Have you wondered why you always seem to have lectures at 8 a.m every morning in Broad Art Center or Bunche Hall while your roommates get to sleep in until noon? It turns out there are patterns that determine when and where departments schedule their classes. The class schedules we used were scraped from the UCLA Registrar archives and included all classes held between Fall 2012 to Winter 2017.

Where are the classes located for my department?

Pick a department to see the geographic distribution of that department’s classes.

Each box displays the percent of classes that are held in the corresponding building , and you can click on it to see a more detailed breakdown, including a number that takes class size into account. (Note: Buildings that account for less than 1 percent of the total are excluded.)

The red circle indicates the weighed average location for that particular department.

Some departments, like Design | Media Arts have almost all of their classes concentrated in one building, while others like the statistics department resembles a diaspora that has no particular buildings to call home. (More on this later in the post.) The GE cluster classes in particular have a weighted center in the middle of “nowhere,” as around half of them are on the Hill and the other half are on campus.





How spread out are departments?

Some departments hold lectures in many buildings scattered around campus while others are concentrated in two or three buildings. For each department, we calculated the percent of classes that took place in its three most common buildings. This type of analysis is sometimes used by economists to detect whether an industry is monopolized by a few companies.

Most Concentrated Departments Department Top 3 Percent Dance 100% Ethnomusicology 100% Music 100% Music History 100% Art 99% Arts and Architecture 99% Nursing 99% Physics 98% Biostatistics 97% Astronomy 96% Design / Media Arts 96% Art History 95% Materials Science and Engineering 95% World Arts and Cultures 95% Chemistry and Biochemistry 93% Film and Television 92% Program in Computing 89% Education 88% Anthropology 87% Classics 86% Departments Without Homes Department Top 3 Percent Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology 39% Statistics 41% Environment 41% Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics 45% Gender Studies 46% Religion, Study of 49% Ancient Near East 49% Honors Collegium 51% Asian American Studies 53% Society and Genetics 54% Physiological Science 54% Neuroscience 55% Chicana and Chicano Studies 56% English 58% Linguistics 60% Global Health 60% Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 60% Communication Studies 61% Scandinavian 62% Japanese 63% History 63%





How North or South Campus is my department?

Using the latitude (ie. vertical) values of each department’s center, we can now rank departments based on how North or South Campus they are. We also convert the latitudes into distances from Bruin Walk (in meters), which we use as a dividing line.

Note: In case you’re wondering why your favorite department isn’t on the list, we included only the 40 largest departments (by number of students) in the following tables.





Most South Campus Departments Department Distance from Bruin Walk (m) Life Sciences -320 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology -309 Physiological Science -276 Chemistry and Biochemistry -265 Neuroscience -254 Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics -231 Engineering -165 Electrical Engineering -142 Mathematics -131 Computer Science -131 Psychology -98 Environment -76 Statistics -53 Physics -42 Ethnomusicology -31 Education -31 Music -31 Music History -31 Bruin Walk 0 Most North Campus Departments Department Distance from Bruin Walk (m) Film and Television 536 Theater 503 Economics 325 Spanish 325 Geography 302 Political Science 269 Management 258 History 258 Chicana and Chicano Studies 258 Communication Studies 247 French 236 Philosophy 225 Sociology 225 Chinese 225 Anthropology 213 Classics 202 Linguistics 191 English Composition 191 Art History 191 General Education Clusters 191 English 158 Bruin Walk 0

As we can see, related departments tend to be clustered together geographically. The furthest South Campus departments are in the biological sciences, followed by engineering and then the other sciences. Interestingly enough, the music department is slightly on the South Campus side because of the location of Schoenberg Music Building. Furthest north are the visual and performing arts, followed by social sciences and finally, the language departments.





When are the classes for my department held?

Scheduling patterns are also evident in when classes are held. Let’s take a look at how many student-hours in total are spent in each hour period. (For example, if 100 students are in a class that lasts 30 minutes, then 50 student-hours are counted.) The “average” time is also labeled and it provides a rough summary of each distribution.

Pick a department to see its hourly distribution.





A few interesting patterns: