I am an engineering student at a CCC. At first I wanted to transfer in 2 years, but I soon realized I would have to completely dedicate myself to school and only school for those 3 years. Instead I decided to create a 3 year transfer plan, and become more involved in EC’s with the extra free time I would have. I helped start a robotics club at my school and even got an internship for a semester. There a lot of opportunities out there, and from what I’ve seen, there are a lot more internships for electric/mechanical/civil engineers than there are for chemical engineers.
If you decided to do 3 years instead of 2, you can even take more GE classes, for example you can take an Art History class at your CC, which might save you time and money once you do transfer. I’d say, enjoy the time and freedom you can have at a CC, it seems once you transfer you won’t have too much of that.
Last thing, I’ve seen in some UCs’ transfer agreements that starting in Fall 2017 that a 3.4 GPA is the minimum required GPA to transfer. If I were you, I would monitor the transfer requirements with UC Davis or any other school you are interested in applying to, in case that they too make changes to their requirements in the coming years.