A warning to potential applicants (especially engineering/cs)

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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<p>I want to start off by saying that I am not posting this for the purpose of complaining; I just want to offer some insight that I really, really wish had been presented to me before I came here. I came here with such a positive attitude. I was nervous, but so hopeful and excited. Then, reality hit me like a Peterbilt.</p>

<p>There are a lot of issues that I have with this place, from the computer sciencs/EECS program to the campus in general.</p>

<p>First, let us talk about something that should be no surprise, but is certainly worth mentioning: I literally have no time to ever have fun. I have been out one weekend this entire semester. The amount of dense, coarse, heavy work that is assigned for each technical course is orders of magnitude beyond what one would ever expect or hope for. If one of your reasons for liking Cal is the fact that you like SF, I will tell you that based upon my experience so far, SF might as well be on the opposite side of the globe. I have been keeping a detailed log of every hour of every day for the past two weeks, and on average, I am working 15 hours per day on school work. This is accounting for eating/sanity breaks. I know others who spend even more time than that.</p>

<p>Another issue is that the people in this major have a strong proclivity to isolation and seclusion. I do not think that a thriving social life is a possibility in this department. They skip fun events in order to stay at home and study or write code, and you better do the same if you want to compete with them (which you must, since things are curved).</p>

<p>In just a few months, this place has completely changed me. Even friends whom I talk to from back home notice it. I'm miserable, and surrounded by a lot of people who are also miserable, but a lot of them have simply gotten used to it and grown complacent. The attitude at the school (or at least in this department) is one of accepting misery. I had no idea that people lived like this. When I noticed that this place was going to be much less enjoyable than I expected, I tried to do everything in my power to make the best of it (you can read my previous posts), but I think that this morning, after working past 3:00am for the 12th night in a row(I checked my time log), I am declaring defeat. </p>

<p>I urge anybody who is considering coming here for undergraduate EECS/CS to strongly reconsider. I wish that I had known, but it is too late for me now. If you do come here, don't take courses with Hilfinger. He alone is making my life a living hell, on top of my two other technicals and one non-technical.</p>

<p>If you are still considering coming here, feel free to PM me, and I will try to make time to discuss it further with you. Also, you probably should get input from others, too. There might be some people whose experiences are drastically different from mine. I just want to help people who are in the same situation which I was in about a year ago by making sure that they see the reality of this place. I want you to know that even if you are expecting it to be extremely difficult, which I was, it is still probably not anything close to what you expect. There are some silver linings, but I wholeheartedly believe that the cons DRASTICALLY outweigh the pros in my case and most others' cases.</p>

<p>I have myriad other reasons why I think that coming to Cal is a bad choice, but I don't have time to keep writing. I have to get back to work until my eyes force themselves closed (I wish I was exaggerating).</p>

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<p>I know a good number of CS and EECS people who not only do well in their classes, but have thriving social lives as well… Seems to be more about time management than anything else… Maybe you just took a bad combination of classes? Or maybe CS/EECS just isn’t for you?</p>

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<p>I’m an international applicant so I’m not sure how things are in the US right now. Am I going to be pepper sprayed and beaten by the police as I walk through the campus? Is it safe to visit right now or should I forgo applying to Berkeley entirely?</p>

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<p>My son is a second year EECS major. Yes, he works a ton but he is not miserable. In fact, he loves Cal and is completely happy there. By the way, he does have Hilfinger this semester and he has mentioned to me how much work there is in that class. I think part of the reason he is not miserable is because he knew that engineering at Berkeley would be extremely difficult. He was prepared for that. I mean truly prepared. A high school student’s concept of difficult is completely different than collage difficult. You do have a point there. Don’t come to Cal for engineering if you don’t want to work hard, but it is possible to still love Cal and major in Engineering. I think everyone needs to make up their own minds on the situation. I hope that things get better for you. Hang in there.</p>

<p>^^ Yes, it is safe. I would not forgo applying to Berkeley based upon the actions of Occupy Cal.</p>

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<p>I feel like you’re doing the other engineering majors (other than EECS) a disservice by having “engineering” in your thread title. </p>

