<p>Hi, EECS transfer, graduating this semester. Wow, there’s a lot of questions like this right now. x_x</p>
<p>Personally, I think EECS is really, really fun. Yes, there are times when it’s challenging, but you learn so much that it’s all worth it.</p>
<p>I’ve never timed how long it takes to do homework… it’ll vary pretty drastically from one day to the next, what classes you’re taking, how quickly you work, etc. Yesterday I was in class until 8 and didn’t finish homework until 4am, today I did maybe 4 hours of work and have enough time for a break… considering spending a couple hours baking cookies now. Some classes assign a lot of problem sets and homeworks, some will give you huge projects, some (mostly non-EECS classes) will be primarily reading. The amount of work, the kind of work, and the timeline of it depends on which classes you’re taking.</p>
<p>As for having free time, that depends on how many classes you take. I’m lazy and don’t take too many credits (12 right now, 2 CS and a humanities), but I can get away with that because I have a ton of credits already. It’s not too stressful, and I feel like I have free time this semester. In the past I’ve had worse schedules (16 credits, 3 technicals and one upper division) and I was constantly behind, stressed out, and struggling to keep up with it all. So long as you’re careful with scheduling (mix humanities with techs, don’t take two big project courses together, etc) I think it’ll work out. For me, most semesters weren’t too bad, but once or twice I just had too much going on.</p>
<p>Jobs: I was a GSI one summer, and this year I’ve been doing research. It’s pretty neat, I’ve learned a lot from both and it’s good experience. Oh, and you get paid sometimes. 
Research also means getting to know professors better… classes can get pretty big here, so it can be hard to connect with professors sometimes. Big class doesn’t mean you’ll be left without help, btw, it just means you’re more likely to interact with GSIs than professors, like in sections (~5-20 students) and office hours.</p>
<p>Weeder classes: Yes and no. Berkeley doesn’t really have any weed-out classes, but every class here, at least for EECS, is pretty challenging. Most classes are graded on a curve… that it, only a certain percent of the class can get an A. Some classes use a fixed point scale, but those are based on prior curves and still produce a bell shaped distribution. In a lot of classes, how you do will depend on how other students do. So, if you want to be in that ~20% that gets an A, you need to really work for it, because every student in the class would love to get an A. And that system makes every class competitive (only in terms of grades, the atmosphere itself isn’t competitive/cutthroat). But in terms of being a weeder class, most courses have pretty similar distributions, most likely grade being some sort of B. Very few people fail, I think usually under 5%. Anyways, the result of this is that most classes have pretty similar grade distributions, they’re all challenging, but if you put in the effort to understand concepts and do the work, you won’t fail.</p>
<p>Part of the perceived difficulty for EECS is that everyone is a top student. They’re used to being at the top of the class. They always got A’s, that’s how they got into Cal. And then now that they’re at Cal, there’s a curve. Everyone was the top of their class, but not everyone can be the best anymore. It’s not that they’re not smart, it’s that everyone is smart. That’s part of what makes Berkeley amazing, you’ll be challenged, and you’ll learn a lot. You’re always surrounded by other smart, motivated students. It’s a lot of work, you can’t just coast by like highschool or CC anymore. The classes move fast, and cover a lot of material because they can, because the students figure it out. The end result is that yes, EECS is challenging, but it’s because you’re learning so much in every class.</p>