The University of California - Berkeley

Date: Apr 07 2012
Major: Math (This Major's Salary over time)
I graduated a few years ago from Berkeley and subsequently went to graduate school on the East Coast. I knew that I disliked Berkeley when I was there. Comparing my experience at Cal with my experience at another university has made me sure that I was miserable at Berkeley.

First, classes are huge. Unless you major in a foreign language that nobody speaks, or a similarly useless major that nobody studies, your classes will be huge (100+ people). Second, you are on your own with respect to everything. This isn?t necessarily a bad thing, but because classes are huge, and TAs or professors will often be terrible at teaching and/or cannot speak English proficiently, you will have to learn everything on your own. Third, students self-segregate by race. I have never met a more self-segregating group of people in my life. The university doesn?t help the massive self-segregation problem either, considering it has dorms that segregate by race. Fourth, Berkeley, the city, town, whatever it is, is a terrible place to live for people who don?t beg on the streets for a living. I?m not sure if Berkeley is a city or a town because it?s too small and boring to be a proper city but too filled with concrete and ugly to be a proper town. It?s dirty, it?s ghetto, it?s small and boring, yet it?s expensive. Fifth, I often wondered how half the class got admitted. Numerous people struggled with classes that contain basic concepts like Stats 2. I will concede that a plus with Berkeley was that I was able to get a high enough GPA in my major (3.7 in Math) to get into graduate school at another university.