<p>I can only speak for chemical engineering, but all the ChemE’s I know are very happy at Berkeley. Yes, classes can be difficult, but I haven’t had a single class at Berkeley that had work assigned that I felt was “orders of magnitude beyond what one would ever expect or hope for.” </p>

<p>Of course we work hard, but we (everyone I know at least) all have plenty of time to have fun as well. My housemate is a Cal student athlete with practice every weekday afternoon, but he still has a 4.0. And I do research for 20 hours a week on top of my coursework. Yet we both still get to bed by 11pm most nights and are able to spend our weekends watching college football on Saturday and NFL on Sunday (we’re watching Nebraska vs. Michigan as I type this)…</p>

<p>So basically, unless EECS is orders of magnitude more difficult than ChemE here (which is possible), maybe your high school coursework wasn’t good enough preparation for Berkeley courses? Or maybe you should reconsider your major?</p>

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<p>I’m not in any type of Engineering at all, so obviously I have absolutely NO right to complain or anything, but I can sympathize with @INeedFUN.</p>

<p>No, I’m not taking any Engineering classes, but I find the amount of work and the level at which we’re supposed to think to be waaaay different than in high school. Yes, I know that people knew that already, but I really wasn’t expecting it to be that much. I think it all comes down to our high school, though. Some people come from really nice, high-ranking, private, or otherwise really progressive high schools. A lot of the people I’ve talked to say, “What, Berkeley coursework? Nah, I’ve been this kind of stuff for years.”
Seriously? Wow. As my first semester of Cal comes to a close, I can’t tell you HOW many times and in how many different ways I’ve found new reasons to really resent my high school. They didn’t prepare me all that well at all. And now that I think back on it, I couldn’t have expected that much from a high school where 50%+ of those graduating are expected to just go to community college just a few dozen blocks across the street or just over the highway.</p>

<p>End of rant. My point is, Cal is cool, but get ready to work hard. Especially because everyone here is a genius and you have to keep up with the curve. If your high school sucked, just know you’re gonna have to work extra hard, also, to develop those crucial time management and self-study skills.</p>

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<p>It does really seem to vary depending on major. I met with the medical director of my county’s hospital a few weeks ago. One of his sons is at Cal studying something medicine or biology related and is getting absolutely brutalized by the curve. On the other hand, statistics for political science classes show that nearly everyone gets an A or a B, with a few Cs here and there.</p>

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<p>First off, about Hilfinger: you will thank him later on for making you a demigod at programming. And come on, this is Berkeley. One of the top Computer Science departments in the world. Surely you didn’t expect this to be a cakewalk. I don’t mean to sound rude or insensitive but I’m tired of people complaining about the difficulty of EECS and this school in general. Guess what, man up or switch majors. EECS is hard, and it definitely isn’t for everyone. There’s a reason any halfway decent EECS major can easily get a 70k+ job.</p>

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<p>Based on the OP’s other posts, the OP is a transfer student.</p>

<p>Transfer to EECS or L&S CS can be particularly difficult, because many community colleges offer no courses that articulate to Berkeley EECS or L&S CS prerequisite courses CS 61A, CS 61B, CS 61C, CS 70, EE 40 (or 42 for L&S CS), EE 20N (EECS only), and most of the others offer just one or maybe two or three (you might be able to find four with a combination of community colleges like Laney + Diablo Valley). This means that most transfer students to EECS or L&S CS need to take a lot of “catch up” courses after arriving at Berkeley (often taking more than one of the CS 61 courses simultaneously), and probably have not had any CS courses of equivalent rigor and workload as Berkeley CS courses. Some transfer students handle it well (some eventually go on to study for their PhDs at top CS graduate departments), but others find the huge increase in CS workload and rigor to be an unexpected shock.</p>

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<p>I think that being a transfer makes a big difference. If you are taking three technicals, probably heavy lab/project classes, plus a non-technical, then that is a pretty overwhelming workload. As transfers, we are forced to compress all of these courses into a very short time span, as opposed to freshmen applicants who do not need to make themselves so miserable for their time here. Plus, if you’re in EE40 right now, I know that Maharbiz is making it exceptionally intense and difficult, especially with this extremely time-consuming project. That, combined with Hilfinger, and one other technical which is probably either 61C with Garcia, 61A with Denero, 70 with Rao, or EE20 with Babak, is quite an overwhelming workload. Take it easier next semester, if you can.</p>

