ESS 605: Enrollment Tips with ESS peer advisers

Laura Vogt:

Hello, you’re listening to the Not So Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. My name’s Laura Vogt. I’m the Associate Director for Marketing and Communications for the College of Engineering. And I’m excited to be hosting and producing the podcast again this week to provide you with registration tips from our engineering student services peer advisors. And I interviewed Adarsh Anil Kumar and Kaichen Liu in May before they graduated. And I’m glad that they joined me to share what four years of registering for classes taught them. Kaichen and Adarsh, thank you so much and welcome. Can you each tell us about yourself and what was your favorite place to eat in Berkeley?

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

Hey, y’all. I’m Adarsh Anil Kumar and I’m a graduating senior majoring in mechanical engineering with the concentration in aerospace engineering. I fell in love with mechanical engineering, mainly because of my dad. He is a mechanic and an electrician, and I really just love designing and optimizing mechanical concepts. At Berkeley, I used to be the president of the Cal Aero SAE club, which is the [inaudible 00:01:00] airplane design club on campus. I worked my way up the ranks, mainly focusing on the structural aspect of things. I used to be part of the structures team, then the landing gear team, and finally, the president. At campus, I also helped found the Alpha Lambda chapter of the [inaudible 00:01:15] Greek fraternity. And I also founded the Cal Cricket Club, which is the first collegiate cricket club in the Bay Area. I also used to be the VP for [inaudible 00:01:24], which is a mechanical engineering honor society.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

Most of my time outside academics or mechanical engineering is mainly spent out playing cricket or IM soccer. During my time at Berkeley, I was fortunate enough to be able to intern at Tesla and [inaudible 00:01:38], where I was able to enhance my interest within electric vehicles and sustainable engineering. My favorite place to eat on campus. That’s difficult. There are a lot of amazing places to eat on campus in Berkeley, but it would have to be Fire Wings. It is on [inaudible 00:01:51], but I think they shut it down last semester, unfortunately. But then me and my friends used to like Fire Wings so much that every Friday used to be Fire Wings Friday. It was really good. It’s got the Asian fusion flavors and it’s so flavorsome. It’s one of the best chicken wings I’ve had in my life.

Laura Vogt:

Well, maybe they’ll be able to come back if they had to close down.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

No. Yeah. I mean, for all the upcoming students, if you still want to have Fire Wings, they still have a branch in San Francisco and Oakland, so it’s not that far away.

Laura Vogt:

Oh, that’s perfect then.

Kaichen Liu:

Hi, everyone. My name is Kaichen Liu. I’m a graduating senior studying electric engineering and computer sciences here at Berkeley. My academic interests span robotics, systems and modeling, signal processing and computation at scale. Through undergrad, I did a few internships at different fields and spent a short time with undergraduate research, running robotics labs, and will be joining the industry as a sophomore here at Meta after graduation.

Kaichen Liu:

I’m also a longtime member of a few campus organizations. I’m a student engineer on the Berkeley [inaudible 00:02:48] SAE race car competition team, as well as the Board Officer of Berkeley Tennis Association, the largest recreational tennis club on campus. For my favorite place to eat in Berkeley, it’s honestly hard to choose because there’s so many great options and my cravings vary, but [inaudible 00:03:01] has a soft spot in my heart. In my opinion, we have a lot of good tools for course selection here at Berkeley. But learning to combine them in an effective manner takes some adjusting. To start off with, a four year plan in a reasonably filled out degree worksheet were the basic foundations of my core scheduling goals. Keeping and editing these throughout my undergrad, made decision making simple when phase one and two rolled around every semester. I would say definitely check out berkeleytime.com, which is a student built resource sponsored by ASUC.

Kaichen Liu:

It’s a great data provider on all course enrollments and requirements. I used Berkeley Time to decide on a set of courses I could feasibly enroll in, using the historical enrollment data it provides. I could also find courses to satisfy requirements when I was more concerned about satisfying the requirements than taking particular course content. The historical grade distributions and professor lists also let me understand who teaches the course and if there’s variance in the pedagogy. And lastly, the scheduled planner on Cal Central is the essential tool when I have already decided on a set of courses that I wanted to enroll in. Since I often had many commitments outside of class, the schedule’s planner’s ability to block off time and generate all possible schedules on the fly was very helpful to find course accommodations that I preferred for my week.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

