UC Irvine
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40 free UC Irvine trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
UC Irvine is one of the younger campuses of the University of California, and it grew up fast. Opened in the 1960s on open land in Southern California, it now enrolls tens of thousands of undergraduates and counts Nobel laureates, Olympic champions and Hollywood names among its people. It also has one of the strangest mascots in college sports and a battle cry to match. This quiz collects the best UC Irvine fun facts in one place: the bargain that created the campus, the legends told about its buildings, the traditions that send undergraduates sprinting between classes, and the discoveries made in its labs. Expect questions on famous graduates in film, television, books and business, and on the teams that have brought national titles home. It is written for alumni, applicants planning a visit, and anyone who likes college trivia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind the fact even when you guess wrong.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal did UC Irvine students vote in as their mascot in 1965, beating eagles, unicorns and seahawks?
Anteater
Anteater won the November 1965 student ballot, with 'None of these' the runner-up. Campus administrators at first thought the choice too undignified.
Q 02For what price did the Irvine Company sell 1,000 acres of land for the UC Irvine campus in 1960?
One dollar
One dollar changed hands because company policy barred donating property to a public body, so the sale was a gift in all but name.
Q 03Which US president dedicated the UC Irvine campus site before a crowd of about 15,000, over a year before classes began?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson spoke on what was then open farmland, more than a year before the first 1,589 students arrived in October 1965.
Q 04UC Irvine's business school is named for Paul Merage, who made his fortune from which frozen snack?
Hot Pockets
Hot Pockets came from Chef America, the company Merage co-founded and sold to Nestlé for $2.6 billion in 2002. Three years later he and his wife gave the school $30 million.
Q 05UC Irvine residence halls named Rivendell, Mirkwood and Isengard come from which author's fantasy world?
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien supplied every name in the Middle Earth housing complex, where residents eat at Brandywine and the towers added in 2019 are called Telperion and Laurelin.
Q 06UC Irvine's campus was a location for a 1972 film set in the future about an uprising of which animals?
Apes
Apes rise against their human masters in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth film of the series, which was shot mostly in Century City in Los Angeles.
Q 07For his UC Irvine master's thesis, performance artist Chris Burden spent five days shut inside what?
A locker
A locker held Burden for the 1971 thesis work he called Five Day Locker Piece. The same year he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle for another performance.
Q 08UC Irvine's founding class voted in 1965 against having a team in which popular college sport?
Football
Football was voted down by the first class and never arrived, yet the Los Angeles Rams chose the campus for their 2016 training camp.
Q 09UC Irvine chemist F. Sherwood Rowland won a 1995 Nobel Prize for showing that CFC gases damage what?
The ozone layer
The ozone layer was at risk, Rowland and his postdoctoral colleague Mario Molina found at Irvine in 1974. The pair shared the chemistry prize 21 years later.
Q 10In 2007 a stuffed toy of UC Irvine's mascot made which journey with researcher Tracy Caldwell?
A flight into orbit
A flight into orbit: the toy rode Space Shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-118 with Caldwell, who had earlier studied atmospheric chemistry at UC Irvine.
Q 11UC Irvine's battle cry 'Zot!' copies a sound from which Johnny Hart newspaper comic strip?
B.C.
B.C. is Hart's strip about cavemen, and the cry it inspired gave its name to the campus email service, Zotmail, and to the Zot 'n Go convenience stores.
Q 12UC Irvine's core campus, built around a central park, is laid out in roughly which shape?
A circle
A circle was the plan: buildings line the Ring Mall around Aldrich Park, with undergraduate schools placed nearer the center than graduate schools.
Q 13UC Irvine is older than the city of Irvine; both take their name from landowner James Irvine's vast what?
Ranch
Ranch country surrounded the university when it opened in 1965, and the city of Irvine that grew up beside it was not incorporated until 1971.
Q 21UC Irvine graduate Erin Gruwell's years as a high school teacher inspired which 2007 Hilary Swank film?
Freedom Writers
Freedom Writers follows the 150 students whose diaries Gruwell turned into a 1999 book. Every one of them went on to graduate from high school.
