I'm at UCD currently and there are great research and internship options. The medical center is an easy bus ride away and the medical school still retains administrative and lab facilities at the main campus in Davis. We have a number of new lab facilities in/around campus and the always controversial Primate lab has many opportunities.
We have a marine biology research station at beautiful Bodega Bay and one of my professors sent two undergrads there for a summer with a generous stipend to spend their vacation boating and catching small sharks to use in retina research.
One of our premed advisers is the president of the pre-health advisers association and they review PS for free and are extremely helpful to pre-meds.
Our undergraduate human anatomy course uses med school prosections and is taught by the same professor who teaches med students gross anatomy and neuroanatomy. We have a lot of former UCLA professors as faculty here too--I'll leave it up to you what to take from that. If you're an NPB major, you'll probably have Dr. Adams sooner or later who is--and I'm quoting a UCLA undergrad, UCD med student--the best professor he's had in all his time at UCLA, UCD post-bacc, or UCD med. No doubt about it that the NPB department at Davis has top-notch professors and TAs. You even get the opportunity to teach physiology courses as a TA in all but name.
UCD will be a Div I school next year in football, basketball, and soccer with new stadiums to showcase the sports. We proudly defeated Stanford in each of those sports last year during one of our probationary years (I haven't had the time to pay attention this year). Davis is located 1.5 hours from Silicon Valley, 45 min of beautiful mountain driving from Napa, 45 minutes from Berkeley and SF, and 15-20 minutes from Sacramento. It's even home to the world's largest glory hole which drains water from reservoirs to prevent dams from overflowing. Think of a giant hole that disappears into absolute nothingness. That alone is something worth going to Davis for.
I think it's generally a great school. You saw it for yourself so you know how many new science buildings are popping up--and they'll all be done by the time you matriculate. I don't know why you don't like Berkeley but I don't like big cities where I can't really drive or go for a stroll through huge parks (Davis has a number of them with one being a series of separate parks joined together in a greenbelt). The campus even has a massive arboretum and animals frequently wander onto campus where ducks and dogs sit on the same grass as squirrels. I love visiting the cities for a day out and for that, it's easy to hop on the Davis-Cal shuttle that runs between the two campuses and take BART to SF or to drive up there yourself.
If you have any specific concerns, feel free to PM me and I'll get you some answers.
Good luck with your decision! It took me a while to be comfortable with the one I made but four years removed from the decision, I think I made the right one for me.
