<p>Hey y'all. I'm just SIRed to Cal today (I'm so excited!) after spending time there at Senior Weekend. But I was quite bummed out when 8 out of 10 people I met wanted to do something science/math-related. And the one current English major that I talked to warned me that this major will be very hard. So I wonder who else is/was an English major/minor here? Did you struggle with any courses? Any fave courses/professors to recommend? What about creative writing courses? Finally, what do you think about your experience as an English major/minor at Cal?</p>
<p>Thanks so much! And sorry for asking so many questions, lol. Feel free to answer as many or as little as you want. :)</p>
<p>It is an absolutely world class English department, although I don’t have first hand experience to share but hopefully some English majors will contribute.</p>
<p>The great thing about the size of Cal is that even if you are not in the most common majors or have rare or unusual interests, you will find a good number of people like you here.</p>
<p>Of the 34,758 on campus this semester, 4433 are in the College of Engineering and 21,301 are in Letters and Sciences. </p>
<p>Of L&S, about a third are still not declared, but among the declared students, 4,790 are in social sciences majors, 2,595 are in arts & humanities majors, and just under 3,000 are in the hard sciences and math. Not that unbalanced when you look at it this way. </p>
<p>The Arts and Humanities (2,595) are dominated by English majors (737), about the same number as are in Integrative Biology majors, Psychology majors, or Civil/Envir Engineering majors. </p>
<p>Bottom line, you are not going to be an oddity - plenty of fellow English majors.</p>
<p>English really isn’t that hard here. As long as you do the readings you’ll be fine. </p>
<p>That said, it’s boring, and unless you have a real love for literature, you may hate it. Take one of the intro courses (45 series) to get a feel for it.</p>
<p>English is actually one of the largest undergraduate majors.</p>
<p>The [career</a> survey](<a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm]career”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm) lists the number of students graduating in each major (although double majors are counted for each of their majors). For 2010, 346 students graduated with bachelor’s degrees in English. Only Molecular and Cell Biology (534) and Economics (498) were larger. However, there are other biology majors like Integrative Biology (292) and various majors in the College of Natural Resources that mean that you will see a lot of “biology” majors around beyond the Molecular and Cell Biology majors.</p>