<p>Umm, interest, perhaps? Not everyone gets degrees just to get a job. Some of us like taking classes and learning things.</p>
<p>I was actually asking why anyone would want to graduate early…not vice versa.</p>
<p>Even easier: money.</p>
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<p>This is the only justifiable reason why I can see somebody doing a double. If you are going to take the classes anyway, then I agree, you might as well pick up the double.</p>
<p>However, I would point out that you rarely “need” to take classes to learn something. Self-study is a powerful tool. You really can learn a lot just by reading books in your spare time. In fact, in many cases, you can actually learn more by doing that than you can by taking a class. You generally only “need” a class if a subject is highly practice-based, like a foreign language or dance, or if it involves a lot of expensive lab equipment (like EE fab or ChemE Unit ops lab). For most other subjects, you really can just learn it by yourself on your own time. </p>
<p>For example, some of the greatest insights about history and political science (especially ethnic politics) I have ever heard comes from a guy I know who has never taken a class on any of those subjects. Instead, he has 4 degrees - 3 in engineering, 1 in business. However, his hobby is reading about history and politics. I am quite certain that he is actually more knowledgeable about history and politics than a lot of people who actually have history or political science degrees. These are subjects that you really can learn just by reading about them a lot.</p>
<p>Sakky is again correct.</p>
<p>And I would ignore all the people that say to stay and “enjoy” Berkeley. If you are EECS, a lot of your time will be spent coding in Soda Hall. And since your GPA will be under threat a lot of times as an EECS major, you should try to graduate quickly and efficiently. You probably won’t have a lot of time for social stuff anyways.</p>
<p>“It’s quite easy to graduate with one major and a minor in 3 years. Engineering is hard, but there’s not actually a lot of upper divs you have to take. However, why would you want to?”</p>
<p>There certainly is a lot. IEOR with 14 required upper division courses, bioengineering with ~12, compared to economics with 6 upper division requirements.</p>
<p>“You probably won’t have a lot of time for social stuff anyways.”
Only if you make it that way.</p>
<p>I disagree with sakky here, double majoring in a non-engineering area shows that the student is well-rounded and looked at his or her college experience as a way to broaden his outlook. It does matter for an MBA application, which a lot of IEOR grads do. </p>
<p>I also disagree about the premise that one can learn about subjects outside of school to the same extent and in the same manner and depth as one could as a Berkeley student. That’s mostly true about languages only. What’s the point of trying to leave school half a year earlier when you’re 21, when you know that you will be working for four decades after that, especially if you’re going into a fairly lucrative business or engineering career?</p>
<p>shboing, if you want to maximize your GPA, it makes more sense to stretch your curriculum as opposed to loading up.</p>
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<p>My friend who just graduated from EECS said he only had to do 5 upper div requirements…what are you going on about?</p>
<p>hmm OK, so why is EECS supposedly harder yet there are less requirements?</p>
<p>Just half a year man, not worth it. Wait to have the big graduation party with your friends. Take some couses of interest, or maybe some graduate class.</p>
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<p>I completely agree. However, I believe that taking a class along with self-study can net more benefits than either alone. While in theory a person can learn as much individually as anyone taking a class, in practice this isn’t so common. Sure I could teach myself quantum mechanics, but I’d have to spend a lot more time on the subject starting from my current base of knowledge than I otherwise would in a class.</p>
<p>I would say that while you rarely (in fact, never need) to take a class to learn something (certainly the first person that learned it didn’t learn it in a class), it is almost always beneficial to the learner to take a class.</p>
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<p>Funny thing is, people that choose EECS like coding. In fact, many go on to code 9-5 every day for 30 years. I wouldn’t cite that as a negative. That’d be like saying English majors spend a lot of their time reading books and writing papers. Well, if you’re an English major, you probably like reading and writing. That’s the point.</p>
<p>Your advice is well-taken if you’re offering it to those that dislike their major.</p>
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<p>I have no idea. I honestly don’t understand people who say EECS is hard. The graduation requirements are, frankly, easy to meet. The annoying part to me is the humanities requirement (R1B and AC in particular, all of which seem like dull courses). The engineering requirements are easy, because there’s so many choices.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the replies. I really appreciate it. And UnlimitedX is right…IEOR needs 14 upper div classes so it won’t be that easy.</p>
<p>So it looks like I’m down to 2-3 options:</p>
<p>Graduate in 3 years
[ul]
[<em>]Save over $40,000
[</em>]Start working earlier
[<em>]Better for family, and I wont have to pay them back
[</em>]Work my ass off
[li]Might hurt GPA[/ul]</p>[/li]
<p>Use up all 4 years
[ul]
[<em>]Might help GPA
[</em>]More relaxed
[li]Would cost an extra 40k[/li][/ul]</p>
<p>I guess after the first semester I’ll have a sense of how hard some of these classes are going to be and decide from there.</p>
<p>I apologize. I read your first post, stopped, and assumed you were doing EECS. IEOR sounds much worse, but it seems you will be fine. With a higher GPA you might land a better job that pays more…just food for thought. (My friend landed starting salary of 80-90k with engineering for example, because he had a good GPA.) Maybe you can apply for more scholarships or get more grants if you stay the full 4?</p>
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<p>Then perhaps we have different learning styles. I can say that for myself and for practically everyone that I know, we can learn more in most subjects by just reading the book in our own time than by actually taking classes. By this, I don’t mean skill-based classes like swimming or dance or foreign languages. For these classes, I agree that you need a teacher. But when you’re talking about traditional academic classes, self-study is a wonderfully powerful tool, in fact, better than the classes themselves for the following reason:</p>
<h1>1) Don’t have to worry about grading. What that means is that you don’t have to constantly worry about understanding the parts that your teacher wants you to know. Instead, you can concentrate on the parts that YOU want to know. The truth is, any class you take will include topics that you frankly just don’t care about. But you have to study them anyway because you know that the teacher cares about them, and if you don’t know them, then you are going to get a bad grade. That’s regardless of the fact that you may know your favorite topics of the class like the back of your hand. Hence, every class inevitably involves some measure of grinding through topics that you don’t really like. You clearly are less productive when you are forced to study things that you don’t like.</h1>
