The line for the chipotle chicken bowl at Bruin Plate seems to wrap around the building. The Bruin Fitness Center and John Wooden Center only get busier by the hour.

Popped champagne and glittery graduation photos aside, what lies ahead for our graduating seniors may be anything but smooth and picturesque. The real world, as they say, is a tough place to be.

It’s Week 8 and your bank account is probably crying a lot more than you are right now. With Memorial Day weekend coming up, your account balance might as well be holding its own funeral by the time you emerge from the waters of Malibu or the bars of Las Vegas.

“I miss UCLA coffee,” said no one ever. If you haven’t let out an unsatisfied grumble or wince after a sip of an iced mocha from Bruin Café or Kerckhoff Coffeehouse this week, you, my friend, are either getting used to the quality of coffee available here or are simply not a religious coffee drinker.

“Why are you so red?” If I had a dollar for every time I got asked that question on Thursday nights, I probably wouldn’t have to worry about my post-college debt.

Although many of us may have chosen to camp out in our rooms or flee to Coachella on the weekend of Bruin Day, our wariness of participating in the day’s festivities does not lessen the pride we have for being a Bruin.

Behold the UCLA campus. Straight ahead is the Powell Library, named after Lawrence Clark Powell, a previous university librarian whose son is a recent donor of $5 million to UCLA Library.

Hailing from the Midwest, UCLA was as foreign to me as California’s year-round summer weather and the 405 traffic. Desperate for any anchor of familiarity during my first quarter, I let my extrovert tendencies run wild in my race to establish my place on this campus and reaped more dead ends than I did connections.

Fake it till you make it. The amount of times I’ve casually thrown this phrase around in conversations, coupled with a slight eye roll, to garner light chuckles should have been indication that this was not a philosophy realistic enough to be taken seriously.

Two researchers from a UCLA clinical site explained the genetic approach to diagnosing rare diseases to about 50 UCLA students and faculty members Monday.
In honor of Rare Disease Day, Stanley Nelson and Christina Palmer, principal investigators of a UCLA clinical site, discussed how UCLA participates in the Undiagnosed Diseases Network.