<p>Exactly. I realize this - it’s like it’s all a big secret. I’m not new to this concept. That’s why I put in my first post:</p>
<p>“Most of all, you will hear about things that they don’t want you to know.”</p>
<p>BerkeleySurvivor,</p>
<p>I’m very sorry for the terrible experience you’ve been through at Berkeley and am happy to know you’re doing much better in a different environment.</p>
<p>Would you talk about the EECS classes you’ve taken and the professors you’ve taken them with? I want to know who is okay/decent or even amazing – like Peyam – and who to avoid – like Ratner, Speliotopolous, and Hilfinger.</p>
<p>Did any of those EECS classes contribute to your wanting to leave Berkeley?</p>
<p>Are you studying EECS at community college now?</p>
<p>Occupy Movement: Were you one of the students who camped in the tents and who were beaten by the police in Fall 2011?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>WRONG. UCs favor in-state residents like they are supposed to. If you get rejected applying in-state, you definitely will get rejected applying as an international student with the same stats.
I agree that with the budget cuts, UCs may have increased their percentage of international students but it is still not more than that of in-state students.</p>
<p>I’m a very pro Berkeley poster and immensely enjoyed my time at Berkeley, but I agree that Berkeley isn’t the perfect environment and a lot could be improved. </p>
<p>I’ll agree with the following shortfalls:
- On-campus housing & off-campus apartments (supply & condition)
- Segregation by ethnicity in study groups (especially in the technical subjects)
- City of Berkeley is grungy; large homeless population
- Tough grading.
- Protests can get very annoying.</p>
<p>I will say though for the most part, the profs and GSIs are excellent. There’s never a shortage on things to do. Living in the dorms was a very diverse, fun and memorable experience. For students with cars, yes, parking is expensive and a pain; but you don’t really need a car…public transportation in the Bay Area is adequate and efficient.</p>
<p>Love the artwork, BerkeleySurvivor! Too funny! Great talent you have.</p>
<p>Interesting read, the only comment I would have is - your experience probably wouldn’t have been any different had you chosen another competitive college. Was looking at the reviews of other ivy leagues (and top 25 us news ranking colleges) in another board and your review/rants is pretty much similar to what other students wrote about those other colleges. </p>
<p>That’s why so important to find the “right fit” and not go by rankings.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>+1</p>
<p>Berkeley is a great school and my father earned his doctorate there. That said, I grew up in the Bay Area and never considered going to Cal - partly because they don’t really have my major, but partly because I didn’t want to attend a 40,000-student behemoth.</p>
<p>BerkeleySurvivor,
As a mom of college students and future college students (I have 5 kids), I wish I could reach through cc and give you a big hug. I wish you all the best going forward–please take good care of yourself!</p>
<p>I’m sorry you had to go through all that OP. I know UC Berkeley is a stressful university and environment and it’s unfortunate that it just didn’t work out with you. While I do believe you did go to UC Berkeley and your story is indeed real, I also think people should take this with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>When you come to a university like Cal, or UCLA, or Stanford, or whatever, you should of course expect the place to be difficult and more stressful than your typical university. It’s unfortunate that you were stressed beyond sanity in regards to your classes, but that’s just the way it is at a place like Cal. Sadly, students like OP are more common than you think. I do have a few friends at Cal that certainly were not fond of their academic experience there.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I will say that a lot of your issues are pretty universal, regardless of the fact you went to Cal. A crappy roommate? Yeah, that sorta happens anywhere. Homeless people? Again, plenty of that in other colleges as well.</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing and good luck in your endeavors.</p>
<p>BerkeleySurvivor, </p>
<p>I hope your treatments go well and you get better. You obviously have a good, smart head on your shoulders. Since the courses you had the most problems with were the weeder lower division math and general breadth electives, what if you finished up all those courses at a CC, and then transferred back to Berkeley to get the EECS degree? You didn’t fail out. Wouldn’t Berkeley accept you back? I doubt you’ll like the suggestion, but perhaps you should go back and face it when you’re better. It’ll also give you a degree for all the time and money invested.</p>
<p>Good luck to you.</p>
<p>To whoever wrote this comment:</p>
<p>"I doubt whoever wrote this rambling “review” ever went to Berkeley. And if he did, I’m not surprised he dropped out since he’s just the type of societal loser that Berkeley does a great job of getting rid of. "</p>
