ESS 702: GBA Introduction
This week The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer has Sharon Mueller, ESS director of advising and policy, to introduce Golden Bear Advising. She answers the frequently asked questions, highlights the key points of GBA and explains how it differs for first-year and transfer students.
Links:
- After completing GBA you can make an appointment with your adviser
- Technical problems with the College’s portion of GBA, email for support
- Suggestions for podcast topics? Send them to Laura Vogt, the podcast host.
Laura Vogt:
Hello, thank you for joining me on The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host, Laura Vogt, the Associate Director of Marketing Communications in the College of Engineering. And for our second week of the podcast, we’re talking with Sharon Mueller, the Director of Advising and Policy in Engineering Student Services, all about Golden Bear Advising. So all incoming first year and transfer students will be completing it this month and we wanted to tell you what to expect, what’s different about the engineering portion and answer some frequently asked questions. But first, Sharon, why don’t you tell us about yourself and your role in Berkeley Engineering?
Sharon Mueller:
Thanks, Laura. So as Laura mentioned, I’m Sharon Mueller and I am Director of Advising and Policy and Engineering Student Services. So I manage and oversee all of the advisors in engineering student services and also the policy that influences undergraduates in the College of Engineering.
Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for being here. I can’t believe you’re on our seventh season and you’ve been on every season.
Sharon Mueller:
That is unfortunate for the listener.
Laura Vogt:
Well, at least it’s different students listening every year.
Sharon Mueller:
This is true. This is true.
Laura Vogt:
We can act like it’s all new every time. So let’s start with the basics. So what is Golden Bear Advising and why is it important?
Sharon Mueller:
So Golden Bear Advising is an online orientation program that all new Berkeley undergraduates are going to do. For freshmen, it’s open May 30th to June 20th. So basically the first year students have, three years, that’d be hilarious, three weeks to complete Golden Bear Advising. And then the transfer Golden Bear Advising opens I think June 14th and then closes maybe the 27th or 28th and June 13th to the 27th for transfer students. So the transfers have two weeks to complete it. So basically Golden Bear Advising is sort of an introduction to systems and courses and it will help students choose which courses they’re going to take in the fall. I know students are really eager and want to know what they’re going to be enrolling in. And so by completing Golden Bear advising, they’re going to learn that. So it’s broken into four modules, module one tells students all about CalCentral, which is the interface that students use with pretty much everything on it.
Their financial aid is on there, their courses are on there, they have to-do lists on there, which hopefully students are paying attention to right now. And then module two is all about course search and planning. So how to look up courses and how to plan your schedule. We have several tools that students can use for that. And then module three is the college specific module. So our students will be doing the College of Engineering module. What’s really important about module three is that it looks like it’s just one paragraph, however students have to click on the link. That link is actually going to take them out of Golden Bear Advising while they do our module, which is in a different system. And our module is actually where we’re going to ask them some questions about their preparation and it’s during module three that they’ll learn what courses we recommend they take in the fall. And then the last module is module four, and that’s all about how to get academic support, how to explore, experiential learning, just sort of discovery experiences that are available to students at Berkeley.
Laura Vogt:
And is there any way for the students to know if they haven’t done the engineering part of it, if for some reason they missed the big click hair sign to get out of the system?
Sharon Mueller:
So when they have completed the third module, done the College of Engineering part, they’re actually going to get an email that says, “Hey, congratulations for completing module three of Golden Bear Advising.” And that email is going to have a PDF attached to it, which is going to give the student a summary of everything they answered and their recommended schedule so they don’t have to memorize what they’ve put in. It’s all going to come back to them once they hit submit in module three. If they don’t know what I’m talking about, it means they didn’t click on the link in module three.
Laura Vogt:
And they’ll also get reminder emails from the system and from their advisors.
Sharon Mueller:
Yeah, they’ll get emails from us. I think Laura, you’ll probably help us with that. And it is a task on their task list in CalCentral. We will also, when they finished it, we’re going to clear that task in CalCentral. It could take up to a week to actually clear that task because it’s a bit of a manual process, so don’t panic too much if that task doesn’t go away right away. But the only way to get rid of that task is to actually complete the College of Engineering portion of Golden Bear Advising.
Laura Vogt:
And is there a benefit to finishing earlier rather than later?