<h1>2) No context switching</h1>
<p>One major problem of the way education is delivered is that you are generally forced to take a bunch of classes at a time. That means that you often lose continuity. For example, just when you really start getting into a physics textbook and you are really starting to understand it, you have to put it away because you have some English paper due and you have to work on that. It would be far better if you could just burn through an entire physics textbook from cover to cover, with no loss of continuity, than trying to pick up multiple topics simultaneously. </p>
<p>I’ll put it to you this way. When you read books for pleasure, do you read multiple books at the same time? No, probably not. Most people will just read one book from cover to cover, and burn through a whole bunch of books that way. Nobody willingly takes 20 books and reads them all at the same time, switching from book to book. The context-switching would kill you. But that’s what classes want you to do. All this switching back and forth decreases your efficiency, because you forget what it was that you previously read, so you have to go back and read it again, etc. </p>
<p>The point is, self-study is often times a far far better way of becoming educated. This is incidentally why former doctoral students consider the years after their coursework (when they are supposed to be doing their research) to be some of the happiest times in their lives. Either that, or they would be happy if they didn’t have to worry about their dissertation. But the point is, few doctoral students think highly of the years they spent in coursework. That’s because they know that they learn better when they are free to study what they want.</p>
<p>The value of coursework is that it forces (or at least tries to force) a certain level of consistency. You know that everybody who has passed a course will have a certain base level of knowledge, and from an economic and social standpoint, that’s valuable to society. But that’s different from saying that that’s an optimal way for individual human beings to learn something. If you just want to learn something, you can just get the books and learn it yourself, and you don’t know really need the structure of classes to enforce a certain level of consistency. For example, if I just want to learn about French Impressionist painting, I can just get the books and read them, and I can go to the museum and I can look at the paintings myself. If I decide that Renoir is uninteresting, then I just stop reading about Renoir, and nobody is going to bother me or threaten me with a bad grade because I don’t know Renoir, because I’m just learning for pleasure here. So my ‘Impressionism education’ is socially inconsistent, but it’s still education nonetheless.</p>
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<p>It’s the grading. EECS doesn’t have that many classes, but it’s not really the number of classes you have, but rather, just how hard each individual class is, and in particular, just how hard it is to get decent grades in those classes. EECS is full of classes in which you can work extremely hard, and still get a terrible grade. In fact, sometimes so terrible that you will land in academic probation.</p>
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<p>I guess…I mean, I have friends that are like that. I’m in EECS, though, taking “hard” classes (frankly harder than the classes of friends doing worse in EECS), but have never had problems keeping a high GPA. I guess my view is just too skewed by my own experience.</p>
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<p>While to an extent I agree, I also find that I cannot read the same book for more than a few hours at a time (unless it is just amazingly spectacular). I personally find myself much more productive when I have 5 different tasks to complete. Instead of working on one, becoming bored with it and taking a break, then working on it again, I can go from task to task without becoming bored and therefore complete more work in the same amount of time. These may not be 5 novels (that would be tough), but since physics/math/engineering don’t exactly follow storylines, it isn’t a big problem.</p>
<p>I suppose it depends on your level of focus. If you can read and absorb the material in a physics book in one continuous sitting (or a couple of them), then perhaps self-study would be best. For me, though, I need breaks, I need different subjects, otherwise no matter how interesting something is, I will get bored with it.</p>
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<p>I don’t believe this is a valid argument. This introduces another variable. I’m talking about a student with 3 classes either taking a 4th class or self-learning a 4th class’s subject, not a student learning one class’s subject versus a student taking 4 classes. And if one student were self-studying 4 classes of material, then he would be stuck context-switching too.</p>
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<p>For certain things, especially most real-world tasks, I completely agree. I think sitting a week in a job helps you do that job much more than 4 years of college will (unless you happen to be doing exactly what you did in college, which is unlikely). However, if you left an 18-year old alone for 4 years and told him to learn as much as he could in those 4 years (with full access to textbooks and other resources) or put an 18-year old through a typical college education, I believe the latter method would produce a more educated individual almost every time.</p>
<p>I guess what I’m saying is that I see there being three types of learning: 1) doing, 2) being taught, and 3) self-studying. The difference I see between 1 and 3 is one is actively doing something–I’m coding a Perl script. Three is more passive learning–I’m reading “Programming Perl”.</p>
<p>I feel that for most subjects, 1, 2, 3 is the order of effectiveness for each method. For very difficult or technical subjects where you don’t have a solid base, I think 2, 3, 1 is best (since somebody telling you how to do something is better than reading somebody tell you how to do something is better than trying to do something you have no idea how to even begin). Anyway, that’s how it is for me.</p>
<p>“My friend landed starting salary of 80-90k with engineering for example, because he had a good GPA.”</p>
<p>NeedAdvice, was this w/a B.S.? What was his GPA?</p>
<p>your friend probably had an EE degree.</p>
<p>Eastcounty…He majored in EECS and had around a 3.6 to 3.7 GPA. He told me that his GPA wasn’t high enough to ensure him a job without an interview (his girlfriend’s GPA was a 3.9 in EECS so she got a job without an interview I think), but that it was high enough to get interviews. Then, he continued, that because he was a social person, he aced his interview and got the job.</p>
<p>Is 90K average for EECS majors w/3.6+ majors? Do you know what chem-e majors get?</p>