<p>Booooooo! Berkeley is better than UCLA any day of the week!</p>
<p>You know Berkeley's post count will surpass UCLA's when they get their decisions. :p</p>
<p>Have you guys considered talking about stuff that has nothing to do with college admissions and academics and is more like a normal conversation? Like how Oregon State won their first away game this season, against UCLA? Sorry, it's a thing between my gov teacher and me(he's a UCLA alum, both my parents are OSU)</p>
<p>I'd also like to hear all the answers to shinseki's questions</p>
<p>I was admitted under molecular, dev, and cell biology but I'm thinking I want immunology instead, can I change it and how?</p>
<p>you can easily change. the pre-requisites for all of these bio-related majors are the same, they focus on the life science series, chemistry series, physics, calculus</p>
<p>okay actually let's have icarus and jyancy answer, they're pre-med.</p>
<p>*Have you guys considered talking about stuff that has nothing to do with college admissions and academics *</p>
<p>There are other things to talk about? :) Actually, if you really want to talk shop with me, we can talk about emergency medicine and prehospital care hehe - sports i'm not too big on</p>
<p>....but we're gonna own Texas Tech :cool:</p>
<p>And to shinseki...</p>
<p>kfc4u is right - changing majors is a piece of cake. Just takes a quick trip to Murphy to change your declared major (who knows, you might even be able to do it on URSA)
Intro bio, chem, physics, and math classes are all pretty big, mostly because everyone and their mom has to take them for one reason or another. But yes, once you get into the upper division classes, they should be much smaller. If you want specifics go to <a href="http://www.registrar.ucla.edu/schedule/%5B/url%5D">http://www.registrar.ucla.edu/schedule/</a> and select "spring 2005" and "life sciences" "physics" or "chemistry and biochemistry" and then select one of the lower division courses (Life science 1-4, chem 14a-d, etc) and you'll get exact numbers. The courses with numbers over 100 are the upper division (major-specific) courses.</p>
<p>And finally... eh, I don't know what everyone complains about - premed competition isn't that bad. There are the typical freshmen pre-meds who study day in and day out (literally), but whatever. Try to enjoy college, not worry about your peers. Do reasonably well in your classes, and you'll be fine. I know probably more than I should about med school admissions and the road to med school, so if you have any other questions, feel free to ask...</p>
<p>btw, on the topic of this thread, did anyone notice that we passed the People's Republic of Berkeley up in posts? :p
now we need a posting spree to stay ahead when their decisions come out hehe</p>
<p>EDIT: haha nevermind, I probably should have read page 2 - oh well.... :: pad ::</p>
<p>shinseki12: It's easy to switch out since you're switching between L&S majors. You can either figure it out on URSA if its possible, or wait during summer orientation in the summer (don't worry, since you don't sign up for classes until the last day, and a lot of people going into orientation are undeclared).</p>
<p>Intro bio classes are pretty large since a good group of students need it. Lectures are around 200 students with discussion/labs capped off at 20 students. As you get to classes concerning your major, the number of students in the class will drop, and how far depends on the class. Usually upper division that I've seen are around 30ish.</p>
<p>Unfortunately premed competition is cutthroat wherever you go. Keep in mind that most med schools have a little more than 100 spots to fill every year. Getting into any CA medical school would be an amazing feat in it of itself.</p>
<p>Edit: Are the 100 spots (per med school) only typical of CA medical schools or is this a general estimate throughout the nation?</p>
<p>it really depends on the school. UCLA technically has 100 spots a year (its actual entering class is about 125 strong), but it does vary quite a bit school to school. I would say that 100 is a good estimate of the average, though.</p>
<p>now that i see that only 100-125 entering spots a year... and uc riverside thomas haider program brings in 24 of those entering spots... wow that's a huge percentage of the entering class.</p>
<p>:( Yeah- so really if you subtract the guaranteed Haider acceptees, there's only 100 spots for the rest of the international pool of applicants.</p>
<p>ok maybe its 150 then haha, if the UCR kids aren't included in the original 100 (which they probably aren't)... the extra stduents I was refering to come from the Charles R Drew med school.</p>
<p>And the number of posts would be soo much higher if the ucla posts in "college admissions" were transferred here :)</p>
<p>Thanks for the information Icarus, Kfc, and Jyancy. Yeah some classes don't seem to be that bad at around 100-150, but there are some huge ones as begnning courses w/ 343 and such.
Icarus and Jyancy-since you guys are premed, are there any special activities you'd suggest doing to help for med school later on? Like are you guys doing any research(how hard is it to find profs willing to let you help them conduct research) or any clubs/internships and whatnot? Sorry for the amount of questions, but yeah I'm really curious.
Thanks!</p>
<p>You can search your interest at this site and it'll pull up a list of professors whose research concerns that topic. Then what you have to do is email them or stop by their office hours or whatnot and apply:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.research.ucla.edu/faculty/%5B/url%5D">http://www.research.ucla.edu/faculty/</a></p>
<p>Research opportunities at this site in pdf format is updated every quarter and also throughout the quarter and you just need to keep rechecking for updates/new opportunities:</p>
<p>You can also visit local hospitals for research opportunities. I can't find the link at the moment, but I know Cedar Sanai loves UCLA/USC premeds (who wouldn't like free labor?).</p>
<p>There's also a unique internship opportunity open every quarter that you can find more information about by clicking around this link:</p>
<p>Also, you can approach your current science professors (99% of the time they're involved in some sort of research project) during their office hours or after class and ask if you can get involved. More personal this way I guess and plus they'd know your academic qualifications.</p>
<p>Another method that would work is that a friend of mine is doing work-study and he chose a job where he washed test-tubes and other glass instruments (for some pretty good money too) for a professor during his research, and used that as his springboard to obtain a research opportunity from him.</p>
<p>There are plenty of research opportunities, you just need to keep an eye out (there's also bulletins outside of classrooms of professors or grad students who are in need of help w/ their research) and be persistent in applying.</p>