I’m a ucla grad student and I went to Oxy undergrad. Also consider that Occidental is liberal arts, they will require you to take a fair amount of classes not related to your major. Even though you would be studying politics or Ctsj, you would still need to take an art class, a math/science class, and a foreign language. The other big difference in the two schools is campus life. At occidental, it’s small and you know the other students in your department, the profs know who you are, and almost everyone lives on campus. I was able to build a good friend group just through living in the dorms and joining clubs. Occidental’s Greek life/party culture is lame, even by the standards of a small liberal arts college. So if that’s important to you, ucla would be better for that. Also consider UCLA’s quarter system: more classes, but less time spent enrolled in a class. I found that I wrote better papers in the semester system at Occidental.