My son was fortunate enough to be accepted at all 5 of these UC’s as a chemistry major.
We would love to hear perspectives and experiences of chemistry majors at any of these schools, and also how you might compare them and/or advise about selection.
He wants an academic challenge, but has also heard scary stories about grade deflation and competition at UCB College of Chemistry especially. (We also live close to Berkeley, which is a minus for him, but it does sound like a wonderful program in many ways.)
He is a very sharp kid who wants to study hard and is ready for a challenge, and he loves chemistry, but he also wants to have time for other pursuits— mountain biking among them. He would prefer collaboration over competition— he’s very easy-going and makes friends easily.
At this point, he hopes to attend grad school in chemistry. He’s also wondering if (potentially) lower undergrad grades at a more challenging school (UCLA, UCB) will hurt his grad school admissions— but that’s only one of several points he’s considering as he chooses.
Obviously there are no bad choices here, and he feels very lucky. Thanks for any input!
CoC majors take different general and organic chemistry courses from biology and other non-CoC majors and pre-meds who are not in CoC majors. They are more in-depth and rigorous, but have less of the pre-med grade competition.
Here are the grade distributions for the following UCB courses: CHEM 1A (general chemistry for non-CoC), CHEM 4A (general chemistry and quantitative analysis for CoC), CHEM 3A (organic chemistry for non-CoC), CHEM 12A (organic chemistry for CoC) – first semester of each two semester sequence: Berkeleytime
1A and 4A have similar average grades, but 1A has a wider distribution, with more top grades and poor grades. 12A has a higher average than 3A. However, the type of students in each course differs. The CoC courses may have the students strongest in chemistry, but the non-CoC courses may have greater percentages of grade-focused pre-meds.
I have the feeling from your post that he might be leaning towards Cal, but is worried about its reputation of grade deflation?
Or does he have another favorite (or favorites)?
We live in Berkeley and my S also originally wanted to go farther away, but at this point he is having a great college experience living on campus. There are advantages to being close to home at times, and it also helps to smooth over any gaps in housing availability (such as when your student is transitioning to off campus housing and the lease doesn’t start for a while).
Any of these are fine for undergrad and none of these will necessarily be easier than the other. If he thinks he wants to go the grad school route then he needs to go to the one that will give him the most extensive undergraduate research experience that will allow him to make an informed decision about what he wants to do in grad school (which will be reflected in his statement of purpose), and one where he will most be able to get 3 good rec letters from. GPA is important for grad school but not med-school level critical.
Now if you were putting this list in front of me for grad schools, no contest, UCB all the way.
thanks for this perspective! though he still sees staying close mostly as a drawback, he has realized that going to UCB will give him greater access to his (many) bikes
this is very helpful— especially the idea that undergrad research can be about refining your own interests for grad school, rather than just collecting research experiences for a grad school resume.
I’ve got a Chemistry PhD and work in a chemistry department in Pharma/Biotech.
+100 to dad15’s comments. I’ve been in grad school and worked with top people who did chemistry undergrad at all of these schools. I’d encourage him to pick based on the the school he likes the most and where he feels like he can do undergrad research and get to know professors for letters of rec. Truly no bad option in this mix for undergrad chemistry.
This is really helpful— thank you so much. re: undergrad research: we’re not sure how to compare the schools to each other; every school seems to say they have research opportunities for undergrads. in general, we’ve been told getting undergrad research positions is easier at schools that don’t have a lot of grad students, but i don’t know if that’s necessarily true. anyway, if you have any advice on how to evaluate research opportunities, we’d love to hear it!
Undergrad research is available at all of the schools. What type and level of research doesn’t only depend on the school, but also on the individual professor(s).
I think it’s difficult to say whether it will be easy or hard for your student at any particular UC. It may depend on what their interests are, whether a lot of other students are looking for research in that particular thing, and maybe also just how comfortable your student is with putting themselves out there looking for research positions.
My son told me that he knows a lot of other first year students already involved in research, and his belief is that it’s not too tough (in COE) if research is a priority to you, unless you want to do the same thing as hundreds of other students. That could be just his social group, though…? And your son is not in COE.
One of my son’s roommates is in CoC and has a research position… but I don’t know the details of how he got that position. (He’s a nice kid and they all get along, but he’s not the roommate my son is super close with.)
For evaluating UCB, whether it’s about research or any other aspect of the school… my feeling is that your student might try to talk to as many students as possible within CoC, rather than trying to draw conclusions based on experiences of students in L&S, COE, Rausser etc., because UCB is like a big universe with many smaller worlds within it, that can feel quite different from one another.
