Kathy Barrett: Welcome Everyone! It’s our first real podcast — we’re very excited! So, I’m Kathy Barrett, I’m the associate director of advising in Engineering Student Services.

Sharon Mueller: And I’m Sharon Mueller, I’m the director of advising and policy in Engineering Student Services. So today our topic is Golden Bear Advising, you’ll hear us refer to it as G-B-A, and this is the campuses online orientation program. GBA is your introduction to campus life and its gonna walk you through the steps needed to get ready to enroll in classes in July. So its super important! You’ll access GBA through bCourses, which is great because you’re going to become familiar with bCourses. A lot of your professors are gonna use bCourses as an adjunct to their own courses. So it’s great for you to become familiar with it during GBA and to start learning about all the functions that bCourses has. So, GBA has four modules.

Kathy: The first module covers some of the  enrichment opportunities available to you and many of the academic support centers on campus.  Of course there are a ton more things happening on campus then are covered in GBA and we’ll talk more about engineering specific enrichment opportunities and our own awesome support services, including our tutoring center in a future podcast.

Sharon: And then in Module 2 you’re gonna learn all about CalCentral and about how to search for classes and enroll in classes. Although we do mention that we have some truly awesome videos in module three made by our own Laura Vogt. And you met Laura in our introductory podcast. The videos in Module 3 are gonna give you step-by-step instructions on how to search for classes, create a schedule using “Schedule Planner” and then moving those courses to your shopping cart and then enrolling in those courses.  So we know the information in Module 2 is pretty overwhelming, but we think our videos in Module 3 are really gonna help navigate the course scheduling and registration process

Kathy: So for Module 3 you’ll actually go out of bCourses and you’ll go to our Engineering Online Orientation and we’ll direct you to do that through Module 3 so you’ll know exactly where to go. Once there, you’ll meet your ESS adviser, virtually, and you’ll learn all about your requirements.  By answering a series of questions you’ll know what requirements you have already satisfied and you’ll be given a list of suggested courses you would want to enroll in for first semester.   Then using the course planning and scheduling tools you’ll  pick your first semester courses and then you’re gonna send that list of your proposed first semester courses to your ESS Adviser for review.

Sharon: And then you go back into bCourses for Module 4. And Module 4 is a review of how to enroll in courses and it also shows you some really important features in CalCentral — like how to swap classes or change your grading option. These are going to be really important to you when you go to register for classes, so please don’t ignore the information in Module 4!

Kathy: It’s really important, so don’t ignore that. So Freshmen we’re going to have you have GBA completed and a schedule  submitted to your ESS Adviser by June 9th.  Your Adviser will respond to you by June 23 with any comments or suggestions. And for our transfer students who are listening, you’ll access GBA starting June 13, so you won’t actually be able to get on to GBA until the 13th, so you have a little bit of time to wait.  And then you’ll need to complete it and submit your proposed course list by June 23.   And your Adviser will respond no later than July 6. And then everyone starts registering for classes starting July 10. So exciting! You’ll start registering for your first semester classes.

Sharon: So that’s Golden Bear Advising in a nutshell. There’s a lot more Golden Bear activities to come including Golden Bear Prep in July and Golden Bear Orientation in August. And we’re excited about that because you come to campus and we get to meet you in person. But we’re really excited to get things started with GBA. Well, thanks for checking out our first real podcast.  Remember we’ll be posting any additional material related to this podcast on our website, which is welcomengineer.berkeley.edu. We’ll that’s it for now — Bye!

Kathy: Bye!