Hey guys, I am a current transfer student planning on attending UCB next year! I was accepted for Economics and am worried about the difficulty. All I have heard about from Berkeley is the difficulty and the stress, but the rewarding experience - these people were all engineering majors however - but this is hard to compare to a community college. I am hard working and I want to get a high GPA. I know that my GPA will dip due to the fact that it is Berkeley; however, I do not want it to tank. I am planning on taking the less math intensive path. If you are in the economics department or a transfer student, please let me know about your experience! Thank you!
My friend’s an Econ major and is taking 18 units (4 at a CC) with I think a 3.7. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely still possible. Plenty of transfers keep their GPAs high even after transferring.
Does anyone know the difficulty of getting one of those econ classes first semester? It looks really really packed right now… at least for econ 100a, 101a, 100b, 101b… and for transfers we wud need to declare that major first semester…
@81Mamba I’m an econ transfer for this coming fall and I’m planning on taking econ 100A and stat 21 fall semester. As of right now econ 100A has filled 41/340 spots in the lecture, and stat 21 has filled 13/200 spots in the lecture. There are probably some sections that have already filled but these are the ones that are showing via schedule builder (https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/). I signed up for the first day of CalSO so I’m pretty confident I’m going to get these two mandatory classes, given the fact that all the returning students have signed up already (according to the guy at the SoCal reception event).
That seems much more relieving haha because this website http://schedule.berkeley.edu/ seemed to say otherwise about the capacity/enrollment.
@81Mamba Wait I actually have no idea which one is the right one, I feel like your link might be the more accurate one
Edit: yep, your link is definitely the right one. It’s more updated. The econ lectures and discussions are basically full, no idea how the transfers are expected to get in given the fact that we are required to take that class to declare our major.
@i20hndc sigh, I was hoping your link would be right LOL
Although, my link doesn’t exactly make sense. Theres space, but then theres a waitlist going on to. Kind of confusing.
Anyways, what do we do now… I think it’s a little ridiculous how they did that…
Well looking at your link I might be looking into taking 100B now since the waitlist is much shorter, I think maybe 11 spots deep. I was reading that getting into the discussion section first is more important, so my plan is to get on the lecture waitlist and hopefully sign up for the 8-9am discussion which will boost my chances. Stat 21 isn’t too full so I don’t think that’s a problem (don’t know about stat 20), and the third class I want to take is a 5 unit language class which has only 1 spot taken and I should be able to get it in phase II.
I think they reserve certain spots for the professor to add, but considering we HAVE to take these classes our first semester something tells me they must have a way to fit the hundred or so transfers still needing to sign up for classes. That, or they hate us all, give us terrible priority, and we declare political economy lol
@81Mamba There’s always the option of taking the 101A and 101B route, but I hear those classes are much harder than 100A and 100B
A couple of seniors I talked to at a reception event said that a wait-list eleven deep isn’t that bad and still would put you in the “likely in” group due to all the class shuffling unless it’s a lab section with a strict body count limit–apparently it’s around 15+ that you should consider alternatives.
So does that mean people are actually likely to drop the course? Or how exactly does that work
Yeah, this is pretty much true. I have friends in the Economics major and there’s a strong love/hate relationship with it. TAKE STATS 21, NOT STATS 20 for the prereq. Your GPA might not be as glamorous as your CC GPA at Berkeley, but I doubt you’ll tank.
@ocnative Do you have any idea how phase I goes for transfers? It seems like all the lectures and discussions are filled by returning students. What do they do about transfers?
@i20hndc Don’t worry, for the Econ major they will reserve the prereq classes for you in Phase I because you’ll need it to declare.
@ocnative Thanks, I think all the econ transfers need some reassurance with the whole registration process. Why do you say take stat 21 over 20? Apparently stat 21 has a lower average over the past few years, but I read good reviews about the prof teaching it in the fall
@i20hndc Stats 21 might be less intense than Stats 20, from what I’ve heard.
@81Mamba Yes. For auto waitlist classes, people are likely to drop as new sections are added and/or as spots in other priority classes open up. That said, good luck getting Econ 100B with Professor Wood; I hear he is an amazing person to learn economics from.