write a collection of poems, the chapters of a novel, or a film script. One will research the effect of trauma on memory, another the portrayal of monsters, a third an ambition that kills you. Everyone is working on something starkly different from the person next to them, and here we arrive at perhaps my favorite facet of the program.
The nature of our class sizes means that of course I know everyone’s names. I know their area of study, their grade. But I don’t know their favorite colors, or hometowns, or what they do in their free time.
But I do know what haunts them. I know the first time they felt the violence of a man and their grief of not knowing the language of their ancestors. I know why their passion is translanguaging and their feeling of being meat under a doctor’s hands.
I look around the round table that is our classroom — just enough seats for everyone, sunbeam spilling across the piano, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver taped on the door — and feel my place at UCSB solidify.
Everyone brings vastly different passions and pains to the table. Some write about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be disabled, what it means to be queer. One of my friends wears jewelry she made from the teeth of dead animals; another wears Arthurian dresses.
All of this rambling and the point is: The College of Creative Studies was built upon the foundation of passion and community. There is no judgment (though we do, of course, offer creative critiques). There is a celebration of learning and a celebration in the exchange of ideas.
The student-to-faculty ratio means that you grow close to your professors and staff that frequent the building. I look forward to my advisor meetings because I know we will end up somewhere far more exciting than where we started. There is always colorful conversation to be had.
Your teachers have their own passions and creative pursuits, their own goals and niches, and they teach in CCS because they want to promote your individual fascinations. There is a great big web of faculty that extends across universities, and often your professors will connect you to other academics that they think you should know.
Because of CCS, I am friends with physicists, mathematicians, artists, chemists. A music major produces a musical and a biochemistry student is the lead. Everyone knows everyone and your talks are never boring.
I interviewed two of my peers, Makenna and Max, to get their perspectives on CCS. Makenna is a fellow Writing & Literature major, and Max is a Math major.
What is your favorite part about CCS?
Makenna: It’s incredibly academically freeing. That is the selling point, and I’ve always been an academic brat when it comes to being told what to do, but it’s something I still appreciate nonetheless. I spent a good third of my freshman year solely on Religious Studies classes, and eventually became a research assistant for one of those professors, and I doubt I’d ever have been able to do that in L&S English. On another note, CCS is so small that I’m now intimately familiar with everyone ELSE’S academic pursuits as well, and some of my closest friends are STEM majors, which DEFINITELY wouldn’t have happened in L&S. And as someone who’s so cocky (or stupid) as to try to pursue the pre-dental path while keeping the W&L major, I’m grateful that I have them.
Max: I think my favorite thing about CCS is the people. Just the community is so wonderful, and it is just such a catalyst for learning and so many facets of school that get lost in, you know, normal L&S for instance. It’s just very special.
What most positively surprised you about CCS?
Makenna: It’s such an art school. Which is to say, the building is falling apart and we have no money (affectionate). But everyone knows each other, I’m comfortable with the front staff enough just to pop in and chat, and the rapport I have with professors is so intimate because we’re stuck with each other for four years. As someone who went to an arts school (also for writing) for a brief time, the authenticity of the people and raw effort put into everything are things very dear to me, even the dysfunction
Max: I think probably how nice the faculty are. The faculty is just so wonderful, and you really don’t expect it, but they get to know you on such an intimate level and you get to know them really well, and it just bridges a gap that I always felt was between me and faculty in high school.
For Max specifically – how does STEM fit into the “creative” college?
Max: When it comes to math, it’s easy when you’re not doing math to ask where’s the creative part, but when you’re in it, it’s plain and simple. Math is quite literally problem-solving, and if you’ve ever had to problem-solve in your life, which we all have to do, the most complicated problems are the ones that aren’t very straightforward. So it requires a creativity.
Whether you’re a stranger to CCS or a student of the college itself, I hope our perspectives give you a glimpse into our creative campus.