Yeah. So my first few semesters, I don’t think I planned my schedule the best, but there are some certain mistakes I made. And now that I’m a senior, I have basically optimized this process of selecting what kind of courses I want. Essentially, your go-to tool for any student has to be the schedule planner that you see on Cal Central. It’s organized pretty well. It’s structured pretty well that you can add in all the classes that’s already in the system. You can see if these classes are going to run out of seats, how many seats are left, which professor is teaching it, where the class is going to be taught for the upcoming semester. And basically place it in your schedule and it’ll do the organization accordingly. If you have multiple classes, it’ll say if you have conflicts.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

And you’ll also be able to add manual breaks where, if you want some time off for lunch and you don’t want a class in that particular time period, you’ll be able to add that, and that’s very useful. So right before you’re enrolling into classes, [inaudible 00:05:15] use schedule planner to kind of swap around and optimize what kind of classes that you want to take, what kind of schedule that you want to explore. For example, what I did one of the semesters is, I strategically took classes such that I had no classes on Friday, which means I had a three day weekend. So all of this is possible by [inaudible 00:05:33] schedule planner, but that effectively does not give you an entire insight on what classes or how the classes or the workload is going to be for that particular semester. So you always have to tag schedule planner along with…

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

This is not a Berkeley endorsed website, but I think it’s made up by students. It’s called Berkeley Time where you can see the different courses that are available for each semester. And then how enrollment works with Berkeley students is that there is a hierarchy. So region students are at the top, senior students come out right after, and then junior, freshmen… I mean, sophomore and freshmen. And you get different enrollment periods within your own hierarchy. So you sometimes may have a difficult time enrolling into classes that you want because you just got the short end of the stick during the enrollment period. So what Berkeley Time helps you do is not least see grade distributions, historical grade averages, see what professors are teaching it and how they will teach it, see different statistics about it, but also see when the class gets filled. So that helps you decide if you want to phase one or phase two certain classes that you want to take for a particular semester.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

And a combination of these two also prevents some kind of panic. What I would suggest most people to do is not just how one schedule. If one schedule fails, you have backup schedules. And you can organize that within the schedule planner itself. And on the side, always make sure that you have your four year plan, either on an Excel sheet or there are multiple resources available online where you can plan schedules, several made by Berkeley [inaudible 00:07:02] itself, such that you can see how your four year plan changes based on how your schedule for a particular semester changes. But yeah, that’s basically the three main tools that I use and I think is basically good enough for any kind of optimization for your course load.

Laura Vogt:

When you’re talking about, you know that you had all these sections and times that you had to block off, how did you make the choices of that balance of what times to… When to give yourself personal time, when to give your friend time, study time?

Kaichen Liu:

Well, for me, I don’t like having classes in the evening. I think I had often a lot of commitments where I had tennis practices or I had to go to the garage to work on something for my competition team, or just cook for myself. I like to have my nights basically blocked off, not having classes, and have it as an open time for clubs or working on homework or working on projects. So I would simply use the ability to set off a time block for almost every day of the week on the schedule planner. And if that wasn’t possible, I could take a look at which classes I had to attend during the nights, and then for the nights that I didn’t have classes I had to attend, I would block them off specifically and then generate my schedules based on that.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

One thing that was pretty important, I think freshman year, even though I had a pretty good unit load, I think I made a lot of mistakes. I think it was essentially because I was still in the high school mindset. That was the biggest mistake, I think. I was like, “Oh, yeah, I wake up for soccer practice at 7:00 AM. I can do that in college.” It’s not essentially that you don’t wake up. It’s such that in college, things are harder and you are also living by yourself. So there’s a lot of independence that comes into term that has a certain amount of time commitment that goes into it, as well as, usually in my high school, you’re surrounded by basically the same students or same set of friend groups throughout your schooling period.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

And after you’re done with your schooling day, you’re basically done, when that’s not college. You’ll be 9:00 PM at home, you will probably be doing academic or engineering or club related stuff on campus. So when I went through my freshman year doing two techs, two non-techs, engineering club, social clubs, the load of commitment, all the different things I had to do throughout the day, that basically gave me an idea that, okay, how I want to prioritize each thing. So that’s what’s essential, I think. Freshman year, first semester, okay. It’s fine for you to explore. I would take reduced post load, not… Around 13 to 14 units. And I would choose to explore what I want to prioritize in. Right? So I’ve seen different kinds of engineering students who prioritize a lot on their engineering clubs.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

