A warm welcome to the class of 2011

Recently I coordinated with the department to send out information about BruinPlanners.com to the incoming 2011 class. Not so easy to send out a tutorial about the site from China, where all access to blogs is pretty heavily restricted (then how am I posting... see below). Anyway, the incoming students seem pretty intrigued by the idea of BruinPlanners and several are getting in touch with requests to join. As far as I can tell, there's a good reason to be thrilled; I haven't found any other top-tier Urban Planning program in America with a similar student-published resource. So to our alums who just left, our returning class of 2010, and the new class of 2011, welcome to BruinPlanners. Hopefully all of this can be at least a tad bit useful.

As I get new requests from people to join, I'll go ahead and approve them, but I've also suggested to people that they ask any of the current authors for access, as we all have equal administrator privileges. So if you see a new name on here from someone you don't recognize, leave them a comment, and welcome them to UCLA and BruinPlanners!

I am posting this thanks to Mail2Blogger (I think that's what its called) which allows you to write your entire post from email, then click 'send' and have it automatically posted. Times when this is most helpful:

• When stuck behind "The Great Firewall of China" and you can't access Blogger.com
• When someone emails you something really cool, and you instinctively hit the FOWARD button, only to realize that it might be better communicated via a blog post. Just remember this little piece of wisdom that some girl said to me once: Emails come and go, but blog posts are forever!
• When you are in one of those hyper-productive Outlook / Gmail / Yahoo / Hotmail, etc modes, and you don't want to go to another site in your browser for fear of the lengthy, but pleasant, distraction that it will cause.

Instructions on how to set up Mail2Blogger (along with a full guide I made on every aspect of BruinPlanners.com) is available from this Google Doc: BruinPlanners.com Guide

And since I think every post is best when there are some visuals attached, here's a recent video I made of some time visiting some villages, exhibits, and developments in southern China. Make sure to check out the end, where you can see how they exhibit local long-range plans in each city. Oh, and the soundtrack is the Chinese National Anthem, so don't forget to salute the flag.


Jiangxi Work Trip from Jeremy Cogan on Vimeo.