<p>I find it somewhat humorous that such a comment was made, since many of our society’s greatest inventors, brilliant minds, and entrepreneurs have gone to Berkeley and decided to leave for similar reasons that I did - partially because it can be so stifling to creativity and personal pursuits other than strict academics (which often times have little practical real-world value). Take the computer science titan Steve Wozniak for example. He went to Berkeley for a year, then decided to drop out.</p>
<p>Anyways, I think that it is largely true that I would have had a similar experience at most any other behemoth competitive school. I think that, personally, it is a smarter choice to choose a smaller niche school than somewhere like Berkeley just by Gause’s Law of Competitive Exclusion alone. It seems to me that somewhere smaller where there are less kids, more resources, and less competition offers a greater opportunity to flourish and develop oneself - to develop a niche and develop your own personality without being stifled by everyone else’s interests. Think about it like this - going to Berkeley might be sort of impressive, but is going to Berkeley and getting a 2.5 gpa really that much better than going somewhere else and getting a 4.0 gpa while enjoying yourself the entire time? Probably not. </p>
<p>Thanks for the compliment UCBChemEGrad! A lot of people from Berkeley thought it was pretty funny too. I showed it to my girlfriend at the time, but she wasn’t really a very supportive person and she didn’t really care what I was going through and she said that she didn’t think it was funny and didn’t like it. I asked her “why?” and she didn’t even tell me. Then again, she wasn’t really too supportive towards anything I did and often times I felt like she just subconsciously had a low opinion of me because I was so nice to her all the time that she felt like she could walk all over me. Anyways, just another example of how looks/prestige aren’t everything! I remember I was talking about how stressed out I was at Berkeley and she coldly told me to stop whining! Even after I supported her through her suicidal periods!! She begged to see me when I was at Berkeley because she was feeling lonely, and I told her I would love for her to visit, but that it was midterm season and I really needed to study (Halloween), so if she did come, I would still need to go to class. She said okay, but when she visited, and I went to class, she got super ****ed off like she expected me to just not go to class! Ughh… But that’s a whole other story…</p>
<p>I’ll answer some of Johnny2013’s questions:
GSIs are pretty hit-or-miss, and I don’t remember if you can even choose your GSI, plus GSIs that were teaching when I went to Berkeley probably won’t be when you go because they have already fulfilled their teaching requirement.</p>
<p>As far as classes I took here are some that I can comment on:</p>
<p>CHEM 1A:
I had a professor named Heino Niche or something like that. He was a good professor who kept the attention of his students during class with his high energy, relevant demonstrations, positive attitude, German accent, and efficient teaching style. Tests/grading were fair. The GSI I had for the lab/discussion sections was smart, but often times the lab instructions were vague, and if you didn’t know what was <em>intended</em> for you to do exactly, or you didn’t read the mind of your grader for EXACTLY what they wanted in your lab report, you would get points off. This was extraordinarily frustrating - even after asking the GSI questions to clarify every single detail every 5 minutes (no exaggeration) during class, I would still get points off. It was like they were just LOOKING for ANYTHING to take off points and would intentionally not tell you things so that they could (I’m not talking about forgetting to put your name or something - if you forget to put your name on a lab report, you deserve to lose some points because it is clear that you need that) so that it was impossible to get a perfect score. At any other college - community college especially, they wouldn’t be so impressed with my reports that I would have always gotten 100%. My GSI had a strong accent (not sure what the accent was really) and some would be bothered by it, but I don’t really mind accents. He would always pronounce “moles” as “moors” and “citric acid” as “citrit aciiiit.”</p>
<p>CS61A:
