Dear Prospective Student:

It's not always this cold here. Trust me. Really. Don't choose UCLA over a school in the Northeast just because of the weather. Maybe University of Hawaii. But give us a chance in the spring. When it rains every day. Also, the cold isn't that bad, at least here, because the administration provides free coffee, tea, and hot cocoa every weekday morning. Don't worry about the rumors they lace it with anti-depressants to make the students seem happy when they're really miserable. That's just something I'm making up now but the administration might think about trying if they really want to trick people into coming here. Because they can't change the weather. They can try. They are trying to build an artificial environment that could overtake the real one in a battle of wits and power. We could soon be attending school in a square mile of climate controlled goodness, while the surrounding communities get three degrees colder and twice as much snow to compensate. They're working on it. You might be a 3L by then, but still, it's in the pipeline. There's not always slush on the ground. Sometimes there's ice. It's not always snowing. Sometimes it's just windy. There aren't always 8-hour take home exams. Sometimes there are 3-hour in-class exams. Sometimes you write papers. All of that goes on inside, where it's not snowing. And where it's not 3 degrees. Kelvin. I'd forgotten about the Kelvin scale until recently when I realized it might make more sense to use it when temperatures are consistently in single digits or lower. It's been negative on the Celsius scale for about two weeks now. That means that the warmth from our bodies is actually taken away from us by the weather. I learned that in high school science. I think. I don't know if we can ever get to absolute zero but I think that was my raw score on some of last semester's exams. It's also the chance of us getting our grades before spring. Last year I thought a month was too long to have to wait for grades. I didn't realize the 2Ls and 3Ls had it worse. Not that it matters since we're all going to freeze to death before we get out of here anyway. But it's not always this cold here. Trust me.

Best wishes,
A cold student