Sharon Mueller:
Not really. Honestly, they are going to be reviewed in the order in which they come in and we know that students, as do I, like to procrastinate. And so we do tend to get a lot towards the deadline, which again for first year students is June 20th and for transfers is June 27th. So you can kind of count on that the week before that deadline, we’re going to get a ton, which means it’s going to take us longer to review them and to get back to students. So if they’re feeling a little anxious and they want to get through it and they want to actually meet with their advisor, we do recommend that they do it sooner rather than later because they can’t actually meet with their advisor until they’ve done it. So the sooner they do it, the sooner they’re going to hear back from their advisor, the sooner they’ll actually be able to make an appointment with their advisor. So I suppose that is a slight advantage to doing it sooner rather than later.
Laura Vogt:
Because they want to be able to start a conversation but you got to do the groundwork before you can get into the conversation.
Sharon Mueller:
That’s right. And speaking of doing the groundwork, we can always tell when students haven’t actually engaged with our module because they will ask questions that were stated probably three or four times in the module because they’re so important. So it could be that if students email us or make an appointment with us and start asking some of those questions where we’ll say, “Okay, hang on, you need to go back, start over and actually pay attention, actually read the text, actually watch the videos because your questions are going to be answered for you.” So just fair warning, we can kind of tell when students have paid attention or not.
Laura Vogt:
There’s a video that I am the person that’s talking over it that I say, “This is important.”
Sharon Mueller:
That’s right. And it is important. And honestly, in that video you give really good tips on enrolling and how to find information. So it’s really to the student’s detriment if they’re not paying attention to those things.
Laura Vogt:
And it’s kind of nice in some ways. If you have a question, you can go back and reread stuff or rewatch a video. It doesn’t go away once you finish it.
Sharon Mueller:
That’s right. It doesn’t go away. It will forever remain in a student’s B courses, which they’re going to learn is the system that they use with all their courses too. So it will always be there and that those videos are always going to be there.
Laura Vogt:
And so when submitted, at the end of this and they’re submitting that course plan, it’s not a specific schedule where you’re like, “All right, I’m going to take math 1A on Tuesdays at 11:00 AM.” It’s not that granular. It’s more of just a list of the courses you’re planning on taking.
Sharon Mueller:
Oh, right, exactly. So sometimes students will get caught up and they don’t want to submit it because they’re like, “Wait a minute, I don’t know what time this course is offered and I don’t know if I can take these courses together because of the schedule.” Well, that’s okay. They’re going to have plenty of time to figure that out. What we really need to know is what courses do you plan to take? We don’t need to know what time you’re going to take them. We don’t need to know which lab you’re going to enroll in, whether it’s the 4:00 lab or the 9:00 AM lab. We just need to know which courses you plan to take. So that’s the important part. It doesn’t have to be the specific times or section numbers.
Laura Vogt:
And one of the things that’s important to note is as you make this course list based on your answers to your questions, we give alternates because when it comes time for the students to do their registration in July, a lot of them are probably going to need some of those alternate options.
Sharon Mueller:
That’s true. We only give alternates for the first year students. We haven’t really had the need to give alternates for the transfer students just because more so they’re enrolling in engineering specific courses and we know that there’s going to be space available for them in those courses. But the first year students are competing with students all across campus for math, for chemistry, for physics, for reading and composition. So we do give plenty of alternates in most cases per students as they’re going through that module because like you said, they’re going to maybe have to rely on enrolling in some of those alternates because it could be that their first choice courses were already full or weren’t available to them.
So it’s important that students plan out multiple schedules. When they submit their plan to us, they tell us which courses they plan to enroll in, and then they’ll give us backup courses so that we can give them feedback on those too. When they actually use Schedule Planner, which is a very cool system that will help them actually plan those dates and times, when they do that, they’re going to want to create multiple schedules that include alternate courses as well, just so that on the day of enrollment they have a backup plan just in case some of those first choices are already full.
Laura Vogt:
Oh, I had a follow up question. What was it? I hate when I forget the next thing that I’m asking, maybe if I remember it we’ll come back to it. One of the questions that I know we have a lot of that transfer students end up with coming back to us with is as they’re planning their schedules, are there transcripts going to show up in the system yet, or even I guess for the first years if they’ve got community college classes that are transferring over?
Sharon Mueller:
Oh yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s an important point because no, they’re actually not going to see in CalCentral their transfer courses until probably sometime in the fall semester. And we actually tell students it could be the very, very end of fall semester. So the campus has admitted thousands and thousands of new students, all of those transcripts have to be manually entered, not all of them, but a good portion of them, that takes a lot of time. So they are not going to see that their transfer work is actually in our system and there’s no reason to panic. It just takes a long time. I’ll also mention that for the courses our students are going to be enrolling in for their first semester, our system does not check prerequisite completion for most courses. So the fact that their transfer work is not in the system will not prevent them from enrolling in the courses that they want to enroll in.