And this is not necessarily a bad thing. I know academics comes first. But people who have emphasized a lot of efforts into their engineering clubs, they see a lot of rewards because they get a lot of internships through these clubs. And they get so much hands on experience. There are other people who just focus on research. That helps you with your graduate school and publishing path. There’s students who just emphasize on some kind of idea that they believe in and they want to promote it or start a new club. There’s so many different things that you can work on as you’re in your time during Berkeley. It’s not just purely the academics. And even within academics, it’s not just like you’re coming in as a particular engineering major. But Berkeley offers basically the best of the best in a lot of different majors and a lot of different curriculums.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

So it took me time to realize that, oh, yeah, there are some fun CS classes. I’m in mechanical engineering, so I don’t have to take as many CS classes, but there’s some fun CS classes that it’s worthwhile exploring, and Berkeley offers the best program. There are some fun dance classes. The dance clubs on campus are pretty intense. And they’re one of the best in the nations. Many of the Indian dance clubs as well as AFX, which is just a general dance team that has multiple sub teams within it.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

So there’s so many different things to explore. So when you talk about what you want to prioritize and how you want to go through about it, I don’t think you have a perfect formula when you go in in your first semester, and that’s completely fine. Being lost in your first semester is completely fine because everyone’s been there. Everyone’s out there to explore things more. So I think it’s more so that first semester you just need to make time or have additional time to explore new things. And from the second and third semesters onwards, you get a feel for what exactly you want and what you want to prioritize, and you just go about doing that.

Laura Vogt:

I know one of the things that we tell a lot of students about when they’re creating that first schedule is to be flexible. So how did you learn to be okay with what that being flexible meant when you were planning that schedule?

Kaichen Liu:

Well, I think one thing that I like to do is early on, and even so now, when I was signing up courses more as an upperclassman, and as an underclassman, is that we have a lot of courses where you don’t necessarily have to take them in a strict order. And understanding that and basically generating a set of courses that’s your grab bag of possible courses that you would be okay with taking and making progress on your degree within that semester, that’s actually more courses than you would actually end up taking. I would grab six or seven courses. I could take any four or three of them in that semester. And depending on wait lists and depending on open seating and depending on how their schedules conflict, I would play around with them and whichever one’s worked out, I would just pick them. I would pick the smaller set within that large set of courses that would help me move forward in my degree.

Laura Vogt:

And did you meet with an advisor ahead of time to discuss those courses?

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

Yeah. So what I remember exactly [inaudible 00:13:20] I think I had to choose a tentative schedule for my freshman year for semester courses. And then you have to submit that to the ESS advisor that you’re paired with. And my ESS advisor was Shaniqua, and she emailed me a week after reviewing and basically setting up an appointment with me to basically explain to me why my schedule is bad. So when I initially planned the schedule, it was around 18 units because I asked some student at Berkeley, just emailed them, and he was like, “Oh, yeah. 18 to 20 units. That’s completely normal for a Berkeley student.” I mean, probably was completely normal for him, but I didn’t realize that it was a very hectic schedule. So Shaniqua helped me guide through the different aspects of Berkeley.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

There’s things called weeder classes. Since there are a large number of people, it might be easy curriculum, but then the grade distribution is just really bad. And other classes such as 61A, it’s not necessarily a extremely difficult class, but just given that there’s so many students in the class, it’s competitive and there’s so many… It’s a large commitment or large workload, per se. So I didn’t know about all these different niches or small things about each classes, especially the introductory classes. So Shaniqua was really nice about explaining what would be a better course load. And she gave me different options. So during this appointment and this email thread, she explained the different strategies I could go about. And that basically helped me stick to a 15 unit… Two technicals, two HSS class schedule. And as an advantage, I was able to explore so many different engineering clubs and social clubs on campus, and also explore sports, which I was really passionate about.

Laura Vogt:

And so you talked about it a little bit, but if you had a choice of, you’re taking Math 53 and there’s three different times to take and a bunch of different discussion sections, how would you choose… If you had the option to choose which time to do, how would you make that initial choice?

Kaichen Liu:

If there’s multiple sections. For the most part, I liked to have big blocks of time in between courses where I could sit down and get basically homework done and have a large amount of focus time or have time to go both maybe get something to eat, get lunch, and then sit down and knock through some errands, answer emails, do your whatnots.

Kaichen Liu:

And that would be one of my priorities, is having a schedule where I have big blocks of time where I’m able to essentially do whatever. Whether that’s study on campus or go back to my dorm or apartment and do chores, exercise. So I would say that would be usually one of my first priorities, is not having basically very alternating schedules where I’m in class for an hour, then I’m in class for an hour and then class for an hour again. So I would try to put the sections close to or right after another class. That would be my first priority. And then my second priority would be, if I knew particular GSIs, then I could try to optimize for those. And then because some GSIs, they have different office hours, right? So you would probably want to attend your discussion section’s GSI office hours. So actually that’s another constraint on, if I took this [inaudible 00:16:58] GSI, would I be able to go do their office hours? That’s another consideration to have.

