<p>Can anyone give me a solid description of these majors? What to expect, what kinds of things should people have an interest in to follow these majors? etc. I'm planning on double majoring in business and one of these at Berkeley and I have an interest in all of them but obviously I have to choose one of them.
Help me!
Thanks!</p>
<p>I can speak for Soc only.
You take a very interesting broad intro course and a basic methods class (basic stats, types of sampling, etc).</p>
<p>Then for upper div there are two main core theory classes (Foucault, Weber, Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Engels, Bourdieu) and you take lots of other “electives”. These include Sociology of Culture/Family/Education/Work/etc., Urban Sociology, Globalisation and Development, Race and Ethnicity, Social Inequalities… They are all very interesting and you can choose.</p>
<p>Then you also need to take a seminar, which is a smaller class with lots of individual time with the professor through which you work on a research project of your own. It’s good grad school prep experience and it’s really fulfilling. You have free reign over your topic most of the time.</p>
<p>Within the department, there are also many opportunities to work as a research assistant to the professors or GSIs, a chance to write an honors thesis, you can join the soc honors society or various social groups, and so on. It’s a pretty fulfilling major that has a lot of interesting options for you. Of course, the faculty is also top-notch and the department is consistently ranked as the top 3-4. We also have a couple of professors that have chaired the American Sociological Association and other international associations, and many of the “famous” readings are actually written by professors in the department (who are really nice and amicable) so the sheer academic firepower is pretty amazing.</p>
<p>I would imagine that either Sociology or Psychology would be better suited to be paired with a Business major. For example, the Organisational Behaviour class in Haas has some parallels with Soc 110, and there’s an Entrepreneurship class in Soc too. After all, there’s a lot of human interaction-y stuff in both majors.</p>
<p>I was wondering, how has sociology affected your daily life? Also, what’s fun about sociology to you and also what’s not fun?</p>
<p>Lots of the theory studied is very empirical, so it naturally lends to daily life experiences. For example, Bourdieu talks a lot about the different types of capital a person can have - social, cultural and economic - and how these can be transmitted. Cultural capital you can inherit from your family or people around you; for example, people from a certain social class might have the cultural capital to differentiate real leather from patent leather, while others might not know that but instead know how to get rid of tough stains from laundry with certain household chemicals. So how does the volume of a certain “kind” of capital or even the composition of the different capitals you posses determine your social class? Maybe it has relationships with race and ethnicity? Ever walked into a very, very posh restaurant and not know how to order, or which fork to use? Everyone (according to Bourdieu) has different types and amounts of capital.</p>
<p>Everyone, everyday embodies such characteristics. Sociology hones your skills in identifying and creating meaning from them. Soc research helps you do this systematically and analytically. I guess this whole process is fun for me.</p>
<p>What’s not fun… well I hate exams. I wish we weren’t graded on assignments. Haha but I guess that applies for everything.</p>
<p>How hard was the bio portion of psychology? I’m a bit worried about the competition in those courses because of all the pre-med students and their competition at Berkeley.</p>