<p>Is the atmosphere really cutthroat and competitive at Berkeley? Or is it more laid back where people help one another?</p>
<p>its not as cutthroat as you think</p>
<p>i wouldn't say people really help out one another, but you do have study groups and tutoring sessions...other than that, you're pretty much on your own...just like in the real world...</p>
<p>most intro classes have beneficial curves, even the ones that don't are not that bad though...if you find people who want to help each other out, all good...but you gotta find them</p>
<p>I heard many stories (from different sources) of how your peers would mess up your notes when you're not looking or mess up your chem experiment just to get ahead of you in class. That scared me. True, a good school, but is there an honor code?</p>
<p>at cal it gets really competitive with the engineering and chemistry..the rest, i'm not sure. and i got this from a friend who currently attends bezerkeley.</p>
<p>uhh, cal engineer here, and i'd have to disagree. i've never encountered or even heard of a situation such as the ones ecnerwalc3321 described. i'm not quite sure how you would mess up somebody's notes... and if a chem experiment goes wrong, you just get data from people around you.</p>
<p>i'd say engineers are naturally competitive, but it's more like we're trying to push our own limits rather than hoping those around us fail and go splat. in fact, a lot of the assignments are difficult enough that we have no choice but to work together. i was actually surprised by how nice people are about helping each other, even random strangers in the middle of lecture. there are definitely a few people who are completely antisocial and refuse to work with others, but that's pretty rare.</p>
<p>yea I have to agree with flippityflop. The stories of cutthroat competition are greatly exaggerated. In all my chem classes so far, I haven't met a single person who felt the need to sabotage someone else in order to boost their own grades. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Most people are very nice about helping one another, and it's true that you'll generally end up working in groups anyway cos the assignments/problem sets aren't exactly a piece of cake.</p>
<p>Really? I've heard otherwise. (I'm not saying you're wrong or anything) I'm a Berkely acceptee and was considering berkeley until I heard these stories from cousin and friend who both went there. They say it is cutthroat and gave these examples.</p>
<p>hmmm ... the engineering majors at cal have pretty low gpa first year ... rougly 2.6-2.8 gpa ...</p>
<p>but i assume they can bring that up with ease and then apply for a much more prestigious grad school like stanford ...</p>
<p>if that's your main reason for giving up on berkeley, ec, i think you should reconsider...</p>
<p>those are pretty crazy stories... and definitely rare...</p>
<p>Well, I'm not saying that your cousin and friend are lying either, but if those cases did happen, they are definitely very, very rare exceptions to the rule. And could happen anywhere, for that matter. Not just at Berkeley. I still say that most Berkeley students are not as mean-spirited as these stories make them out to be. The main reason why a lot of the science and engineering classes here are so competitive is because everyone works really hard to secure a place in the "upper end" of the curve (most science classes only allocate a certain number of A's, B's, etc), and even then they aren't guaranteed a good grade.</p>
<p>And to uclover8: Berkeley's grad school is arguably the best in the nation and definitely beats Stanford hands down. It's debatable whether the same can be said of the undergraduate program, but for grad school, it's a hard fact.</p>
<p>How about Haas?</p>
<p>i took a few econ classes and the kids weren't as collaborative as my classmates in engineering, but the material wasn't as difficult (meant for the average kid to actually be able to finish/plow through by themselves, whereas some of my problem sets for tech classes are, uhh, yeah...) i hear that once you get into haas, everything's straight scale and you don't get below a B unless you try for it.</p>