University of Central Florida

With over 53,000 students enrolled in fall of 2009, the University of Central Florida has the third highest enrollment of all public universities in the United States and the most enrolled of all Florida universities.  The university is located in Orlando, Florida and is one of the 11 public universities that make up the State University System of Florida.  Central Florida was founded in 1963 as the Florida Technological University (‘Florida Tech’), which served as a training school for the Kennedy Space Center.  The university would later develop into a more traditional university with multiple disciplines, and it became the University of Central Florida in 1978.  In 2009, U.S. News & World Report named Central Florida the fifth best ‘up-and-coming’ university.  The university’s campus design is a blueprint for other universities around the country, with its concentric-circled design that emphasizes pedestrian use in its center with automobile-traffic flowing on its outer-most circle.    

Central Florida is still connected to the space program by way of being a space-grant university, which means it is one of 52 universities that are a part of the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program that was began in 1988 and is managed by N.A.S.A.  (Florida State University is also a space-grant university).  Noted research areas for Central Florida include optics, modeling and simulation, digital media, engineering and computer science, business administration, education, and hospitality management.  

 

The University of Central Florida maintains 11 satellite campuses and offers 225 different degrees in 12 colleges.  Other than the three satellite campuses also located in Orlando with the main campus, there are campuses in Cocoa, Clermont, Daytona Beach, Heathrow, Kissimmee, Leesburg, Ocala, Palm Bay and Sanford.  The university recently became more selective for incoming freshmen due to its rapidly expanding size, with 42% of prospective students being admitted in the fall of 2009, down from 61% in 2005.

The University of Central Florida’s location in Orlando, Florida helps to define some of its emphasis and usefulness for students.  The College of Business Administration at Central Florida is the only accredited business school for undergraduates and graduates in the Orlando metropolitan area.  The College of Education at the university produces the most teachers statewide.  UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science specializes in providing an education that translates for careers at such Orlando-area institutions as NASA, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Siemens and Walt Disney World.  Likewise, the Rosen College of Hospitality Management of Central Florida benefits from being located in the belly of the tourism industry.  

The internationally revered College of Optics and Photonics at UCF consists of three major research institutions which include the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL), the Florida Photonics Center of Excellence and the newly-founded Townes Laser Institute.    

 The links to Central Florida’s various colleges can be found here:  http://www.ucf.edu/academics/

Graduate programs at the University of Central Florida can be found here: http://www.graduatecatalog.ucf.edu/programs/