UCLA vs UC Berkeley/Sciences Po Dual Degree

MYOS1634
Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:26:44 +0000

First, congratulations! Those are really tough admits generally, and this year especially.

More specifically about the Sciences Po degree:

you’d need to learn some French before you go so that you can manage daily life, shopping, taking the bus, etc.
(memrize, etc., I can give you some references if you want)

your first year will be very structured:
Semester 1: 4 courses + 1 math course (elementary stats, stats, or calc-based stats) + French A1 + (optional) Spanish + (optional) “Sports”
Euro-American Programme, Semester 1 - Google Drive
You’d have Languages: French A1, plus if you wanted to continue with Spanish and “Sports”, meaning college activities (strongly recommended).
Semester 2:
SCIENCES PO - Course Directory
2 mandatory courses, 1 courses in stats applied to social science (2 levels), 1 course in Humanities with an added seminar linked to it (lots of seminar choices), another seminar, a community service project, French A2, Art workshop (Theater/drama, Creative writing, Visual Arts, Music practice, Film&Cinema…) including field trips.

Year 2: you choose 1 of 3 tracks and continue French
Year 3, your classmates go back to UCB with you and you’ll be the leader
https://www.sciencespo.fr/college/en.html

Some possible advantages:
smaller campus for freshman year; small-ish classes not huge lectures with 300 students; it’s about 1h from Paris so cool trips ahoy (and you have 2-week breaks every 7 or 8 weeks, roughly 4 or 5 per year); cheaper housing, possibly ways to save on room&board; international environment; you’ll become bilingual; you’ll make friends from all over the world; right when you get tired of the small campus you move back to UCB and its HUGE campus/city, but since you’re an upper level student you entirely skipped the huge intro lectures.

Possible disadvantages:
French professors aren’t warm and fuzzy, they come and teach and leave; you’ll have to master a very specific way of drafting your papers (it can be useful but it’ll be tough at first to follow the format); very structured 1st year; you don’t know French so it’ll be confusing at first; mostly only matches social science majors, not appropriate for STEM students.

Will you be vaccinated?