<p>Biology is no longer impacted as of spring 2013. Thoughts and opinions? I for one am not happy about this news. Pretty silly for students that they just admitted last quarter for biology through the exceptional admission program. Taking the 20 series... taking the phys2 series... then taking chem classes that wont apply to biology majors -.- They sure pulled a fast one on me.</p>
<p>Any idea why they are doing this suddenly (like REALLY suddenly considering that they were still using the exceptional admission last quarter. No idea why they did not announce this earlier for current students... ) My bet is that UCSD is not getting enough SIR ( and supported by the fact that people are actually getting in via appeal). smh this school.</p>
<p>@momosky: same here. This is good for future students I guess. But for their current students, it is a pretty big slap to their face. Especially for people who couldn’t get into biology and it is too late for them to start going on the bio track. I guess they just don’t care about their current students… And they made it impacted for a reason in the first place, and that reason is still valid.</p>
<p>Does this mean that there are going to be a LOT more Biology majors in the future, and therefore even larger class sizes / more competition for the same number of resources?</p>
<p>@kings: The university does not have the interest of the students at heart. They care more about the quantity of their students than their quality. And their policy is so backwards. They just recently made CS an impacted major, but now they are making Bio not impacted. At least for CS majors, this only affects incoming students. But this is immediately effecting current students, and all for the sake of meeting a quota of students that the school itself turned away. And yeah I realize that the UC is like a big business despite being a public school system, but that shouldn’t make them immune to criticism. The university forced themselves in a corner with these policies. </p>
<p>@archaic: I can’t speak for the incoming students because we don’t know if the lack of SIR is coming from the admitted biology students or just an overall lack of SIR (and even then, lacking SIR is just a speculation). So either the incoming students will meet the usual quota of biology student, or the quota has been increased to compensate for the decrease of potential CS students. But from my own personal experience, most people I know that were in chemistry immediately switched into biology. This is just a baseless speculation, but I would assume that incoming freshmen who are in chemistry will likely switch into biology too.</p>
<p>I really don’t understand anything you’re saying here. If they have open spots in biology classes now, what’s wrong with them opening the major up? I don’t see what they’re doing that is so wrong here.</p>
<p>I am suggesting that biology still has the same amount of people. But they are trying to fit more people into what is already an overpopulated major. An analogy of that would be trying to fit more people into a city without building more complexes. Basically what archaic said is my concern: more people fighting over the same resource. If there are really spots opening up and enough for the major to be no longer impacted, then yes I would be just shouting at the sky. However, as a student here, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Of course I am not going to base everything off my personal experience; I am going to try to get a more official response from the school.</p>
<p>Ah I see. Well I was assuming that there weren’t as many freshmen coming to UCSD for biology so they had extra space in the major. Let me know if you get an answer.</p>
<p>Regardless, the problem of overcrowding in the biology department needs to be addressed in some way – I was not able to get into a spot in a biology lab until this quarter, and I have about 160 units. While taking the lab course is easy because I’ve already knocked out most of my non-lab classes, I feel that finishing lab courses this late in undergrad really hinders my education and job prospects. This problem still happened when biology was impacted and I don’t know if lifting the impacted status would make it even worse :(</p>
<p>I definitely feel you with the bio labs. Maybe they’ll be adding more spots in their labs. I know they just made a new bio lab last year that I’m in now. It only has 20 spots though (even though they let in everybody who was waitlisted). </p>
<p>And when you said you couldn’t get into a lab until now, was that any lab or just the labs you were interested in?</p>