<p>First off, I think it's funny that the Berkeley board is being overrun with EECS questions.</p>
<p>Second, I'm a junior transfer, and I want to know if I would be setting myself up for failure by taking:</p>
<p>EE40
EE20N
CS61B
an EASY humanities class</p>
<p>For my first semester. Again, I am a junior transfer, and my goal was to graduate in 2 years. Is this too much lab/programming stuff? ucbalumnus is consistently stressing the importance of NOT overloading on heavy programming and lab courses, and I want to make sure that I'm not asking for an ass-kicking, but I'd also like to try to graduate in 2 years, if it's doable with a good gpa. Any experienced folk willing to offer their advice?</p>
<p>I had a friend last year who took EE 40 and 20 together in fall and had no problems with it. I forget what other classes she took, self pace java and stuff but she managed to do well in them minus her total social disconnection and whatnot. Personally, I plan on taking 40 and 20 in the fall too but I’m not sure what other courses I’m going to take yet.</p>
<p>hootenany - look into the summer session - good way to combine the ‘dont get overloaded’ goal with the ‘graduate in two years’ goal. [Courses</a> by Department | Berkeley Summer Sessions](<a href=“http://summer.berkeley.edu/courses/courses-list]Courses”>Classes by Subject | Berkeley Summer Sessions) for this years set, but similar options will be available for next summer. You can also ‘walk’ at graduation ceremony in Spring but actually wrap up in the summer immediately after the ceremony, if it comes to that.</p>
<p>If you are a transfer who has not had EE 40 and 20N equivalent in community college, you pretty much have to take them as soon as you can, as prerequisites to upper division EE courses. Similarly, you need to complete CS 61A/61B/61C/70 as soon as you can as prerequisites to upper division CS courses. (You may have some slack if you want to do only EE or only CS for upper division.)</p>
<p>(Oh, and find out whether the humanities or social studies course has a big term project. Do not assume that humanities or social studies automatically means less work.)</p>
<p>I’d recommend you take CS61A instead of CS61B to make your schedule easier because a very difficult professor is teaching 61B in the Fall. Otherwise, 3 technicals is fine.</p>
<p>I’ll be taking 61A over the summer.
What about taking CS70 instead of 61B? Would this be a bad idea? I’m not sure if the The instructor teaching the class in the fall is Rao. I guess I could also take Math 55 instead of CS70, but it seems like the CS course would be better.</p>
<p>You can’t really take Math 55 anymore. As far as I know the new requirement starting Fall 2011 is CS 70 and can no longer be replaced by Math 55 unless you took it before the requirement was changed. @ucbalumnus
How do we find out if there is going to be a big project for humanities/social studies classes? I’m sure that some are alot of work and it depends on the professor too.</p>
<p>You pretty much have to ask around to see if a given H/SS course has a large term project or unusually large amount of work. (Economics 1, 101A, and 101B are not high work courses, or at least they were not back when I was in school.)</p>
<p>Anything else? Taking EE 40 then would help from a prerequisite standpoint if you plan to take a lot of EE courses, but that would mean two lab courses during the summer, which may be a relatively high time commitment and workload.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.courserank.com%5B/url%5D”>www.courserank.com</a> is a good place to check if a class is easy or difficult/time consuming. If you access it with your UC Berkeley email then you have access to official grade distributions for most classes. Students also leave comments below which often say how much work is involved in a particular course. Try to look for humanities classes (and professors) with B+ or better averages and nice reviews.</p>
No, I didn’t want to take 2 technical classes over the summer, especially since it will be my first session at Cal. I think that taking ee40 in the fall should still leave room for me to graduate in two years… hopefully. Also, the 61B lecture and the EE40 lecture overlap.</p>
<p>Which area(s) of EE and CS do you plan to emphasize?</p>
<p>If purely CS, you may want to move CS 70 to the fall instead of EE 20N (or H/SS), taking the latter in the spring. That may allow a bit more schedule flexibility for upper division courses in the spring. For someone emphasizing CS:</p>
<p>With CS 61B, no CS 70 or CS 61C: can take CS 160 or EE 122
With CS 61B and CS 70, no CS 61C: can take CS 160, 170, 188, or EE 122</p>
<p>Originally, I wanted to go into the electrical engineering side of things, but I am starting to realize that I know relatively little about that stuff, and therefore am somewhat uncertain of whether I would enjoy it. I enjoy the computer science side of things, but I’ve always been incredibly curious to know what is happening on the physical level. I loved my physics classes (If I thought that there was a great career in it, I would have majored in physics). I wish I could just learn everything. I suppose I’ll need to figure this out pretty quickly, though.</p>
<p>“Originally, I wanted to go into the electrical engineering side of things, but I am starting to realize that I know relatively little about that stuff, and therefore am somewhat uncertain of whether I would enjoy it.”</p>
<p>Isn’t the purpose of education to learn what you don’t know?
In fact, do you think you would enjoy it if you already know about it?</p>
<p>If you want to emphasize EE, stay with the schedule you have with EE 40 and EE 20N in the fall. These will cover the prerequisites for a large number of upper division EE courses. If you then take EE 105 and EE 120 in the spring, you will cover the prerequisites for almost all of the rest, allowing you to explore your EE interests in senior year.</p>
<p>Being a transfer student who has to “catch up” on 20N/40/61A/61B/61C/70 puts significant constraints on your schedule, in terms of spreading out the lab/project/programming (high workload) courses. You may also have to have semesters with all technical courses (which is fine for some people, but others would rather have a H/SS course each semester).</p>
<p>I absolutely agree. What I mean is that I haven’t had enough of a sampling of the material to know whether it is what I imagine it is. I have taken enough cs/programming classes that I know where that path will take me, and I know that they are things in which I am quite interested. But you are certainly correct.</p>
<p>Does anybody know what career prospects look like for the different types of concentrations? Would a CS person have more job opportunities than an EE person? When I look at the companies which are hiring eecs majors, I see a lot of companies like amazon, yahoo, and google. I would imagine that the majority of these jobs are more computer-sciencey, though I don’t really know. Are EE people more expected to go to grad school, rather than get jobs in industry after their BS?</p>
<p>But under EECS, it looks like the job titles are heavily biased toward the CS side (“Software Engineer”), while the graduate school majors show a heavier representation on the EE side. However, the EECS graduates going into software do seem to be more likely to work at computer hardware companies than L&S CS graduates.</p>
<p>Based on that, if you want to emphasize EE, you may still want to try to fit in EE 122 and CS 162 into your schedule at the very least.</p>