<p>Hey guys, for those of you who went to CalSO today, I'm interested to know what you guys thought of it.</p>
<p>I'll start.</p>
<p>My CalSO experience was okay. I say okay because it wasn't that bad, but I know that it could have been sooooo much better and I could have had a much more memorable experience than I ended up having. I was expecting to have fun meeting a bunch of new people. Didn't happen. The program was fine, the food was good and Berkeley was gorgeous. The downer for me was the group.</p>
<p>So I was in a group with five other people. Three of them ended up being recent Asian immigrants that all happened to speak Chinese, so they basically spoke to each other in Chinese the whole time. I'm not bashing them; they were really nice people but they just weren't talking so much to the group, which sucked for me. Another guy in my group brought his parents... so for most of the time and all of the lunch he was just talking with his parents. That left one other girl for me to talk to. She wasn't so talkative but I don't blame her considering that the rest of the group wasn't really talking to us. She ended up having a friend from the same CC who she hung out with most of the time. What all of this means is that anytime we were walking/eating in groups, which was about 60% of the day, the socializing sucked. Plus the others got lost or wandered away sometimes. I feel gipped because during the lunch and dinner I saw so many other groups having whole group conversations :/</p>
<p>Fortunately my student counselor was pretty cool. She was a non-transfer sophomore in a sorority. She was very nice and helpful..I talked longer to her than to all of my group members combined. Plus when it was over she walked with me back to the parking area. I also found people from my CC, which made the non-group periods a lot nicer than the group periods.</p>
<p>So in the end I didn't really make any new friends except for the student counselor. For the rest of you who haven't been to CalSO yet...I just hope you're lucky and get a better group than I did. If you do, I think it'll be a very fun introduction to Berkeley :)</p>
<p>wow sucks ucbhi but don't worry their are many activities to be going on during welcome week (so I heard) which will provide you many more opportunities to make homies.</p>
<p>If worst comes to worst, you've always got your CC click!</p>
Why are the groups so small? Oh and I'm just curious, what kind of icebreakers and activities did yall do (out of the norm)?
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<p>Mmmm...There were some hundreds of transfer students there but there were at least 40 student counselors. I don't know about the other groups, but my group didn't do any icebreakers or activities. I think all of the girls went to the bathroom during the time we were supposed to do that lol.</p>
<p>Mine was pretty good. But it would've been a lot better if there were individual academic advising. the people in my group were pretty cool and turned out that a lot of students are from DeAnza and DVC. </p>
<p>There were a few international students in my group and I am actually surprised by the number of internation students admitted to Cal this year because i thought Cal didn't accept that many internation students. But i guess I am wrong since international students is a good source of income for the university. </p>
<p>Our counselor was great and very friendly. The people in my group were kinda forming small circles of their own. They kinda just paired off with someone they click with and talk to that person the entire time.</p>
<p>lol to above... I wish there was some search feature where we could just search for all incoming transfers? Hmmm, does anyone have any ingenius suggestions as to how we can accomplish that?</p>