San Diego, CA (special) -- From Warren College, where Laura Matisoff is majoring in clinical psychology, she climbs a long serpentine path with a mosaic design to UCSD's Geisel Library.

Along the way, Matisoff amuses herself with a story based on the Book of Genesis that she and other campus tour guides like to tell visitors about the significance of the path, which is designed to look like a snake.  "You start off at the bottom as a freshman, and when you come in you don't really know where you want to go and what you want to do, so you can walk up different paths making different choices," she related Wednesday, Aug. 5, after a group trudged up the winding path.

Snaking toward the Geisel Library

"Then when you hit your senior year, you are going to start talking about what you want to do for the rest of your life; so you can sit down in our little Garden of Eden at the top (of the hill) and make a real decision about where it is and what it is you want to do.

"And then the snake spits you in the right direction towards our Tree of Knowledge, the library, with the hope that whatever knowledge you gained here at UCSD will take you to the outside world."

A snake, a Garden of Eden and a Tree of Knowledge are not the only reminders for Matisoff and other Jewish students that UCSD is a campus which has been imprinted by Jews and their traditions.

I accompanied my niece Heather Zeiden on a campus tour designed to answer the questions of prospective students. Although she is just about to enter 11th grade, she is a thoughtful young lady who wants to gather all the information necessary to make such an important decision as where to go to college.

The tour wended us past the Price Center, a student activities center donated by the Price Family, and also to the Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering, named for the first family of Qualcomm. The Jacobs gave $15 million recently as an endowment for the school.

Of course, there also is the Mandeville Auditorium, which lay beyond the tour route, and other buildings and art pieces with Jewish connections.

Following Matisoff's 90-minute walking tour, the prospective students met with an admissions officer who explained the processes by which the university evaluates grades, SAT tests, extra curricular activities and the like. Last year, an entering freshman needed a 3.99 average to win automatic admission to UCSD.

The admissions officer told us that applications for the School of Engineering are so much in demand that they are available only to incoming freshmen. So if you want to be an engineer, don't come in as an undeclared major and think you can transfer into the program later. You can't.

There is some irony in that. When Jacobs himself was an undergraduate at Cornell University, he had enrolled in the school of hotel management. Before long, he felt himself to be in the wrong major. He had a calling for something else, either physics or engineering, and only after a lot of pleading was he permitted to switch majors.

Good for all of us that he did, because he subsequently would become a professor at UCSD, a founder of Linkabit, and later the founder of Qualcomm, which has become a major employer in San Diego, not to mention a philanthropic force. Is it possible some future Irwin Jacobs will be prevented from reaching his potential because of UCSD's own policy against switching majors into the engineering school?