<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I'm a new EE/CS transfer student to Berkeley and right now I'm planning my class schedule. I was wondering if taking EE 20, EE 40, CS 61A at the same time would be manageable? Have any other transfer students taken all 3 at the same time and done alright in them?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance for any advice or help.</p>
<p>If you were a freshman, the answer would be no. But as a transfer, you do what you have to do. Do you have prior knowledge in any of these courses?</p>
<p>I assume you’ve taken CS classes at CC, so you’ll have a slight advantage in 61A. It’ll diverge from your typical CS classes though, and wander through strange areas like logic programming or implementing OOP or writing an interpreter… but it’ll still help to not be learning all things programming from scratch. 61B will probably look more like your past CS classes, but I wouldn’t suggest taking Hilfinger and Babak at the same time.</p>
<p>40 is circuits. I’ve only had the summer version but didn’t find it too bad… results may vary in normal semesters. If your Physics E&M went over circuits, or if you’ve taken a CC circuits class, it’ll help you out some I think?</p>
<p>EE20 was a nightmare for me. Very super mathy, lots of labs, surprise problem sets, pop quizzes, and absolutely miserable exams (let’s write random math proofs!). So, be ready for that one. Try to get a smart lab partner, or find a study group for the problem sets.</p>
<p>I haven’t had this combination together, I hate EE so I spread out 40 and 20. Coming in I did 61A and 61BL over the summer, and took EE20N, CS70, 61C, and a humanities in the fall… do-able, but not fun. I kinda knew 20N was a weak spot before I started though, and I knew most of the CS70 material from past classes. The more familiar you are with the material, the easier it’ll be to take these on. If you struggle in these subjects, it might be better to spread them out. But chances are you can do it. :P</p>
<p>If you do choose to spread things out more, try to prioritize based on pre-reqs. I’m a CS person and didn’t plan on taking any upper div EE, so pushing EE40 to senior year wasn’t a huge deal and I chose to focus on CS my first couple semesters instead. So, plan ahead, figure out which courses are most important to you.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice @failure622!
To give some more background info, I have taken the circuits course offered at my CC which only covered analog circuits,and I have taken CS classes in structured programming, OOP programming and assembly language at my CC. I have no prior experience with an EE 20 type class and I took my last math class (linear algebra) almost a year and half ago so that’s the class I’m worried about the most.</p>
<p>Here is the EE 20 textbook (free online, or you can buy a paperback):
<a href=“http://leevaraiya.org/”>http://leevaraiya.org/</a>
You can preview the course with it.</p>
<p>You may also want to get familiar with tools like MATLAB (or GNU Octave) and LabVIEW that may be used in the course.</p>
<p>I’m also a new EECS transfer. Hopefully I can take EE20 in Fall, though it looks like almost full. Thanks for sharing the textbook information! @ucbalumnus </p>
<p>I think you’ll be fine. EE20 depends on “mathematical maturity”–when I took it with Babak, the book was practically useless. They’ve changed the course up quite a bit, but I’m not sure what Babak will do about that. Linear algebra is useful, but not crucial. EE40 depends on what ends up being covered. If you’ve taken a circuits class before, use the first portion of the course to get ahead and read up on future material, since it’ll save you a lot of headache when doing labs (they’re usually 3-4 weeks ahead of the course material, so if you have a solid background on stuff coming in, you’ll be set for the first half of the course at least). Don’t underestimate 61A (I did, and it’s the lowest grade I’ve gotten in a CS class looool). For reference, I took 61a, 20, math 54 and phys 7a my first sem as EECS (switched from biz). Lowest GPA I’ve had here (my schedules got harder each sem) because I underestimated it (7a and 61a), but it should be doable. </p>