Laura Vogt:

And where would you find out what the GSI office hours are?

Kaichen Liu:

Usually at the beginning of the semester, they would post it. If you can also contact them through their email, I think you can look them up in the campus directory. And they often, if it’s a GSI, they usually have some kind of personal website and they’re working under some faculty advisor and you can look them up as well and contact them directly.

Laura Vogt:

I want to explore this idea of the high school mindset. I think when you’re coming in from high school, you’re used to being told, “All right, your classes start at 8:00. Your classes end at 3:00 and you’re going to have straight classes all the way through.” So when you make this first schedule, it’s okay if you have only classes on Tuesday to Thursday, or if your classes are only Monday through Thursday, right?

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

Yeah. So that’s one of the other difficult things, right? Because when you go from that [inaudible 00:18:01] entire stretch of classes schedule to having maybe one class on a particular day, many freshmen, including me, make the mistake of, “Okay. Because I only have one class on Tuesday, that means I’m just going to chill the entire day.” But there’s so much better organization that you can do around… You can just [inaudible 00:18:23]. So what many people that I know usually did that helped them with organization is just, even if they don’t have a class, they would put something on their schedule. They’ll put a blog there on their Google Calendar, saying that, “Oh, this is my study time. [inaudible 00:18:34] study time or homework party time,” blah, blah, blah. So having those slots of time commitments, I think that also helps a lot. Maintaining a Google Calendar, I think it’s essential. It’s something that you don’t do as a high school student.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

I think it helps a lot. Because unlike high school, I mean, you’re going to meet and be influenced by people almost every day. You’re going to meet so many different groups of people as well. And there are going to be so many different meetings, dinners, get-togethers, homework parties, projects, meetings that you have to manage, as well as office hours, GSI discussions. So maintaining your schedule outside your schedule plan, having a Google calendar and stuff, I think it’s extremely useful. And from the high school mindset, another thing is, I don’t think the grind is the same thing. I feel like a lot of students who come into Berkeley, they’re like, “Oh, yeah. I’m part of high school.” I mean, I feel like this is a general notion. They’re usually top of their class. They do so many different clubs.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

And when you try to do the same thing in Berkeley, it’s a bit different because when you join more than one club, the amount of commitment they expect out of each member in a particular club is insane. So I don’t know many people who do more than three clubs. Three clubs itself, that’s an eight unit, nine unit course load in itself. So I mean, I made that mistake. Freshman year I came in, I’m like, “Okay, I like this engineering club. I like…” So I joined underwater robotics at Berkeley. I joined Cal Aero SAE. I joined Stack. And then I was like, “Okay. I also like all these different social clubs.” I joined all of them, and it was all of a mess. There were so many things I had to do within a week and I had to just eventually start quitting each club and actually starting to prioritize where I think my time is more valuable.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

So I think that’s another thing with the high school grind set. I’m not saying that you should not grind. You have to plan your grind differently. It’s not just a one horse race. There’s different elements to it. And that’s totally contextual and independent based on your background and what kind of experience you want out of Berkeley. So I could not give you a perfect form as to what to do. I think it’s more for you to… I think the journey is in exploring that throughout your four years. I think I’ve come to a realization of what exactly I want out of mechanical engineering towards my second last semester. So it’s completely fine if you go through your first three years basically not being sure if that’s exactly what you want. That’s a lot of people. But as long as you give your time and the flexibility just to explore more and do things that you love, I think that’s perfectly fine.

Kaichen Liu:

I would say when I was a freshman and taking a look at my first semester courses, I was trying to basically straddle two majors a little bit, because I was interested in two majors within the college of engineering. And that led to a course load that honestly had too many technicals. I think I actually suffered a bit in terms of my foundation understanding for some of these courses because they surprisingly carried a lot of topics that would pop up again and again throughout my undergrad here, even as I’m taking more complex, upper division, given almost graduate level courses. The foundational topics that were learned in my freshman year still show up. I would say in your first semester, try to just put in some requirements. Just make some progress in your degree, whether that’s technical or your breadths, I think it’s just good to get some degree progress and then make an evaluation after that semester’s over to see how that workload performed for you. Right?

