<p>Hello!</p>
<p>My major is biological sciences at USC, and at berkeley molecular and cell biology, but I was deferred to spring admission. What should I do?</p>
<p>Your goals (pre-med?), net cost after financial aid and how important costs are, and other preferences would be relevant if you want to get useful responses applicable to your situation.</p>
<p>Yes my goal is to eventually enroll into medical school. Financial aid wise, I was granted 47,000 need based scholarship per year for USC, meaning that I would have to pay 13,000. For Berkeley, I am given a 21,000 need based scholarship, so for that one I would have to pay 11,000 per year. I live in Irvine, CA. how bad is the USC surrounding city?</p>
<p>From Irvine, you can easily visit USC’s neighborhood if you are concerned. There are also crime map web sites you can check.</p>
<p>You do not necessarily have to major in biology to take the pre-med courses. But pre-meds do want to keep costs down, since medical school is expensive. Biology or biochemistry majors also want to keep costs down, because job and career prospects at the bachelor’s degree level are not so good for these majors.</p>
<p>One semester of community college in the fall followed by seven semesters of Berkeley starting in the spring may save a bit of money. Use [Welcome</a> to ASSIST](<a href=“http://www.assist.org%5DWelcome”>http://www.assist.org) to check course equivalency (if you want to take a sequenced course like chemistry or math at community college, do so at a semester system community college so that the course “boundaries” line up with those at Berkeley).</p>