UCI History
Relative to the other UC campuses,
UCI is quite young and was founded in this year.
(Hint: The first spacewalk
happened the same year!)
What is 1965?
Over the years, many housing options have been built for UCI students, and this was the first residence hall at UCI.
(Fun Fact: Chris lived in this res hall
when he was a student!)
What is Mesa Court?
Each fall, high school students must carefully consider their college applications. What are the essays called on the UC application?
What are PIQ (Personal Insight Questions)?
Students can participate in club sports through the UCI Campus Recreation, and there are currently this many club teams they can join.
What is 39?
The club list includes such sporting activities as cricket, dragon boating, pickleball and wushu.
Students voted to select the UCI mascot in 1965. Name 3 of the other proposed mascots.
What are the roadrunner, unicorn, centaur, sea hawk, golden bison or toros (bull)?
UCI's first students began their Anteater journey decades ago, and this many students were in that group on opening day.
What is 1,589 students?
The dining halls offer a wide variety of healthy, all-you-like meal options. Name the 2 dining halls located in on-campus housing.
What are the Anteatery and Brandywine?
Anteaters prefer to roam alone, but there were approximately this many students enrolled at UCI in 2024-2025.
What is ~36,600?
For the 2024-25 academic year, this is the approximate number of undergraduate, graduate and health sciences students who were enrolled at UCI.
Anteaters are kind of slow and lazy, but UCI students are active and athletic, and they compete on this number of NCAA Division I sports teams at UCI.
What is 18?
UC Irvine’s intercollegiate athletic program supports teams for 18 NCAA Division I sports — men’s baseball, basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis, track & field, volleyball, and water polo; and women’s basketball, cross country, golf, indoor track & field, soccer, tennis, track & field, volleyball, and water polo.
Anteaters originally evolved in South America and can be also be found in Central and North America as well as parts of the Caribbean, and UCI students come to Irvine from this many different countries.
Approximately 79 countries are represented within the UCI student body.
Howard Gillman is the current Chancellor at UCI and the 6th to serve in this role. This person was appointed by UC President Clark Kerr as the first person to lead our campus.
Who was Daniel Aldrich?
Daniel Aldrich was UCI’s founding chancellor and served from 1962 to 1984. Upon his retirement, the campus’s 19-acre Central Park – which he designed – was soon renamed Aldrich Park in his honor.
Anteaters forage for ants and termites, but UCI students are often too busy to visit on-campus eateries for nourishment, so they order online to have food brought to them on campus via these cute machines.
What are Starship Food Delivery Robots?
UCI students can choose between this many different majors and this many schools in their educational pursuits.
What is 85+ majors and 15 schools?
The 15 Schools include Biological Sciences, Arts, Information & Computer Sciences, Population & Public Health, Business, Engineering, Education, Humanities, Law, Medicine, Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Ecology, Social Sciences, and Nursing.
Anteaters are mostly solitary creatures, but UCI students have active lives outside of the classroom and choose to invest time with this many registered campus organizations at UCI.
What is 674?
Though they are pretty chill, anteaters are funny creatures. Name the Saturday Night Live cast member that graduated from UCI.
Who is Jon Lovitz (BA, 1979)?
UCI's first graduating class was awarded degrees at a commencement dinner at Gateway Commons (now the Gateway Study Center) on June 25, 1966, and this many students received their degree on that day.
What is 14?
Although the graduates numbered only 14, the degrees conferred were in various fields, including art, psychology, math, and engineering.
Residence life is a big part of the Anteater experience for many UCI students. This is the current number of spaces in UCI Housing.
What is 17,793?
As of February 2026, this is the number of bed spaces across residence halls, apartments and graduate housing communities.
Anteaters are extremely intelligent, and this many Nobel Prize winners have ties to UCI.
What is 6? UC Irvine's laureate community includes the following emeriti: Leland Hartwell (Medicine, 2021); Frederick Reines (Physics, 1995); Irwin A. Rose (Chemistry, 2004); and F. Sherwood Rowland (Chemistry, 1995).
UC Irvine's laureate community also includes: Alumnus David MacMillan (Chemistry, 2021) and Postdoctoral scholar Mario Molina (Chemistry, 1995).
UCI holds several Guinness World Records, the latest of which involves a very tall athlete who committed to play this sport at UCI.
What is basketball?
At a towering height of 7' 9", Olivier Rioux was certified in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the world's tallest teenager." He has committed to play for UC Irvine, as he announced on Instagram on April 30th.
The UCI campus is very scenic! Name at least 2 movies that included scenes filmed on the UCI campus.
What are Conquest of Planet of the Apes (1972), Silent Movie (1976), Poltergeist (1982), The Creator (1984), Ocean's Eleven (2001), The Newest Pledge (2010) and Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story (2023)?