As in any competitive institution you HAVE to stay focused of your studies at UCSB or you will end up somewhere else. Many don't understand that the difference at UCSB is that you can go from work to fun quickly there (since the campus is on a beach), rather than spending time travelling to go do what all undergrads do - play a bit from time to time.
I was there as a grad student, but there were 10 or so grad students in the program when I got there who had been there already as long as 10 years when I got there!!
I'm a UCSB alum as well. It was fascinating to surf the internet from one of the first 4 nodes ever put on it -- in engineering 1.
UCSB will become a top notch school by virtue of its weather. When I went there, my professors had the world's fastest BJT, world's fastest and smallest diode, world's smallest (and probably fastest) FET, my TA developed the first blue laser in North America, and the lab I worked in had the most advanced VCSELs. All of those professors were world class, could teach anywhere and chose Santa Barbara because of how nice it was. If you could have a $50million lab & teach anywhere in the world, would you live in Chicago? Detroit? Taipei? New York?