<p>I recently have been admitted to UCLA's biochemistry major. Could anyone tell me how is UCLA's biochemitry ?</p>
<p>I’m interested to know too 
I have to decide between UC Davis and UCLA for biochem… but I think Davis is ranked higher?? Are the professors like… really good? hahahaha</p>
<p>First off, nobody cares how highly ranked a department is unless it’s a professional department. Biochemistry falls under the college of letters and sciences, meaning it’s going to be considered a liberal art anyways so it doesn’t matter if UCLA or UC Davis has a better ranked Biochemistry department because it really doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>Second, biochemistry is considered one of the most difficult science majors in the college of letters and science. It’s a physical science. The upper divisions are difficult and in the lower divisions you will be taking intro courses with engineering students. For instance, life science (i.e. General Biology) students take the Math 3 and Chem 14 series, which are generally easier. Physical science majors like biochemistry will take the Math 31 and Chem 20 series, which are considerably harder.</p>
<p>Either way, being a science major will be hard in general because if you’re life science, you’ll be competing with annoying pre meds and if you’re physical science, you’ll be competing with engineers.</p>
<p>If you’re good at AP Chem, AP Calc, AP Bio, and you got 5s on all of them, you’ll do okay in Biochem. But it’s hard nonetheless. An average general Biology GPA would be around a 3.1-3.3 cumulative. Not sure what it is for Biochemistry, but I would say more or less around that.</p>
<p>^agreed 100%</p>
<p>Think about it: how can you rank an undergraduate department? The professor’s research and reputation? That’s hardly going to affect you at the undergraduate level and just because a teacher has a great reputation does not mean they can teach. Most of your classes are actually going to be outside of your department as you have to take GE’s and general lower div’s like freshman chemistry/biology that other science majors have to take. </p>
<p>My point being is that at these top schools, the education you are going to get is going to be very similar. A better question would be how do you feel about the school itself/environment/how do you fit/etc. How happy you are at a school will affect you the most, and keep in mind over fifty percent of the people entering college change their major.</p>
<p>That said, UCLA’s biochemistry is considered one of the most difficult majors in the sciences due to the subject matter</p>
<p>Also, science professors at any major research university aren’t going to be “very good.” Most of them are researchers and teach because they have to. Some of them will be very good at it, and some of them will be very poor at it. Either way, if you’re going to study a science at any UC, you have to know how to self study and put in a lot of time and effort to learning the material. That doesn’t mean lectures are useless though. Go to class, but it just means that a lot of the studying will be from how much time you spend reading the text, doing practice problems, practice tests, etc.</p>