I had professor Harvey, who I think contributed some things in the field of computer programming. The semester after I took the class, he retired, and the class material changed. Back when I took the class we learned mostly useless information (like making text-based card games and a metacircular evaluator in an inefficient/defunct programming language that is never used anymore and that bares little resemblance to modern languages). I guess I could carry some concepts out of this class, but I could have been taught these concepts in a much easier, more efficient, and less roundabout way. I have found that I have the ability to learn everything I took away from this class with less than half of the effort at community college while doing it in a much more useful computer language. A lot of people seem to have liked the professor, but then again, some people seem to like just about any professor in Berkeley, regardless of how unnecessarily difficult they make things, unfair grading, poor teaching style, and general suckiness. My opinion of Harvey was that the material he taught was of moderate difficulty for a Berkeley class (some things were more difficult) and he was a fair grader (generous sometimes), but he was also a dry speaker. My GSI was Darren Kuo. Darren was an AMAZING GSI who was really smart and helpful. You could email him at any time and you would get a response to any question within minutes.</p>
<p>PHYSICS 7A:
I had professor Yildiz (I forgot the professor’s name, so I looked back into my computer documents to check. Just goes to show you that information you learn and don’t use, you will soon forget anyways). Yildiz seemed to be a professor of adequate quality. He seemed to give you most of what you needed to know, but left some things out. Whatever he didn’t go over in lecture, the GSIs were expected to go over during discussion/lab sections. My GSI seemed to be okay, but not especially memorable. I tried chatting with him over gmail chat for a while, but then he just stopped replying.</p>
<p>THEATER R1A:
I had Hentyle Yap or something like that (pronounced “hentai”). Remember, he was not a professor since GSI’s fully teach R1 classes. Hentyle seemed to be a good instructor, but the class had a strong political undertone which I was hoping to escape by taking “theater.” At times I felt that grading was pretty subjective, but overall, even though I would have given myself an “A” in the class rather than the “B” he gave me (I’m not just saying that because of course everyone wants a high grade), Hentyle seemed adequate. See my story for more details about this class.</p>
<p>MATH 1B:
Oh God - I took this class two times. The first time around I had Vaughan Jones or something like that. In my opinion, he was not a good teacher at all, but still tried keeping people’s attention with jokes during class. His methods were hard to follow. It’s no wonder that I had to retake this class. The second time around I did my research on ratemyprofessors and chose Borcherds. My roommate chose Ratner. I warned my roommate not to choose Ratner, but he insisted that it would be good for him and that he would learn more and that a challenge is always good to stretch you, etc. Needless to say, I passed, and he didn’t. Big surprise. He probably didn’t even learn that much since she teaches by the ideology “if you throw enough mud at a wall, some of it is bound to stick” with the added proviso that if you don’t understand everything she throws at you, you will fail. I doubt my roommate remembers much of what he learned in Math 1B one or two years later just like me - just the stuff that you actually USE in other classes or in real life. You will gradually forget all the useless information and incredible detail that is added on by the professors to make this class difficult. I would have taken away the same important information just taking this class at community college. My roommate was so stressed out all the time! As for Borcherds, he was supposedly really really easy, but he found out that students had that opinion of him, so the semester I took the class with him, he vowed to make it more challenging. I would say that some of the tests weren’t really as straightforward as they should have been. Borcherds often did examples during class and got lost in what he was doing making mistakes, because he too had forgotten many of the Math 1B concepts!! This was a mathematics field medalist, forgetting Math 1B concepts!! You might be wondering how a person with a mathematics field medal doing research in mathematics could forget more basic math like what is taught in Math 1B. Well, I’m telling you - it’s because a lot of the excruciating detail isn’t used often in real life, and most people just look up what they need to know anyways (Borcherds included). Borcherds had a British accent that sounded much like the nasally voice that repeats some of the lyrics in Beatle’s
“Yellow Submarine” - you know, the voice that goes “in a yellow - in a yellow, submarine - submarine.” </p>
<p>THEATER R1B:
