<p>Hey all,</p>
<p>I'm currently a 2nd year student at UC Berkeley. I've had thoughts about transferring early on in my Berkeley career, but decided to stick around and hope I'd enjoy my experience here more. Unfortunately, I've finally decided that I would like to transfer and spend my next two years of college elsewhere, preferably somewhere smaller.</p>
<p>What did I not like about Berkeley? </p>
<p>I didn't like the size. I felt the school was too big for the administration to handle, and so it's typical for students to feel like they don't get any of the attention that a school should provide. It's a very disconnected campus without much of a community feel. Everyone keeps to themselves and their own friend groups. It's common to attend a discussion section weekly for an entire semester and not know the names of anyone in your group. It's so large that people get used to meeting people briefly, doing whatever assignment needs to get done, then parting ways, usually for good. It's made a lot of interactions here very artificial and shallow.</p>
<p>The academics. My problem with Berkeley's academics is that many of the professors are great researchers, no doubt, but simply should not be teachers. I've taught several classes over the summers and throughout a gap year I took after high school. I love teaching, and I want to be a teacher. So I respect teaching as a craft, and I respect the relationship a teacher and a student shares. I think this relationship is an important part of a successful education. It's very difficult to get that here. Most of my classes here have had anywhere from 100 to 600+ students. Even in the upper divisions (at least from my experience as a Psych major), you'll find huge classes, where you're simply spoonfed information and expected to just memorize a bunch of facts and diagrams. There are definitely people who thrive here academically. At Berkeley, you will be surrounded by some of the most driven students in the world. For myself, it has been a struggle to keep up with the workload and competition. It has been incredibly stressful, but for all that stress, I'm not sure that I've learned very much. This is also because much of your experiences with your classes depend heavily on which GSI you are assigned to. Your GSI is responsible for reading your papers and teaching you the material more in depth than in your lectures, in smaller groups. Unfortunately, my experiences with my GSIs have been too sporadic for the amount of money I have to pay to attend. I've had a couple of very awesome GSIs. But I've also had too many AWFUL GSIs who clearly didn't care about the class and made the class experience so much more difficult than it had to be.</p>
<p>I want to avoid this turning into some longwinded, incoherent rant, so I will end this here and say that there are also things about Berkeley that are pretty amazing. For one, I had an immunology professor who was part of the team to make an Anthrax vaccine for the US. He was an amazing teacher. Too bad I got a C, even with all the studying. But that's just kind of what happens at UC Berkeley. Grade deflation. </p>
<p>As for suggestions, I'm looking to transfer to a smaller school with a comparable academic standing. I think I'd like to try my hand at a liberal arts college. Some things to note, I'm a psych major, but I also have a strong interest in learning languages. At the moment, I'm learning Korean and Chinese. The school I transfer to doesn't necessarily have to offer Korean, however, as I know it's not common. I'm hoping to go somewhere with more of a community feeling, where professors are less research oriented and more teacher oriented, and where classes are perhaps more discussion based. I'm flexible in terms of location.</p>