<p>I’m also a BioE, and I was taking a much less aggressive fall schedule. I could, conceivably, have done very well in 4A, but I didn’t take it seriously, and paid pretty dearly for it. I know ONE person who managed E7, 4A, and 53 during fall of Freshman year with good grades, but he slept about 4 hours per night and virtually never socialized until Spring started. I also seem to remember that he didn’t actually live in his bedroom, but in the common room for his suite - part of the justification being that it reduced travel time and made it easier to eat while working.</p>
<p>Blogging on CC Time: I’m currently in 3A and 3AL for the summer and hate it. The CoC bred a very interesting intellectual dynamic in several of my friends, and while getting to work with them probably isn’t worth the higher difficulty of the 112s, the grass is DEFINITELY greener on the CoC side of the OChem fence right now (peer- and assignment- wise, at least).</p>
<p>7A was…well, I had Yildiz, so it was basically just AP Physics but with aggravating, difficult homework questions. Yildiz doesn’t really believe in tricky tests - attend all lectures, discussions, and labs, and do all the homeworks, and you’re probably going to get an A from him.</p>
<p>I hear very different things about the other 7A profs. Zettl’s reputed to be a great teacher who gives hard tests, and…don’t know anything about the others, actually.</p>
<p>I had Boggs and he definitely pushes you to the limit. First midterm was quite generous with ~85 as average, but he came up with this crazy second midterm with <40 average that getting 60/100 was enough for an A. I know I should have studied more for his class, but then again, Chem 4A was even more urgent so I couldn’t have done anything. But yes, Physics 7A is a popular course and usually depends how difficult the professor wants to take it.</p>
<p>Saykally’s amusing, but he may not actually teach any chemistry - last fall he just introduced the course, and Head-Gordon and Dhillon handled the actual material. Saykally’s awesome, though - blows stuff up, etc…</p>
<p>Head-Gordon teaches the quantum part of 4A and is…well, he’s Australian, and comes across as a very old-school commonwealth professor - he’s very organized, very clear, very qualified, and gives fairly hard, albeit straightforward, exams. 4A’s hard on the basis that there’s a ****ton of material to cover and you’re going to be tested essentially on ALL of it (in a form concise enough to fit into a single lecture period for each midterm), not because the professors are in any way bad, and Martin Head-Gordon represents this perfectly.</p>
<p>Param Dhillon was the other professor for 4A last fall, and…well, yeah, she knows her stuff, explains it well…she was a tad underconfident and so forth last fall, particularly compared to Head-Gordon, but that was her first time teaching here, so she should have improved in what few areas could use it for you guys.</p>
<p>Don’t know much about the others. I’m told your choice of E7 prof is pretty much irrelevant for the fall, and specifically avoided taking 54 with Voiculescu. I don’t know of any math professors who stand out either way, though my personal biases lead me to say that if you can take a class with Hutchings or Lott (the latter of whom may not be here anymore, actually…), you should.</p>
<p>Studio - You’ll be fine. Just make sure you put in the work and don’t panic. I got a 5 on the AP as a consequence of being smart, and did pretty shoddily in 4A as a consequence of being lazy.</p>
<p>Bad mindset. Try what fortify is saying-- essentially shop ‘n’ drop. You won’t get another chance for another year to take chem 4A if you refuse it.</p>
<p>I got a 5 on AP Chem through intelligence, luck, and a good teacher. There is really no way in HELL that hard work contributed; I did the suggested review during class and then occasionally did a practice free response at home if I was really bored.</p>
<p>And yes, plenty of people who got 4s (or even 3s, in some cases) in AP have gotten As and high Bs in 4A. You will be fine.</p>
<p>I have to say your AP score and how well you do in Chem 4A are quite irrelevant. Plenty of people ace the AP test/SAT II and fail to do well while there’s the opposite. As long as have some basic chemistry knowledge, that’s all you need to start Chem 4A.</p>
<p>Lower division math professors don’t really matter. Although when I audited Voiculescu’s lecture a couple of times last fall, I had absolutely no idea what he was mumbling in his thick Eastern European accent and he was only talking to the first row of the class… it would entice anyone to skip his lectures and just learn from the textbook and your GSI. Just be glad that your grades don’t really have to do with the professor’s lectures especially in lower-division math classes.</p>
<p>I’m told that 61A is the more time-consuming of the two. E7’s also the more useful of the two - Matlab has practical uses, whereas Scheme is useful pretty much only for teaching people how to write code. If you’re not planning on going particularly far into programming, 61A really has no practical use and will likely be more work than it’s worth.</p>
<p>I honestly wouldn’t recommend either alongside 4A unless you’ve got good reason to believe you’re pretty good at programming, though. The Chem. E. who did E7 did pretty well in both, but as noted, his first semester didn’t involve a whole lot of sleeping, socializing, etc…</p>