USC Health Science Campus

This is the best hospital! They have done they’re best to keep me here. I’m truly blessed to have a great kidney and Liver team. Especially Dr. Fong and everyone. For allowing and pushing me to be on point.

oh, all of you haters (minus the pharm student below — fight on, my friend!). i am a graduate student on this campus, and yes our campus is small, but the education here is great. all of the graduate programs on the health science campus are highly ranked in the nation, and it is an honor to study here!
HSC is the campus for a variety of graduate programs for healthcare professions — pharmacy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, medicine, etc. the USC Keck hospital and the LAC-​USC is on the campus. the keck cafeteria is awesome, by the way. my classmates and i love going there for cheap food — yay for student discounts!
there are fruit stands scattered throughout the campus, and multiple food trucks that come by during lunch hour. there is also a shuttle that comes every 20 minutes to take you to the University Park Campus.
and yes, there is a gym on Soto — i’ve heard that it’s pretty nice!
there is free parking on Valley if you’re looking for free parking :)

Campus is small.
Parking is always full and metered parking is hard to find but the best education is here. Too bad its in a not so nice neighborhood. However campus is clean. Its is next to LAC-​USC hospital and my favorite USC School of Pharmacy! Go Trojans! Fight on!

I just took a tour of the campus. It is by no means a small campus. It is a 79-​acre site (excluding the LAC-​USC Medical Center, which by itself is 90 acres in size). Some of it are scattered among or around the county lands. They’re also planning a more than 110 acres bio-​medical research park next to the campus. I was quite impressed with the research facilities, lab space and hospitals owned by USC, which has become a focal point for students, patients, doctors and top-​notched scientists from around the world. The campus is adjacent to the LA County+USC Medical Center, one of the largest teaching hospitals in the US. The Keck Hospital, Norris Cancer Hospital as well as the medical school and pharmacy school as well as some genetic/​stem cell research buildings are the primary facilities. I was also surprised to learn that the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles is also affiliated with USC. The campus is nice and clean, however, the roads leading to the campus have fallen into disrepair. The county also seems to use some vacant sites around the campus for warehousing or yard purposes, affecting the overall appearance of the campus. With the school’s ambition and master plan, I can see the entire community to become a place for world-​class medical research and teaching in the future.

For all of the hype and images of prestige surrounding this school, is it really academically rigorous enough to deserve it? The MPH program capstone is a 15 page (double-​spaced) report. That’s right. Not a thesis. Not comprehensive exams. I have friends in CSUs doing in-​depth formal masters theses that can benefit their careers, and they are paying a small fraction of the tuition. At USC, you can do an MPH «concentration» in biostats by taking just 1 course in biostats.
Really???
Lets be honest. People are paying 100k+ to go to this school to get an easy, almost bonehead, degree that has a nice label attached to it.

0 – 1 star rating solely for the administrative employees (or staff apart from actual professors). They are all rude, impatient, and almost seemingly afraid to be of actual help to people. Honestly, their downfall is their enslavement to bureaucratic red tape.
I mean, I used to be a student worker at a USC office, so I know the feeling. Soo many times, I could’ve easily helped solve a student’s problem (ex. by just grabbing a form, or asking an employee a 5-​second question). But there’s so much red tape to go through (you can’t grab the form without calling this department first who will transfer you to another department, can’t ask the employee the question without first signing up to get in line…)
I understand the need for rules, but I feel like USC HSC office employees have put together so many rules that they’ve become trapped in their own web, unable to be of any actual help to anyone.
And check the attitude, people. It’s honestly embarrassing that elderly adults like you have the guts to talk to and treat young adult students the way that some of you do. You should be ashamed.
1 star for the campus itself… can it be called a campus? It’s so depressing that I want to streak through it sometimes just to bring a little more life. And it needs more food/​places to hang out or study. USC UPC gets everything. Seriously, USC HSC is like the sad matronly older sister to UPC’s popular cheerleader little sis.
I’m only giving 2 stars as a benefit of the doubt to the professors/​classes/​overall education quality. I’ve never taken a class there, but most HSC students I know don’t have that many complaints, so whatever.

Much has changed since the last reviewer’s post on HSC.
There is a gym now! It’s quite far down on Soto (the other side of the train track; next to Lincoln Park). There’s a shuttle (the bus is labeled by 8.5″ by 11″ white paper that says, «Soto Building») that takes you to the gym. It comes every 20minutes starting at 6AM until 8PM. And I think the bus driver said that after 4PM, the frequency of the shuttle increases.
The gym smells «new.» All the equipment are new. There are lockers you can use on a per day basis (bring your own lock but nothing remains in the locker at the end of the day.) And you can check out towels for free. There’s shower, bathroom, water fountain, and even studying lounges.
It is no longer possible to find a broken meter. The county has upgraded all the neighboring meters with the credit card version so you don’t even have an excuse for not having coins. The meter only runs from 8AM-​8PM, but since the library closes by midnight, it may not be practical to only come on campus after 8. Of course, you can always park a little farther where there are no parking meters… but that’s another story.
There is really nothing to do around the campus and safety can be an issue after the sun sets. The food selection is also very scarce. Everything on campus can only be described as, «I had better elsewhere.»
There is a post office on campus. And if you have the intercampus code (can be found online in the directory), you can send stuff to main campus offices for free. If you’re a student, you can also purchase tickets to amusement parks and entertainments at a discounted price. (If only they can take $ 20 off of Disneyland ticket… com’on, $ 3 off? Why even bother???)

Home to the USC health sciences campus.
Some of its great, some of its not.