I seem to have been swayed to leave UCLA and today's events only intensified these feelings.

Financially speaking, I have always somehow had many misfortunes within the UC system. Unfortunately, UCLA is no exception. Missteps occurred during the calculation of my loans and when one loan failed, another federal loan was "maxed out" to make up for it. However, this error was fixed and I was faced with an "over award" which I understood. When the rest of the fixed loan was given to me to cover housing and living expenses, I was told that the "over award" amount had been subtracted from this and accounted for. This was wrong.

Basically, I have to pay 1800 by next Friday or else I will be unable to enroll next quarter, and because of this outstanding balance, my financial aid will be unable to cover my expenses for the rest of the year, should I decide to pay it using my aid, which if is not done by next week, will accumulate 20 dollars per day in late fees.

Right now, I see no point in continuing my education within a system that cares about money more than its students, research more than the quality of education, and a brand name more than actual learning. I see no reason to have to attempt to make an appointment with an adviser for literally 5 days, to have to wait more than 3 days for an email response in which I titled URGENT as it referred to me dropping a class and how it would affect me, to have to take astronomy and calculus and chemistry when all I wanted to study was linguistics, maybe a few languages here and there and should time permit take things such as those mentioned with my "open units," for my own pleasure.


I am failing to understand why I am so unhappy here knowing that thousands of people would do anything to be in my position. I am struggling to remember who I was, to define who I am, and think about who I want to be, when I can't even answer the question, "Where are you from?"

And all this while, in the back of my head, I ask myself if I will ever stop searching, stop moving, stop thinking too much, just BEING, and find everything I have been looking for.