hi, I am currently committed to UCLA. I want to study data science and management (in the future i want to get an MBA). If i were to get off the waitlist at UCB, I would get in for linguistics rather than Data Science. I am in the program I want to be in for UCLA, (Computer Science and Linguistics) - if anyone knows about this program, please let me know how it is. Is it hard as a UCB student to transfer into the Data Science major/ is it capped?
At UCB, linguistics and data science are L&S majors, and all L&S students enter as undeclared.
Currently, UCB L&S does not list data science as a high demand major:
https://ls.berkeley.edu/advising/planning/schedule-planning/choosing-major/high-demand-majors
and the major web page lists only a 2.0 GPA in some prerequisites:
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/data-science-ba/declaring
@yikesandahalf I asked my son who is a junior CS major at UCLA for his opinion and here it is:
I can’t speak for UCB, but I can give you a brief overview of our Computer Science and Linguistics program at UCLA.
UCLA’s “Linguistics and Computer Science” is a great program, but let me clarify a couple things for you that you may not understand. “Linguistics and Computer Science” isn’t really related to data science as much as you think. A lot of the Linguistics and Computer Science majors I know are social and interested in languages (like you), but they go into Natural Language Processing for a career. This involves voice detection technology like Alexa and Siri. However, a good thing about Linguistics and Computer Science is that you’d have some more doors to different opportunities. For example, I know students who go into Software Engineering Internships as well without being an actual Computer Science major.
One thing that you could potentially do is switch majors to Statistics. You’d potentially be more prepared for a Data Science-related career.