Are the first two years worth it?

Liesel
Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:21:01 +0000

Here’s the thing. Most people don’t complete their gen eds in their first two years. They space them out to help cushion their schedules from taking too many difficult classes from their major at once.

I know some transfer students who are taking useless (not toward a major/GE) classes right now because they completed only geneds and some math in community college, and can’t find 15 units to take for their major in every quarter. This is a problem because many majors are very linear and it’s hard to take only classes for your major in any given quarter due to what quarters things are generally offered.

However, for psych, going to community college is a good idea. It is a very impacted major. Students are limited to one upper division course a quarter. If you can get the lower division intro class and statistics out of the way, so you can jump right into Psych 100 at UCSC, you’ll be in decent shape. However, this still leads to the issue of not being able to take 3 classes for your major a quarter in many cases. So you may want to consider a minor in another subject to make the most of your time at UCSC. I’ve heard Linguistics and Computer Science are both popular compliments.

Personally, I’m on the old GE system, which seems to have more easily fulfilled requirements. I also came in with only 6 GEs to complete, and I have fulfilled 4/6 through classes within my major.