Kaichen Liu:

Were you satisfied with the grades that you received? Were you satisfied with the work life balance? And making this kind of host assessment is something that you’ll be constantly doing, I feel like, through your undergrad. How did I do last semester compared to previous semesters? How do I want to do in future semesters as my time commitments outside of class may change? Right? I know I specifically made some lighter course loads for the fall semesters because of job recruiting. I spent a lot of time doing interviewing in the fall and that was almost a course and of itself. So as your time commitments change and as the topics you’re studying change, and some courses are heavier than others, some courses are capstone courses like NB1OTB or CS106B, some of these courses are very, very heavy. And being able to predict that based on your prior semester’s performance and how you will be able to hand that workload is something that’s important. And so for your first semester, it’s usually better just to try to take it easier and then ramp up, would be my opinion.

Laura Vogt:

Was there anything that surprised you coming from high school to college?

Kaichen Liu:

I think one of the things that surprised me was the pace of college curriculum. And I think this isn’t particularly unique to Berkeley, although our course content is very rigorous and that’s part of why we produce so many good engineers. Most colleges will go through something like Calculus I and Calculus II in one semester. And in high school, that would’ve taken two years. So that kind of compression of content into such a short timeframe is something that needs getting used to. And that’s why I would say your first semester, taking less technicals would allow you to learn the content a little bit more deeply than taking multiple technicals and having to kind of spread your study time across so many different subjects.

Laura Vogt:

So is there anything that you would’ve done different your first semester when you were making your choices?

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

I mean, yeah. There are quite a lot of things I would’ve done differently, but I think the thing that stands out… Just because around junior, senior year, you know that, oh, yeah, there are certain elements about how things turned out that I would have preferred turned out differently. But again, it’s that kind of paradoxical thing where everything that I’ve achieved is because of my decisions I’ve made freshman and sophomore year. So I’m very proud of what I’m going to do next and what I’ve achieved so far. So it’s pretty hard for me to answer, but one of the main things I would essentially force myself to do is not to just be part of the engineering community. I think freshman year, I think I was emphasizing a lot on just hanging around other mechanical engineering students and just being part of just one community per se.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

I wish I had explored more. And explored more, as in went out of my comfort zone. Explored things that I don’t think I’ve done before. Whether it be something like rock climbing or some of the camping adventurous clubs on campus, something like the ski club on campus. I wish I did something different that I was not comfortable with just so that I could… Because Berkeley is so big and so diverse and there’s so many elements within it. And I feel like even after four years, I feel like I’ve discovered or explored around 20% of Berkeley. And it’s mainly because I was sort of stuck in that STEM field. Literally 99% of my friends are all within the STEM industry. So I feel like one thing I would advise other people to do and I wish I would’ve done earlier is explore things that are outside of comfort zone and just don’t stick to just the engineering department. Because there are different people coming from different backgrounds, specializing in different things, and you get to learn so much from these people and you get to develop yourself as well. So that’s pretty huge.

Laura Vogt:

So we’re about at a time. Is there any other tips that you wanted to share?

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

Yeah, I think one huge tip is, what people define as a fun college life, it’s different for everyone. So I think a lot of freshmen, including me, I think you often try to see what is defined as fun from other people’s lenses. And I think that’s pretty toxic and I don’t think you should. I feel like whatever you enjoy doing in life, you should continue doing that and continue developing those skills or developing those hobbies. But at the same time, leave a bit of time around to explore new things. Don’t always be stuck with the hobbies that you think that you know, and you’re comfortable with.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

As I said before, explore the… Be uncomfortable so that you can find out new things and understand the different aspects of Berkeley. There’s so many things that… Just from clubs to classes, if you think about it, there’s so many things in Berkeley that, you think of it, I think they have something in Berkeley for you, depending on hobbies or whatever academic path you want to take. So in terms of having fun, you don’t have to go to parties if you don’t enjoy parties, just because you’re being peer pressured. You don’t have to do sports just because other people are doing sports. Just have a feel for it yourself and enjoy things and develop things that you want to do and that you want to prioritize for. So prioritizing what you define as fun is pretty important early on. Otherwise, you would be swayed by things that you really don’t want to do.

Laura Vogt:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. And congratulations on graduating. You have put in all the work and all the time and you have exciting things coming. I’m excited for you.

Adarsh Anil Kumar:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a great time.

Kaichen Liu:

Thank you. Go Bears.

Laura Vogt:

Thank you again to Adarsh and Kaichen. We all appreciate your tips and experiences with class registration. And congratulations on graduating and good luck on your next steps. And thank you everyone for tuning in to the Not So Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I hope these tips and hearing the experiences of our ESS peer advisors will help you next week when you register for the first time. That’s it for today. I look forward to podcasting with you next week.