@duranceau951 Wow your grades and experience look just amazing! I really can’t think of any reasons for you to not be accepted by Berkeley, for real! I am planning to major in Stat/Data science in Berkeley also, and I’m transferring in Fall 2019 too (I also played piano for 10 years but definitely not as good as you lol). So I guess we have a lot in common hahaha. DM me if you want! Or we can exchange contact infos? 
Btw I am a little bit panic about my application since the Stat and DS program are so competitive rn and I know lots of students with 4.0 GPA got straightly rejected last year…Also, I have some foreign credits which may bring down my 4.0 to around 3.7ish, sad…
@Emmanuel7 Dang really?! Now I’m getting nervous. Why do you think they were rejected??? 3.7 isn’t bad! You still have a great shot in getting in. It sounds like your experience looks good too with the music!!
What domain emphasis do you wanna go into?
Maybe lack of extracurricular things I guess… Admission is always such a mystery lol. @duranceau951
I’m looking to go into the applied mathematics or economics domain. What about you? @Emmanuel7
Also, what’s your experience with programming?
Which domains are you guys looking at in general? You can see here: https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis
On the FYI side of things for Data Science as it pertains to Domain Emphases, the department does not take AP credits to satisfy the Lower Division emphasis class. So an AP Biology class doesn’t satisfy the Human Biology or Computational Biology domains, for example. Same with AP MacroEcon/ AP MicroEcon, no go for the Economics domain Emphasis. CC classes are ok.
Interesting program! But I am wondering if the Data science can fully accept credits and courses of other colleges.
The acceptance of credits is done at the school level and at the university level. If you’re asking about how classes from other universities translates to lower division requirements for Data Science:
Math 1A, Math 1B - usually covered by 1 year (3 quarters or two semesters) of Calculus at a university.
Math 54 - usually covered by an appropriate Linear Algebra class.
CS 61B - Data Structures - many universities and colleges offer a similar class and will transfer over, though usually the department will want to see the syllabus to see that extensive coding has been done in the class.
CS 61A and Data 8 - for new students, it’s rare that there would be any class that would transfer/articulate for theses 2 classes.
A class may transfer over/articulate for Domain Emphasis Lower Division class as well.
Math 54 is linear algebra and differential equations, so those transferring credit from a college where these are separate courses need to complete both to get transfer subject credit for Math 54.
However, the data science major does accept linear algebra alone in some cases, according to https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/data-science-ba/lower-division : “We accept linear algebra without differential equations from California community colleges in all cases where the course is included in a Math 54 articulation agreement. Linear algebra courses from non-California community colleges may be considered by individual petition.”
@duranceau951 Hey bro sorry for the late reply. I know a bit of Python and is now learning Java online. I’m not sure if I should learn some C/C++ though…(Maybe not since it looks harder haha). In terms of domain emphasis, I really want to do Social policy and Law or related, but I just checked my lower division courses and it seemed that I only qualified for Applied Math/Business. Not sure what to do about that.
@duranceau951 Actually how would you choose between Statistics major and Data Science? I’m still kinda undecided right now. I want to be a data scientist after graduation. But Stat major seems more proven to me since it has been there for a long time and all the recruiters in tech companies know about its reputation. Data science as a major is relatively too new…Would love to hear what you think.
Data Science and Stats certainly have a lot of overlap. DS combines statistics along with computer science and domain knowledge. The data scientist deals with data management, and the collection, transformation and visualization of this data.
@ProfessorPlum168 Thank you! What I’m thinking is that Stat major would probably teach you more theories that you can add in your toolbox to manipulate data. Data Science major is definitely more practical, but I think programming languages are things you can master by yourself.
@Emmanuel7 the Stat major would definitely be more math oriented especially for lower division courses, and more math/data related topics in upper division (Probability, Stochastic Processes, Game Theory, Time Series, etc). Whereas the Data Science can and does incorporate statistics (Probability) but also incorporates domain knowledge of your choosing (eg Applied Math, Economics, Cognition, Computational Biology, Urban Planning, etc), plus computer science concepts, which they call Computational and Inferential Depth. Programming and programming languages aren’t really taught specifically in Data Science, though you do learn tons of Python in both the Data 8 and Dataa 100 classes…
Hi everyone! I’m looking into to Berkeley for the data science major this year (with a domain emphasis in computational biology), start in Fall 2020. How did the process go for you guys @Emmanuel7 @duranceau951 ?
My kid is studying Data Science in Cal, declared major etc. So, I asked one day what is this thing - data science ?
The answer I got is simple:
It is a major where you should learn as much computer programming which is more than a statistician, and, you should learn only that much statistics which is more than a computer programmer.
I kind of understood what it means.