The University of California - Berkeley

Date: Mar 23 2007
Major: Chemistry (This Major's Salary over time)
I'll start out with the positive: Berkeleys chem dept is one of the most amazing in the country and I love the stuff I've been able to learn here. It is very hard but very fair when it comes to grading, so you can focus of learning not fighting with the other students. Watch out tho, with the chem bio major, pre meds are quickly beggining to turn the college of chem sour.Also, arabic, south asian, and some of the languages are very good depts.

negatives

1. If you are in anything except for Business or Engineering, when you graduate you will have almost no job prospects and be making a max of 13-19/ hr. Basically you have to go to grad school.

2. They have worse job placemnt assistance than ITT tech and the minute you graduate you have to pay 110$ to use their website or go to career fairs.

3. There is no student union. Well, there is but ther is almost nothing in it and no good places to hang out. It is also dirty, dark and depressing. Plus if its raining there are no good places to eat lunch on campus.

4. Your student gov sucks balls. No other way to put it. They are basically why there is no student union. Its funny cus UCSB has infinitely better places to hang out on campus even tho they are a much lower rated school. Go to UCLA for nice facilities =).

5. MCB kids are evil. They are crazy and will smack you down on their way to med school. I've had lab classes where the teachers have made us scrabble on the floor for test review sheets and fight over lab time slots. Human value 0, berkeley 1.

6. The city puts ideology over safety and health. They worry alot about the freedom and hapiness of the homeless. i.e. they provide refridgerated storage for homeless people's shopping carts -no joke. Then when I walk by peoples park early in the morning I have to wear a big hat a sweatshirt so they cant tell im a girl and carry pepper spray. If you dont know what peoples park is - it was one of the main venues for the speech movement, now almost exclusively used by the homeless for camping. Also if you live near there, you often have to step over people sleepinbg on the sidewalks in the morning. All this because berkeley wants to be free and liberal. Im liberal but I'd like to live without fear thanks. Also, Berkeleyites shut down a tritium research program at uc berkeley that produced no more tritium than a banana because the word radioactive scares them and they want to be a nuclear free zone. WTF mate?

7. Good campus jobs are hard to come by if you dont have work study.

8. If you dress like you would in LA you get harrassed by homeless people. ie I wore a not even very short skirt one day and a man asked me to 'sit on his face'

9. UC Berkeley is very cliquey,its diverse but each ethic group forms its own club and ceases talking to other ppl. (Sororities = white people club.)

10. Professors dont usually want to teach you, they see you as an interruption in their research. Also, if they are nice, they are so inundated with students that they cant spare time to form personal relationships with you.

11. Berkeley is just as money hungry as any private school. They treat you like a nobody and then call harrassing you for donotions - for reals, alumni assoc has done this to me and been quite rude.

Theres prolly more but I'll stop before I give myself an MI.

To summarize: There are a few really good dept's here and if you want to study that you might consider going here. BUT, you must expect to mostly teach yourself and know what you want to do with your life. Berkeley is not a place to find yourself or explore oportunities, thats best done at state colleges or somewhere like UCSB. Berkeley is basically a stepping stone to grad school or engineering for people who are already secure, confident adults and dont want to waste time with the typical college shaningans and undergrad experience. If you want a normal college life, dont go here. best of luck to those who do.