I am still upset with the instructor for this class for treating me the way that she did and not doing her job. You can read about my experiences in this class in greater detail in my story. She seemed to be helpful, but I only got my grades AFTER everyone had submitted their “teacher assessments” (papers that the students turn in to the school at the end of the semester to rate the GSIs and assess their performance). Grading was extraordinarily subjective. It was clear that she didn’t even read my paper before grading it, because claims that she made about it were false (like that I only mentioned one term from the class in it one time -interpellation-. I mentioned it several times and many, many other more terms. She would have known that if she hadn’t just read the first paragraph). I feel like sometimes instructors are given way too much “free reign” to give whatever grade they feel like for a paper rather than following a rigorous grading scale. Sometimes even with grading scales, things are too subjective as well. How “flowy” or “smooth” or “critical” any particular paper is is really relative and up for debate. An instructor can just give you any grade they feel like, and if you try to argue with them, they will just LOOK for things to support their initial decision. It’s the “no rest” principle at work. A paper can always be improved, just like in engineering any product can be improved almost indefinitely, but when is “enough enough?” Well, it is “good enough” whenever the instructor deems it to be - and that is anybody’s guess while you are actually writing the paper and depends on the instructor’s mood. You can do a rough draft and go into office hours and MAKE SURE that you do EVERYTHING that they tell you and go over the paper and follow their criticisms and instructions in EXCRUCIATING DETAIL (like what I did), and it still won’t be enough. Unlike in mathematics where you either get the problem right or wrong or your methodology is right or wrong, whatever grade you get on a paper is highly variable. One professor/GSI will think your paper is okay, while another (like this one) will not. That is why I wrote such a lengthy email to her - I needed to corner her so that she had NO EXCUSE to give me a bad grade on it or even to take away points - so that she wouldn’t have any BS to come up with. In Berkeley humanities classes, I feel like things are rigged so that you AREN’T SUPPOSED to BE ABLE to get a perfect or excellent score. I think that the GSIs are trained to be like this (maybe I’m wrong) so that students will always know that they have “something to improve on.” This, however, contradicts the moral principle of education that given a reasonable and adequate amount of effort, any student should be able to meet the expectations given.</p>
<p>EE20N:
This class was very difficult, and it was a lab class which made things even worse. The instructor (Babak) taught you the basics during class, then gave out problem sets to struggle with on your own outside of class. I guess this sort of teaches students critical thinking, and he was sort of reasonable in that he gave students an adequate amount of time to do the problem sets, so I’m not complaining too much here - plus he was helpful at answering questions on the problem sets. It was expected that students form study groups to do the problem sets. The problems were often so difficult that even a group of 5 or 6 EECS students would be stuck on the problems (usually 10 problems per set) for many nights. Tutoring with HKN was useful. I feel like this was another theory-based class rather than something that would be helpful with most real-life applications. This class is known as a “weeder” class, and for good reason - it was EXTREMELY math intensive. I felt like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking with the math and calculations that I was doing. Babak was a pretty good professor in my opinion, and taught you what you needed to know (for the most part), but you had better be really good at math! Otherwise you won’t have a chance. The class wasn’t so much about learning concepts as much as using math you might already know to solve tricky problems. The problem is that you have to figure out how to model what you are given mathematically, and often times you can try multiple approaches without actually getting anywhere. This might be a bit uncomfortable for many students at first, because they are just used to problems given in their math classes where they are already given everything in terms of math and just have to solve an equation or something. I often ran out of time on the exams. I don’t remember most of what I learned in this class. I don’t even remember the GSI. I do remember that during the lab I was frequently asking the GSI questions, but lab grading was very fair and the GSI was generally pretty helpful.</p>
<p>ETHNIC STUDIES 41AC:
All I have to say about this class I said in the story. I don’t remember the professor’s name…</p>
<p>MATH 53:
I had professor Auroux who had a cool french accent. He is generally considered a good professor. He seemed fair to good. Tests seemed straight forward. The material was sort of difficult at times. This is how I felt sitting in his class:
[Lec</a> 0 | MIT Professor Auroux Teaches all of Multivariable Calculus in Literally 40 Seconds - YouTube](<a href=“Lec 0 | MIT Professor Auroux Teaches all of Multivariable Calculus in Literally 40 Seconds - YouTube”>Lec 0 | MIT Professor Auroux Teaches all of Multivariable Calculus in Literally 40 Seconds - YouTube)
The GSI seemed meh. I often just slept in instead of going to his discussion sections because I wouldn’t have learned that much that early in the morning anyways. Sometimes I just walked to class in my pajamas right out of bed.</p>
