ways in which usc is a microcosm of los angeles

1. It's huge, sprawling, and mostly flat.

2. It's full of diversity, but everyone is ghettoized in their separate schools, classes, programs, and buildings, so the chances of meeting someone from outside your academic neighborhood/ghetto are rare. If your department is at the north end of campus, you probably never go to the south end. You might not even know what the south end looks like, and if you venture there it will seem confusing and alien.

3. There's no central gathering place, and in the normal place where you might meet someone new--campus walkways and plazas--everyone's too busy zipping to where they're going on their (a) skateboards or (b) beach cruiser bikes (probably while balancing a coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other while wearing an outfit you'd think would be highly inappropriate for biking) that they're too preoccupied to notice anyone else.

4. In some areas, extremely rich people have paid to build huge, expensive and obscenely ugly buildings that combine the spiffiest state-of-the-art technology with dozens of pointless, minor stupidities like switching which side the men's and women's bathrooms are on on different floors.

5. A large percentage of the public gathering/hanging out space is outside, a fact you don't think about until that one day when it rains.

6. The palm trees are imported. The only difference is at USC, you can pay to have your name put on them.