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<p>But I do think that you have a valid point about the people in the major being extremely boring. Most uninteresting and boring group of people I have ever met.</p>

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<p>There are a lot of responses that are trying to take away from IneedFUN’s message which is too bad. Perhaps they are trying to preserve their own self interests (doing well at the expense of other very capable students). Clearly some very bright, competent and hardworking students are getting a bad deal. Check out other posts on Berkeley engineering including Sakky’s (very thoughtful and well-reasoned).</p>

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<p>It may be that the OP simply wasn’t that well prepared (esp if a JC transfer). I am not a fan of Cal’s transfer policies.</p>

<p>That being said, I agree that the curriculum at Berkeley is generally too rigid, too dense. There’s not enough free time, and certainly not enough to take other courses and get a better more well-rounded education. In engineering, this is a shame. We ought to be training creative leaders, who know how to read and write and a thing or two about business. Instead, the school is creating a generation of automatons who will end up doing grunt work under someone with better interpersonal skills. Engineering kids at Berkeley should be spinning off startups galore; but you rarely see it. Instead, that environment thrives at Stanford, where the coursework and grading are both a couple of orders of magnitude more relaxed.</p>

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<p>I would love to see some proof for a few of the generalizations that have been made in this thread.</p>

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<p>For EECS and CS, it is only rigid and dense in lower division, or for transfer students trying to “catch up” on courses that they could not take at their community colleges. EECS and CS majors have quite a bit of latitude in selecting whichever upper division courses they want within EE and CS.</p>

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<p>Quoted for truth. When I visited Berkeley before I decided to enroll, I fell in love with SF and it was one of the bigger reasons for me liking Cal. Even if I don’t have work to do on a random weekend, everyone else does, or most of my friends claim to be ‘too broke’ for subway fare. I’ve taken to going by myself but of course that’s not nearly or as fun or as frequent as I envisioned my SF trips would be.</p>

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<p>Actually, I feel like I was very well prepared as far as my prerequisite understanding of all of the material for my courses. My issue with the curriculum is not that the material itself is too difficult. I do well on midterms – always above the average so far (knock on wood). I am learning the material and keeping up. My issue is absolutely NOT that they expect us to catch on to things too quickly, or that they expect us to teach ourselves a lot of things. All of this, I am okay with. What is killing me is these extremely time-consuming homeworks, projects and labs, which are assigned regularly, and they consume every spare minute that I would ever have for any type of recreation. I actually think that they are detrimental to my education, because they take away from time that I could be studying to learn the course material. And a lot of these labs/projects really don’t help to deepen your understanding of the course topic(s). They just kill hours of your time.</p>

<p>So, if you are considering coming here for CS, then I at least urge you to do this: go to Soda, Cory, Satardja Dai, and Etcheverry. Ask yourself if you are okay with spending the majority of your time in those four buildings(especially in Soda)
. Then, try to start conversations with people in Soda, and while you are trying to talk to them, remember that these are the ones by whom you will be surrounded for the upcoming years. If you decide that you love the buildings and love the people, then you have found your home. I wish that I had done this, because I would have almost certainly been scared away from this place if I could have just known how boring the people are.</p>

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<p>Take someone from who also does extremely time-consuming homeworks, project and labs AND still do just average or even below average at times on the midterms.</p>

<p>Your life is miserable, but I bet there are those who can’t even think about having fun b/c their grades aren’t even close to what they worked for.</p>

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<p>I’ve read a few posts by the OP. My interpretation is that he simply doesn’t enjoy spending 60+ hours a week coding/studying, but I disagree with his claim that all his classmates are miserable. It’s quite likely some of them actually like doing what they’re doing 24/7 and have no desire to go to SF (ie, even if they didn’t have coursework assigned, they would be in their rooms coding for fun).</p>