Q 22Tyler Hoechlin played second base for UC Irvine before starring on television as which DC Comics hero?
Superman
Superman was Hoechlin's role in Supergirl and then in Superman & Lois. He had transferred to UC Irvine from Arizona State in 2008.
Q 23UC Irvine art graduate Phil Tippett, a Star Wars animator, won his second Oscar for which 1993 film?
Jurassic Park
Q 14In 2016 UC Irvine became the first US public university to launch an official program in what?
Esports
Esports got a varsity program and its own campus arena, fitted out with high-end gaming computers and the equipment for live commentary and streaming.
Q 15UC Irvine students broke a Guinness World Record three years running for the largest game of what?
Dodgeball
Dodgeball was one of the student government's yearly record attempts, which also produced the largest pillow fight and the largest water pistol fight.
Q 16A UC Irvine legend claims the utility tunnels under the campus were built so faculty could escape what?
A riot
A riot by students is the danger in the story, but the tunnels really carry electricity and air conditioning from the Central Plant and are open only to maintenance staff.
Q 17A UC Irvine craze that began in the late 2010s has students racing across campus to collect what?
Stickers
Stickers of 'Petr', a jokey misspelling of the mascot's name Peter, are handed out by anonymous students who post each drop location on Instagram.
Q 18David Benioff, who earned a UC Irvine writing master's in 1999, co-created which HBO fantasy series?
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones made Benioff famous, but his Irvine thesis was the novel The 25th Hour, which became a Spike Lee film starring Edward Norton.
Q 19UC Irvine drama graduate Bob Gunton played the villainous warden in which 1994 prison film?
The Shawshank Redemption
The Shawshank Redemption cast Gunton as Warden Samuel Norton opposite Tim Robbins. He finished his UC Irvine drama degree in 1968, three years after the campus opened.
Q 20UC Irvine theater graduate Greg Louganis won four Olympic gold medals in which sport?
Diving
Diving great Louganis won both the springboard and platform golds in 1984 and again in 1988. He transferred to UC Irvine in 1981 and added a minor in dance.
Jurassic Park kept Tippett on to direct how its digital dinosaurs moved, after computer graphics replaced the go-motion puppets he had been hired to make.
Q 24UC Irvine's Reeve-Irvine Research Center, named in honor of actor Christopher Reeve, studies injuries to what?
The spinal cord
The spinal cord became Reeve's cause after a fall from a horse in 1995 left him paralyzed. Joan Irvine Smith then worked with UC Irvine to found the center in his name.
Q 25Which Saturday Night Live star of 1985 to 1990 studied drama at UC Irvine, graduating in 1979?
Jon Lovitz
Jon Lovitz earned two Emmy nominations for the show, having trained at UC Irvine under the acting teacher Robert Cohen.
Q 26Joe Lacob, who earned a UC Irvine biology degree in 1978, became principal owner of which NBA team?
Golden State Warriors
Golden State Warriors ownership cost Lacob's group $450 million, and he had to sell his minority stake in the Boston Celtics to complete the deal.
Q 27In which men's sport did UC Irvine win four NCAA national titles between 2007 and 2013?
Volleyball
Volleyball brought championships in 2007, 2009, 2012 and 2013, the last of them under a first-year head coach who was himself a UC Irvine graduate.
Q 28UC Irvine earned its first NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament win in 2019 over which fourth-seeded Wildcats?
Kansas State
Kansas State lost 70–64 in the first round, four years after UC Irvine's Division I tournament debut ended in a narrow defeat by Louisville.
Q 29Which former UC Irvine point guard was named NBA Coach of the Year in 2010 with Oklahoma City?
Scott Brooks
Scott Brooks scored 43 points on the night UC Irvine's Bren Events Center opened in 1987, and as a coach he took the Thunder to the 2012 NBA Finals.
Q 30UC Irvine physicist Frederick Reines won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting which particle?
Neutrino
Neutrino hunting seemed so ghostly a task that Reines and Clyde Cowan named their 1950s experiment Project Poltergeist. Reines moved to UC Irvine in 1966 as its first dean of physical sciences.