My bf was accepted for a Mechanical Engineering degree at Cal! While he is thrilled, he’s also afraid.
How was the transition process for you? Do you feel like you were able to solidly compete with your classmates who entered Berkeley straight out of high school? What were the biggest hurdles?
He has a 4.0 from a fairly rigorous CC (5 people in his physics class got into Berkeley, 4 for MechE and 1 for physics). But he’s terrified that his courses haven’t been teaching him all the material he needs to know, or to the depth he needs to know them in order to perform well at Berkeley.
Any words of encouragement/discouragement, or advice?
Back when UC Statfinder existed, it indicated that 3.8-4.0 GPA CC transfers to Berkeley averaged 3.4-3.5 GPA in their first year at Berkeley.
A possible concern would be if his CC did not offer all of the courses needed for his major (i.e. lots of “no course articulated” in the listings at http://www.assist.org ). This may require him to take more “catch up” courses, which can make for a very crowded schedule with less flexibility to even out the workload (e.g. by not taking too many lab or project courses the same semester).
Just wanted to update this thread in case anyone finds it. My bf is going into finals of his fall semester, junior year, and has an A- or A in all of his classes. His 4.0 GPA in CC will probably translate to a 3.7 or 3.8 at Berkeley.
@reygun Thanks for updating. My husband applied for MechE at ucb for Fall 2016. So we’ll see what happens this April. His major gpa is a 4.0 (transferable gpa is a 3.93). It is encouraging your bf was able to keep his gpa at Cal rather high.
@sugarbabies3 he ended up getting a 3.68 GPA and got into honors research this semester. He did the best of all of his transfer friends from CC (except one, who got a 3.8). The sacrifice for the grades was 12-14 hour days of class and studying 6 days a week.