<p>I'm not going to lie: EECS scares the hell out of me. I was admitted as a Fall '11 transfer, and I am considering Cal and UCLA. I'm having such a hard time. I'm afraid that at Cal, I will be cast into the windowless engineering rooms, doomed to isolation and non-stop labor for two years, only to be rewarded with a 2.5 gpa, 30 extra lbs, an absence of sexual activity, and a gaping hole in the "social skills" section of my brain. In other words, is it possible for a non-genius to do fairly well in EECS while maintaining a healthy social life? Because I know that if I was in a situation where I had to choose between good grades and a social life, I would end up choosing good grades. But I really, really want to have both...</p>
<p>^LOL same exact question from me</p>
<p>It is rather doubtful that there is much difference between Berkeley and UCLA in this respect.</p>
<p>Don’t procrastinate and fall behind (a common problem among students transitioning from more structured high school life to less structured university life), and don’t take too many high workload courses (i.e. lab, heavy computer programming, or big term project) courses in the same semester. If you can manage that, your chances of academic success with a good social life are much better than if you do not do that.</p>
<p>To do WELL in EECS, a lot of the social life will have to be sacrificed. If you want to do decent, there’s no reason why you can’t have a good social life. There’s a few EECS kids in frats and as far as I know, they are not doing as well as those not, even though some are Regents scholars and definitiely not intellectually inferior. Most classes require a lot of work, but you will find times to go out and have a good time once in a while.</p>
<p>@strikemaster6: What do you consider well? in terms of GPA and work ethic – how many hours of work do you guys think EECS will take to do “well in” for say…the average student; some examples would be nice too =D haha thanks!</p>
<p>I don’t see why social life has to be sacrificed. o__O EECS isn’t too bad in terms of coursework. And you get to know everyone else in EECS pretty well. :)</p>
<p>1/2 of people in EECS are in CSUA or HKN frats and they do extremely well. They have tons of social events (broomball, in the dark frisbee etc etc) every week.</p>
<p>It seems like it’s being blown out of proportion xD</p>
<p>at what GPA do you guys define as doing well? haha</p>
<p>Holy crap. Read this: [Grading</a> Guidelines for Undergraduate Courses | EECS at UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Policies/ugrad.grading.shtml]Grading”>Grading Guidelines for Undergraduate Courses | EECS at UC Berkeley)</p>
<p>haha can someone give a scale of what’s considered amazing, good, decent, ok, bad, crappy, failing, drop out in terms of an EECS gpa?</p>
<p>3.70 - 4.00: Excellent
3.50 - 3.69: Above Average
3.30 - 3.49: Good
3.00 - 3.29: Satisfactory
2.70 - 2.99: Poor (Will need to fight for jobs after graduating)
2.00 - 2.69: Too close for comfort</p>
<p>With that said, you are not defined by your GPA. A bad GPA will definitely hurt job/grad school prospects, but that doesn’t mean you can’t blow them away with your awesome hacking skills. Sub-stellar grades could be caused by a number of things but it doesn’t mean you’re not smart. </p>
<p>This is coming from an EECS major: numbers aren’t always everything.</p>
<p>thank you! just wondering how many hours of work do you usually do a day and what’s your average sleep time? lol</p>
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<p>Actual grade distributions in 1999 were higher than that 1976/1989 policy (which references course numbers that no longer exist). See this study:
[Grade</a> Distributions for EECS and LSCS Students](<a href=“http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hilfingr/report/index.html]Grade”>Grade Distributions for EECS and LSCS Students)
Note that for freshmen admit EECS majors, 39.2% of them got A+/A/A- grades in lower division EE courses, while 45.3% of them got A+/A/A- grades in lower division CS courses. That is a lot more than the 17% A grades described in the 1976/1989 policy.</p>
<p>Note that [Berkeley</a> grades inflated by about 0.15 from 1997 to 2006](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/Ucberkeley.html]Berkeley”>UC-Berkeley); it is not obvious from public data whether EE and CS grades inflated similarly, more, less, or none.</p>
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<p>Nominally, each unit of courses is supposed to correspond to about three hours of work per week (including class time, homework, reading, studying). So for a standard 15 unit course load, you are supposed to be doing 45 hours of work per week. Being a full time student is supposed to be as much work as having a full time job.</p>
<p>Now it is quite likely that the average course requires significantly less work than three hours per week per unit for the average student. However, there seems to be a trend to courses converging to 4 units (there appear to be fewer 3 and 5 unit courses than there used to be), even if they may take the typical student much less or much more than 12 hours per week.</p>
