<p>Well Leftist is actually a bit right. Science classes in the beginning of the semester are usually full and hella people are on the waitlist. What they do is usually after the first week or so they get rid of the waitlist and close enrollment preventing people from enrolling, however even after this some people will drop due to conflict or difficulty, which results in the few empty seats you see in lecture from past semesters.</p>
<p>FutureENTSurgeon, I explained you the system and I explained you why your 13-unit plan is equivalent to castrating oneself. Just because you don’t like the truth, don’t yell out BS.</p>
<p>Due to your plan, at the end of Spring '11 you will only have 26 units so you will be treated liked a freshman for Fall '11 registration. For Spring '12 registration you will have end-of-the-line sophomore registration (as you will have fewer units than most other sophomores). With your plan you will have **** TeleBEARS, which are not conducive to getting premed prereqs, especially with the budget cuts.</p>
<p>What calbear2012 is saying is 100% accurate, what look like openings in the past weren’t really openings because those are due to late drops.</p>
<p>leftist: i just some research online and i gotta say your right. i originally didnt know that they dont count AP credit for telebears. but to make up for those 4-8 unit that i am lacking, couldn’t i just take summer courses or 2 unit courses such as astro 3 along with 1unit seminars. </p>
<p>Also, another question do summer courses count for telebears or do you register for fall classes before summer starts. im asking because could i do 13+13+ 4 units (summer) or do i have to take 15+15 because summer dosent count</p>
<p>Yup, leftist is right. Here’s some good advice. </p>
<p>To reach the 15/16 unit barrier. Add on an extra humanities course that you would have to take later (like an AC course, writing, R&C, breadth req, etc.). this should boost your GPA and give you good telebears to make your early semesters a breeze.</p>
<p>summer courses do help. Those units are counted just like any others. They advance your position for telebears.</p>
<p>I graduated from MCB in Fall 2009, so I don’t remember much about the registration process, not that I ever did since I never had problems getting into the classes I wanted.</p>
<p>My general advice for premeds is this: take your pre-req classes while buffering them each semester with less demanding humanities courses. This does NOT mean you take random humanities courses; choose specifically the ones that satisfy the breadth requirements and humanities units required by medical schools. Also, don’t be afraid to take community college classes in the summer because those are easy and cheap for satisfying the 7-course breadth.</p>
<p>Quite average? Where’s the statistics to back that up? Where I’m from, people routinely get made fun of for applying to 20+ schools.
And there are plenty of people who apply to less than 10. So I really doubt 25 average. Maybe 15, tops.
Haha, I am probably taking more difficult classes than you are. How many UD hard technicals have you taken?</p>
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<p>Problem is that units from summer 2011 won’t bump up your fall 2011 appointments.</p>
<p>indiscreetmath</p>
<p>my sources? friends who have applied recently and gotten in(from UC schools), an adcom from a do school (who advises california applicants a lot), and an ex-adcom from stanford som who i know personally. you don’t have to believe me, and if you’re a rockstar applicant you very well may only need to apply to 10-15 schools. most applicants from Cal do apply to high numbers of schools.</p>
<p>so doesn’t matter where you’re from and people “laughing” at those who apply to a lot. plenty of people in this thread have stated that its not unreasonable to apply to so many and tons do. check sdn if you actually care.</p>
<p>just trying to give advice from what i’ve learned at my semesters at cal. futureentsurgeon, if you don’t want to listen to me, atleast listen to tastybeef, who has already graduated offers the same advice.</p>
<p>I can’t agree more with the OP. Many people think schools like Cal or UCLA will help them toward Med School when a good bulk of them should really be looking at schools like UCI or CalPoly SLO.</p>
<p>How many med schools to apply is a function of the applicant’s standing. It’s more important to apply to the right schools(schools that are within reach) than to apply to a lot of schools. From a practical standpoint, you won’t be able to handle more than 15 secondaries during that window anyway.
So if you’re good, apply less, say 15.
