Dear UCSD newcomers, This is a greeting from UCSD CSSA president and newcomer directors. As some of you have already got your visas, we are more than happy to share any information we have here to help you preparing your trip and getting you started quick here in San Diego. We will cover some basic information about air trip, picking up, housing and contact. You can also find some useful information at UCSD CSSA homepage at http://acs.ucsd.edu/~cssaucsd/. 1. Air trip Most people will take air flight to San Diego international airport(SAN) 10-15 days prior to the beginning of the quarter (Sept 19 for this year). For those who haven¡¯t traveled by air before, there are various airline companies (e.g. Air China, United Airline) and airline agents can provide tickets and related information. There are several flight flies from Beijing or Shanghai directly to San Diego, but are relatively expensive. Most people take flights that need one or multiple transit at San Francisco, San Jose or Los Angeles. There are also flights require transfer in Japan or other countries. If you take multiple flights here, air company or air agent will provide you all the tickets prior to your leaving China. There are few people take flight to Los Angeles, which is 2 hours of driving from San Diego, and then take ground transportation to San Diego. However, this makes it very hard for CSSA or host family to pick you up. It is also very inconvenient for you to take public transportation from Los Angeles to San Diego with all your baggage and the poor public transportation system in southern California. It is not recommended unless you have friends who can pick you up. 2. Pickup CSSA or host family will provide pickup for you from San Diego international airport to UCSD or your temporary housing. You need to provide your flight number, arrival time, number of people and number of baggage for us to arrange pickup. Sometimes it is a little bit difficult for host family to arrange pickup during weekend or public holiday (e.g. the first Monday in Sept is U.S. Labor Day) 3. Housing Perhaps the most important thing here is housing. If you cannot get a long term housing prior to your arrival, CSSA or host family will provide you few days of temporary housing (probably in living room). Host family housing usually has 3 days limitation and need to apply at least 2-3 weeks prior to your arrival. Check http://icenter.ucsd.edu/host_family.html for more information. If you want CSSA to arrange temporary housing for you, please notify us one week prior to your arrival. Another temporary housing option is to live in the single graduate apartment (SGA) rooms of students who leave for the summer. You need to pay UCSD for this option. Check the SGA rental office after your arrival for more information. For long term housing, we have already put up information on CSSA homepage (http://acs.ucsd.edu/~cssaucsd/new_comer/newcomer_housing.html) make sure you read it before you make any movement. There are several things that we would like to mention in addition to that. 1. Make sure your housing is near SD bus stop or UCSD shuttle stop. Check http://blink.ucsd.edu/Blink/External/Topics/Policy/0,1162,11788,00.html for detailed information (city shuttle route is current under development, check this web site later for more information: http://blink.ucsd.edu/Blink/External/Search/Blingoogle/1,1957,,00.html? site=Blink&dir=blingoogle&q=cityshuttle). You will find yahoo map (maps.yahoo.com) and google map(maps.google.com) helpful in doing this. 2. Biking here in San Diego is much harder than that in Beijing, as it is very hilly and there is no special bike route on some road, which is a little bit dangerous with all the cars right besides you. 4. Contact: If you have any question, problem or information that you want to share with CSSA, please feel free to contact us. Make sure you cc to all of the contacts and include [cssa_newcomer] in your email title to help our poor spam filter. Xing Zhang (x7zhang@ucsd.edu) CSSA Newcomer Director Lingyun Zhang(lingyun@ucsd.edu) CSSA Newcomer Director Yanhua Mao (maoyanhua@cs.ucsd.edu) CSSA President. It is also recommended that you keep update your information (name, gender, from university/department, to department, visa status, arrival date/time, arrival flight, email and MSN) with Yuzhe Jin(yuzhejin@yahoo.com also known as kmienrg at zixia BBS), our newcomer contact in China.