<p>Courses with labs, lots of computer programming, or large term projects tend to be more work than courses without these things (a 13 unit semester of lab courses may be more time consuming than a 20 unit semester of non-lab courses). Engineering and science (though not math) tend to have a greater share of these types of courses than humanities and social studies (though these can have large term projects), which can result in more work on average. A student who goes only by unit value when choosing courses may find an unexpectedly high workload if all of his/her courses are lab, heavy computer programming, or large term project courses.</p>
<p>Lol… that’s why you don’t ask EECS majors about social life. CSUA and HKN can be good if you’re super nerdy but pretty much everyone you hang out with is of the same nerdiness. Yeah, you can still be social but not in the same sense of the word… eg. not Warcraft LAN partying.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think decent is 3.0 - 3.4. Anything above that and you’re gonna have to work hard. But you do get to know a lot of EECS people (especially late night problem sets in Soda) and it’s a lot of fun, but you’re still doing work or playing some online game. EECS people are very excited about what they do and they are really cool people so it’s justified, but if you want to get out of the circle, you’ll have join some club or hang out with friends elsewhere, which entails not doing as much work for classes.</p>
<p>haha i was gonna quit gaming when i got to Berkeley…so how many EECS majors actually go out on weekends and stuff (ie. not playing starcraft/warcraft/dota/hon/lol) lmao</p>
<p>lol, a lot of EECS majors go out on the weekends but not as frequently as others. Since classes are graded on a curve and everyone is pretty intelligent, it all comes down to how much time you put into understanding the material, and if you don’t use that time then you won’t do as well as others who did.</p>
<p>The people I know in fraternities don’t do as well because they just don’t have as much time to dedicate to their work, but there are those who balance it well. Some girls I know in sororities just don’t go to activities if they’re swamped. It’s pretty difficult to be an active member and get high grades as well. If there’s not much work to do on a weekend, sure, there are a lot of EECS majors that would go out, but not a whole lot that would get too crazy haha.</p>
<p>It really matters how much time you put in, though, because a big portion of your grade in most classes depends on projects or labs. As long as you don’t take too many project-based and design courses in one semester, you should be able to have a social life. But there are a huge variety of classes to take and you shouldn’t miss out just to get a good GPA (unless you want to do grad school). They’re all pretty damn interesting but difficult at the same time. And if it takes you longer to understand things than your classmates, then you will have to study harder but you don’t really know where you fit until you get here!</p>
<p>Is there a big difference in difficulty between EECS and CS?</p>
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<p>EECS and L&S CS majors select from the same CS courses. L&S CS majors do have to take at least six upper division CS courses, while an EECS major who wants to emphasize EE may take fewer or no upper division CS courses (and may take few or no upper division EE courses if s/he wants to emphasize CS).</p>
<p>As far as workload goes, it depends on which courses you choose in a given semester. A course load of CS 152, CS 164, and CS 184 is likely to be more work than a course load of CS 170, CS C191, EE 120, and Economics 101A.</p>
<p>Im an EECS major and I definitely think it is possible to have a social life in this major. Just make sure to take 12-14 units with one of them being a breadth class (I made the mistake of taking 3 technicals and getting little to no sleep this semester).</p>
<p>It should be fairly easy to keep a 3.6+ (What I’m at before this semester. After this semester I’m going to bring it up back from a low 3 [what I predict because I pretty much didn’t have any time to spend studying] which shouldn’t be that hard taking relatively interesting classes with easier classes).</p>
<p>Thanks to CS classes being in the afternoon that lends to going to the gym in the morning. Occasionally you’ll pull long nights (I probably average going to sleep at 4-5am, only because my classes are all late in the day and I don’t have to get up until like 10).</p>
<p>The major really is what you make it. If you take a light load and focus on the courses that look interesting to you, you can definitely have plenty of time to do other stuff. On the other hand it is very easy to be too ambitious and get stuck either missing all your deadlines and failing classes, or getting no sleep and stressting yourself out. Basically don’t take 3 technical courses and think you’ll have a lot of spare time.</p>
<p>^I don’t really understand. The sample schedule in the EECS Handbook + Engineering Book prescribes taking three technical courses a semester in order to finish the major within 4 years. How can you get by with only taking 2?</p>