If you’re borderline, apply more, say 25-30.</p>
<p>Oh, you guys are talking about med schools, not undergrad. sorry lol.</p>
<p>Leftist: so do you think i should start out with 15 units off the bat and follow that with 15 units in the spring? or take 13 units, get used to courseload then take like 17 in the spring?</p>
<p>I personally support the idea of starting off with 15-16 units and then turning a breadth to pass/nopass if the load feels too heavy.</p>
<p>A lot of people advocate 13-14 units first semester, and 15-16/+ every semester afterwards.</p>
<p>I’d say at least 14 units the first semester (as this would be a common ground between both views)</p>
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<p>I would actually argue that if you perform poorly at Cal, you are likely to not be admitted to any med school at all. </p>
<p>For example, in 2008, 53% of Cal graduating premeds (who reported their results to Cal) were admitted to med-school - which means that 47% were rejected by every med-school they applied to. </p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/national.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/national.stm</a></p>
<p>Granted, some premeds may choose not to report their results. However, I cannot fathom a reason why unreported results would bias the results upwards, such that the true results would be higher than indicated. If anything, I suspect the results would be biased downwards, as I suspect that many premeds who are not admitted anywhere simply choose not to disclose that fact.</p>
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<p>There’s a certain school across the SF Bay that shall remain unnamed that is at least as prestigious as Berkeley, if not more so, yet is almost certainly easier, at least at the lower bowels of the GPA spectrum. At that school, while it may still be difficult to obtain A’s, it’s also nearly impossible to flunk out. Yet their students nevertheless seem to be extraordinarily successful in grad/pro-school admissions.</p>
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<p>At least for graduate school in some fields, I think usually one needs to be getting A’s relatively consistently anyway, and a lot of the higher level courses (which are what actually matter for grad, not professional, school) end up being less about insane curves and the like. Usually, it takes a high level of sophistication in the material to do well, but aside from your odd professors, they may not be trying to lower GPAs actively. I always felt this is why Berkeley is a great place to study for going to grad school in some fields, and the school itself provides hardly any extra pain…the difficulty to those fields is often intrinsic. The math department comes to mind here. Usually the subject matter and research type work is so incredibly hard and requires such a special kind of mindset that I don’t think professors have to worry about setting insane curves. People who get it do well without much pain, and people who don’t simply don’t have a chance. (Of course hard work is involved, but a certain type of thinking is too.)</p>
<p>On the other hand, for a massively popular thing like premed, Berkeley can be very frustrating, since a lot of the lower level coursework counts a lot, and they do make it quite hard to get a good GPA…perhaps other schools are undeniably more pleasant places. I don’t know, I leave it to premeds here to decide.</p>
<p>As for engineering, I think the flaw is with admissions. I think it is quite predictable who will be able to pass initial engineering classes based on their entering math and physics ability. Granted, they may hate engineering and leave it for something else, but they can at least do OK if they’re pretty good at math and physics. I guess one way to do it is to avoid the burden of having a solid admissions process entirely and just be easy on passing students, but honestly I have seen engineering coursework here, and it seems very easy to pass the basic EECS classes with respectable marks if you just do the work and had decent proficiency coming in, and then decide if it’s worth going on. Like sakky has often said, I think the key is not to admit people who obviously cannot handle the work in engineering.</p>
<p>In summary: I don’t think Berkeley is any more painful as far as studying to go to graduate school than other places depending on the field. I think for pre-professional things that heavily weight GPA and consider lower div coursework a lot, the fact that one will battle for the A’s in those is probably annoying. To avoid students flunking out, do not admit them, because it’s honestly not that hard to tell if someone has basic proficiency.</p>
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The undergraduate population at Berkeley is huge and it has responsibilities as a public university. Cal can’t accept just several thousand undergrads like Stanford. </p>
<p>There also probably aren’t that many qualified students in all of California and competing with schools like Caltech and Stanford would be difficult for Cal.</p>
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<p>If that is true, and I doubt seriously that it is, then UC should close a few campuses! But there are plenty of folks at SD, D or Irvine who would thrive at Cal, but were rejected in favor of compassionate review.</p>