Update on Cal day. Drove the 30 miles from home to attend Cal Day. Starting with the chancellor’s address disrupted by protesters, everything felt Berkeley.
Highlights:
Berkeley engineering feels intimidating and the engineeering events took time to point out the academic support available but at the same time were unapologetic that being the #1 public engineering college means it comes with high rigor.
EECS is a very flexible major and EE+CS is what he wants to study. Fortunately it is in the same department at Berkeley, unlike other schools where they were in different colleges making studying both harder.
Excellent connection to startup and incubator world in silicon valley.
Students seem passionate and very involved in clubs. Lots of students were asking if getting into clubs and research opportunities is hard at Berkeley.
There are 10+ students admitted from S25’s school. So he will have some friends and support if he decides to go to berkeley.
Low Lights:
Not so good in sports. Still selling Jason Kidd Jerseys!
Too close to home!
Seem stingy with AP credits. College of Engineering does not have a lot of gen eds. But still only 2 AP credits can be used for gen eds. Seems less likely to graduate in 3 years. Also credit evaluation for DE courses might take till October, so will not come in time for fall enrollment.
Class sizes are large for introductory cs courses with somebody mentioning that finals were held in the basketball stadium. Not sure if this is true.
My son commented to me today that this is the first day he’s seen protesters in a while!
The breadth requirements are very easy to satisfy.
You can actually use three APs for HSS (one for the first Reading & Comp, and two for lower div HSS). For some other general and university requirements, note that it’s possible to satisfy several breadth requirements at once by taking a single class. For example my son took NWMEDIA 151AC which satisfied three things: American Cultures, EECS Ethics requirement, and one upper division HSS. What a bargain! Students can even take this class pass/fail and still get credit for all three things
For technical classes in the EECS major, my son was able to use APs to skip the first two calc classes, the first physics class (7A), and it turned out that AP Bio and AP Chem also counted (towards the Technical Elective and Natural Science Elective requirements). I might be missing something else too.
All in all, he will have finished all requirements by first semester junior year… and has actually taken a relatively low course load and has taken classes outside his major each semester.
Thank you very much. I did not know there were classes that could satisfy three requirements like that! On that note if you do finish all gen eds, is it hard to take 4 EECS courses in a semester?
Between 2-4 seems typical for people my son knows, but it depends very much on the student. He typically takes about 3 technical courses per semester and he’s happy with that. He does know someone who is acing 21 units of technicals this semester… But this is truly the exception. For freshman year I would suggest no more than 2-3 technicals per semester.
I think he has sociology and philosophy classes at CC, which would transfer but not count as upper division classes. He also has courses at other 4 year colleges ( Multivariable calculus, Linear Algebra, Discrete Math, Chemistry) which would go through a longer credit evaluation as they would need a copy of the syllabus. He can always wait for the evaluation and not take those courses in the fall, but then he might want to repeat them anyway.
It would be great if your son’s course could count towards Math 54, because they are now making 54 an EECS requirement and a prereq for 16A / 16B (this is a new thing).
Unlikely as MATH 54 seems to combine linear algebra and differential equations. These are two separate courses at most other schools and he has done only linear algebra.
I would also recommend that people take at least one lower div math course at Cal regardless of DE or AP credits. There is a level of math maturity that’s hard to get to without the Cal grinder experience, and math 54 would set up the student for 16AB as well as 70.
This is a good point. My son says it’s tough for some people who go straight to 70 because they got credit for all their community college math courses.
CS 70 can be a change for many students generally, since it does more mathematical proofs and logic than other lower division math. However, a student who has taken discrete math elsewhere, even if not given subject credit for CS 70, may have had a preview of some of it.
Not necessarily, but it depends on which specific courses.
When I was in college, it seemed like it was possible to take up to “six” courses, but any course with lab*, term project*, or computer programming counted as “two” courses of workload for this purpose.
Assuming one is on track to earn enough credit (120 total, and however many needed in each category based on your major) to graduate on the desired schedule.
So, the main advantage of taking classes that satisfy multiple gen eds would be that it allows you to take more EE/CS classes, without hitting the 120 credit limit?
Looking at the course listings, it seems there are too many interesting EE/CS classes to fit in the four year plan.