<p>Math 54:
The professor wasn’t really memorable. In fact, I forget the professor’s name and what he even looked like… Wait! I remember now! It was Applebaum or something like that. Well whatever, who cares. I had such an amazing GSI that taught me everything!</p>
<p>CS61B:
I had Prof. Bootstrap or something like that… If I could only remember… Let me look and see if I have the name somewhere in my computer… Aha! Paul Shewchuck (lol sounds nothing like Bootstrap - maybe I got it confused since “shoe-chuck” is sort of related to “boot-strap” I don’t know). My roommate, like many other Berkeley kids, was the ambitious masochistic type. I told him not to pick Hilfinger as his professor. I warned him. I told him that he would fail just like he failed with Ratner. He didn’t listen: he told me that I was way too negative and that anything was possible if you put your mind to it and told me about the law of attraction and how Hilfinger was really smart and bla bla bla. He failed and had to retake the class. Anyways, back to Shewchuck. This professor was not the best in the world, but was okay. I think that my community college professor might be better. That being said, Shewchuck had the type of personality to make (sometimes offensive) jokes during class to keep his students paying attention. The book he used for the class was pretty good and not dry like the CS61A book. The material could get pretty hard at times, and to succeed I think that it was pretty much expected that you were prolific enough to have already had some experience coding to pick up and learn things quickly (if you try to learn as you go, things are really difficult). Projects were tough - he told everyone explicitly in class not to work together on the projects AT ALL, but basically everyone did, and if you didn’t, you would probably run out of time or struggle for hours that you did not have. Another alternative was HKN tutoring.</p>
<p>EAST ASIAN/HINDU STUDIES:
I took this class because I needed to pick a humanities class that I could do in series (a “series” means that you need to take the lower and upperdiv of the same class), and out of the ones that were offered, this was the lesser evil. My second-year roommate was Hindu and this class was about Hinduism, so he said that he would help me out if I needed it. He had already taken the class - he said that when he took it, there was no work in the class or any exams besides the final - all you did was go to class and listen to Hindu stories and watch Hindu movies, plus everything you needed to know was summarized online. There were no “discussion” or “lab” sections. Just “lecture.” Sounded good to me! The class was exactly as he had described it. You might think with a more laid-back class, students wouldn’t learn anything. Ironically, I remember more from this class than EE20 or CS61A combined. I guess if you enjoy a class and aren’t beat over the head with information, you are more likely to absorb the information you are taught in the long run. I didn’t find the information I learned in this class particularly useful in any way (I’m not Hindu), but I guess it’s good to know a bit about another culture.</p>
<p>PHYSICS 7B:
This was a class about thermodynamics and electromagnetism. Seemed to be pretty straightforward. I forget my professor’s name and my GSI. Seemed fair. Ironically, Berkeley’s Physics 7B class seemed to be both easier and of better quality than my physics thermodynamics/electromagnetism class at community college.</p>
<p>AP TESTED OUT OF:
Math 1A
UC Entry Level Writing
American History
American Institution
American Cultures</p>
<p>I don’t think that any particular class “turned me off” to EECS, just my general experience overall.</p>
<p>I am not studying EECS at community college now. I switched my major to something less math/science/mentally intensive. I found that just because I like science and tinkering doesn’t mean that I have to do it as a career. There are plenty of easier, more laid-back, social, and more cushy careers where you get paid just as much - plus, I could still do science/tinkering as a hobby, and if I did it as a career, I wouldn’t be building what I wanted anyways. Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Wozniak, and many others, I don’t have to go to school to learn the information that I want. I’m just going to go back to Berkeley or UCLA and go to the tutoring centers and pick the students’/staffs’ brains to get all the useful information that I need for my own personal projects without having to learn all the bull-**** (epsilon delta proofs, for example, are the BIGGEST waste of time and busy-work that I have ever seen - not even math majors remember them after a year or two). </p>
<p>I was not in the camped tents during the protests of 2011, but I was a part of the protests, and I think that kicking and ripping down tents is sort of disrespectful on the part of the police - especially since they weren’t harming anyone any it wasn’t dangerous/ a nuisance.</p>
<p>Peyam was the best Math 54 GSI ever.
