An engineering or CS student will probably take 5 or 6 “courses” per semester in this scheme, which commonly means 4 actual regular (3-4 unit) courses, 1-2 of which have labs or large term projects.
What is your plan if you are not able to switch to EECS, L&S CS, or ME? Stay in MSE, or switch to an easy-to-change-into major (e.g. physics, math)? Whatever that plan is affects your course selection in terms of ensuring that you will be making progress toward timely graduation in that major.
Data 8 is a good class to learn Python if you don’t have any (or just a tiny bit) programming background. It’s a good class for rookies, a boring class if you’re not a rookie. Though you don’t necessarily need to be that experienced in programming for CS61A, but it helps. CS61B is a different story, you will need to be a solid programmer already if you want to do well in 61B, especially if you take it with Prof Hilfinger. If you take it with Prof Hug, not as much emphasis on programming projects, but the exams are much harder.
One thing to be aware of, Hilfinger is teaching the CS61A class in Spring 2020 - do note the ratings difference between him and Prof DeNero on the Rate My Professor site.
CS 10 is the class that AP CSP is based off of - it’s more a general intro to the world of computers.
In that case, you want to make sure that you are making progress in MSE while exploring EECS and L&S CS. Consider the following (assuming that you have CHEM 1A, 1AL, 1B and MATH 1A and 1B covered by transfer and AP credit):
MATSCI 45 and 45L, or PHYSICS 7A (the MSE plan lists MATSCI 45 and 45L in first semester before PHYSICS 7A, but the catalog says that PHYSICS 7A is a prerequisite, so ask an MSE advisor about that)
COMPSCI 61A
two of these: R&C A, MATH 53, upper division H/SS course (e.g. ECON 101B)
@ProfessorPlum168 I see. I’ve only taken 1 Python class in highschool and I don’t think it covered that much. Do you think it’d be better to do Data 8 then CS 61A with Hilfinger or just go in CS 61A with DeNero? Also, how do you know who will be teaching? My friend had Garcia in the spring for CS 61
Since you have limited schedule space when trying to work toward multiple majors, you may not want to use any for Data (CS/Statistics) C8. You can preview the CS 61A course materials at https://cs61a.org/ before this fall if you want some more preparation.
@HaWeeb if I were you, I would brush up on my Python this next month and then take CS61A in the fall. Professor DeNero is one of the great lecturers at Berkeley. Hilfinger is, uh, not. Though I shouldn’t say bad things about him since he is actually is a very accessible professor (often answers questions in the wee hours of the morning), you walk out of his classes a much stronger programmer, and there’s a decent possibility my kid might do research under him/work for him this year.
https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/coursesurveys has student survey results for various EE and CS courses and instructors. Looks like John DeNero, Josh Hug, and Dan Garcia are among the best liked instructors for CS 61A, 61B, 61C.
what you’ll find at Berkeley is that there are a lot of great lecturers like the ones that @ucbalumnus listed. Then there are also guys like Professor Hilfinger and Rao who aren’t good lecturers, but are really helpful in a one-on-one situation. A sort of funny thing but actually true is that one of the greatest attributes you can obtain out of CS 61B is the ability to self-teach - a very important attribute in the real world.
College courses generally will have you practice self teaching skills more than high school courses. Yes, there are still instructors to help you learn, but college learning requires more self motivation and involves less external supervision and spoon feeding than high school learning.
Does anyone know anything about Berkeley connect? I’m a bioengineering major who is considering ChemE or EECS and I was wondering whether they’re are worth taking, and also whether it would be fine to do a berkeley connect that’s not related to my major (eg I know nothing about ESPM but I want to sign up for ESPM 98bc because it something I think I’d be interesting)
Anyone have any pointers or experiences with Berkeley connect that they’d be willing to share?
I just noticed that two of my classes are back to back, with chem 1a ending at 12:00 and math 10a starting at 12:00. I know that there’s Berkeley time, but I’ll be going from Pimental Hall to Valley Life Sciences. Does anyone know whether or not it’s too far? Or would I be able to manage the distance within the 10 minutes of Berkeley time?