Are some majors harder than others?

ucbalumnus
Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:28:14 +0000

Ractogon:

Is Economics at UC Berkeley a challenging major?



For intermediate economics and econometrics courses, you can choose between light math (100A-100B-140) and heavy math (101A-101B-141) versions. Most people are not that good at math, so they choose the light math versions, but people who like math and are good at it will likely prefer the heavy math versions. Students intending to go to graduate school in economics are also recommended to take upper division math and statistics courses (e.g. Math 104 and 110 and Statistics 134).

Workload does not appear to be particularly high in economics courses (unlike science lab courses, CS courses with programming or design projects, art studio courses, music performance courses, etc.) unless there are some with large term projects.

Economics is a capped major, so one has to apply to declare it. This requires a higher GPA than the minimum needed to stay in good academic standing generally.