– someone not in his section</p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>Wish I never came to this school.</p>
<p>successful ■■■■■ is successful</p>
<p>However, the success of this deceptive venture is eclipsed by the massive effort to post ratio. Nobody has time to read your page-long posts. </p>
<p>Overall, 4/5</p>
<p>BerkeleySurvivor: Thank you for answering my questions!</p>
<p>Ankur1521: Why has your experience at Berkeley been bad? Is it bad profs/GSIs?</p>
<p>Lucyan: How is BerkeleySurvivor trolling? Do you think he’s making stuff up or trying to get a rise out of people? I think he’s just sharing his experiences so people see a different, rarely expressed, perspective about Berkeley.</p>
<p>I’m confused, Lucyan. Is that excellent self-description an attempt to illustrate recursion (since he mentioned wanting real-life examples of abstractions)? If so, I think you’re overestimating yourself a bit, 3/5.</p>
<p>At first I thought the OP was writing an April Fool’s joke, but the more I read, the more I agreed with. ;)</p>
<p>What?</p>
<p>Apparently, I’m not the only one who has developed such symptoms. The stages seem to go like this for most people:</p>
<p>1.) An extreme and/or prolonged stressor
2.) The stressor may be removed, but anxiety/panic attacks ensue
3.) Anxiety/panic symptoms may cease or continue, but anhedonia/emotional blunting develops
4.) Prolonged anhedonia/emotional blunting that may last months, years, or indefinitely </p>
<p>Others seem to develop the apathy syndrome/anhedonia/emotional blunting after use of SSRIs that may persist even after discontinuation.</p>
<p>As for the long posts, I feel that anything shorter wouldn’t really do my experience justice, and for those truly interested in knowing more about Berkeley, I feel that anything less would deprive them of the fullness a very underrepresented perspective.</p>
<p>Why I dislike Berkeley:
- Lack of Fast Food
- Crappy apartments
- Homeless people
- No good stores. Everything is overpriced
- Crappy weather
- Ugly campus
- Too many fobs
- Too much segregation among ethnicities socially and in clubs. I remember I wanted to join a general business club when I was a freshman, and there were like 5 of them that had Asian in their names and only 1 that was somewhat of a general club.
- Lots of rich snobby preps with huge egos
- Crappy dorms
- Classes aren’t too bad, but I’m an econ major. The lower division courses were rough though. I would have definitely gone to community college and transferred in instead of taking them here
- Being a spring admit sucks and it shouldn’t exist. I wish I was straight up denied instead. It was a pretty horrible decision to come here in the spring. I would have rather gone to community college than to come in the spring
- UCLA is better in every way. I’m 99% positive in 5-6 years, UCLA will surpass Berkeley in rankings</p>
<p>I will say this though, you have to study at this school if you want to do well and you really become a master at it. I was a fool and thought I was smart enough to get away without studying during my first 4 semesters here… Started studying during my 5th and I’m doing well now. </p>
<p>Honestly though, courses aren’t too difficult. Every course I’ve taken so far has been really easy to acquire B’s, but getting A’s is incredibly difficult. So if you’re fine with B’s, it’s not too bad. Though in retrospect, given that I was trying to get into investment banking, I think I could have done much better had I gone to UCSB and achieved a much higher GPA and networked in via a business fraternity. The prestige of the school will not make up for a low GPA. There are 40k kids here, they pump out plenty of kids with high GPA’s who share the same brand name as you and you have to compete with them and kids at “lesser schools” with higher GPA’s for jobs. If you can get a much higher GPA at a school with less name recognition then go there. The prestige isn’t worth it. The low GPA here will kill your chances for good jobs and good graduate schools. You pre-med students out there, med schools don’t care at all if you went to Berkeley.</p>
<p>You also really do learn how to think critically and outside the box. But it ain’t worth it to me.</p>
<p>Ankur, would you mind describing your experience as a Spring admit? I have read many fantastic reviews of the FPF system, and I would love to hear your opinion.</p>