There is a small list of courses for which the system actually does check prerequisites, but generally those courses are not going to be courses that our new students are going to be taking. The only exception to that is reading and composition. So let’s say we have a new first year student who took a reading and composition part A course that has been approved by Berkeley. If that transcript is not in the system, that student likely will not be able to enroll in a reading and composition part B course in the fall. And that’s okay because they’re already ahead of the game. They don’t have to complete their reading and composition until the end of their second year.
So it’s okay if they don’t enroll in it their first semester, they’ll just want to work with their advisor on another alternative, maybe an American cultures course or some other humanities social sciences course. So that could be the only hiccup would be reading and composition for the new first year students who are enrolling. But all the other courses that students are going to be enrolling in are not going to be checking for prerequisites. Just as a piggyback on that too, I will mention that I think we do expect to have most at least AP exam scores by the time students enroll, but certainly not the transfer work.
Laura Vogt:
That’s actually what my follow up question was about. When you go through and answer all the questions, would the AP classes, do students already know all of their AP scores so that they could put that correct information in?
Sharon Mueller:
Oh, it’s likely they may not. Especially if they just took the AP exam at the beginning of May, it is likely they’re not going to know their scores yet. And so we actually ask them to just guess, give their best guess. For a lot of those types of questions, there’s a score range, so it’s kind of like, well, do you think you got a four or a five or maybe a three or a one and a two? So generally students, when they are going through our online orientation, they just have to give it their best guess, and we know that that answer might have to change later and that could possibly change what they enroll in the fall. When their scores come out, if they have questions about that, they can always reach out to their advisor before they enroll.
Laura Vogt:
And as soon as they’re going through the problem or through this whole process, if they have questions or concerns, what’s their best means of getting support?
Sharon Mueller:
So as they’re going through Golden Bear Advising, they just need to keep going through it, honestly. Sometimes students get stuck and they don’t want to hit submit when they fill out their course plan because it feels really final. That’s actually just sort of a starting point. So I don’t want anyone to get hung up if they have questions to say, “Well, I don’t know. Should I be putting math 1A or math 1B?” Put one, submit and then make an appointment with your advisor and then we can actually talk about what the submission was. It’s not locking you into anything. It’s not a contract. It’s not saying, “I for sure am going to enroll in these courses.” It’s just a starting point for the beginning of a conversation with your advisor or maybe for you, you feel really confident and you’re like, “Yep, this is exactly what I’m going to take.”
Your advisor gets back to you and says, “Yep, this looks great,” and you can run with it and you don’t need to meet with your advisor. But yeah, I think they have to actually complete Golden Bear Advising before they can actually meet with an advisor. So just keep plugging through. Of course, if they have technical difficulty, we actually have on GBA where they can contact, but there’s our main email, which is just ess@berkeley.edu. So if they get stuck, they’re having any kind of glitching problem, they can definitely email ess@berkeley.edu. But as far as I’m working with their advisor, they have to actually hit that submit button and finish GBA and then wait to hear from their advisor and then they can make an appointment.
Laura Vogt:
And once they’re able to contact their advisors, what’s the process? How do they make the appointment or is it just through email?
Sharon Mueller:
Yeah, I mean, email is fine for one or two quick questions, but beyond that, I would say it’s probably best to just go ahead and make an appointment. And there are a few ways they can do that on our website, which is the Berkeley engineering website, which is just engineering.berkeley.edu, if students click on the obvious thing, which is students, if they click on students from there, they will see a big blue box that says, “Make an ESS advising appointment.” They will be able to do that once they’ve completed GBA and they’ve heard back from their advisor. So it’s right on our website, the link. They will also see the link or hear about where the link is in the email they get when they submit their schedule, they’ll be referred to the link there as well.
So all appointments are made online and they don’t have to call anybody. They can just go online, pick a time that works for them. Advisors will have in-person and Zoom appointments available. So we understand most of our first year students are not in the Bay Area, and so advisors can definitely meet with them over Zoom, no problem. And they’ll get that option when they make an appointment whether or not they want an online appointment or an in-person appointment. So it’s very easy, they just won’t be able to do it until they’ve submitted their course plan through Golden Bear Advising.
Laura Vogt:
Now, I know you just had a daughter that graduated from college, so this question might have pertained to you when she was a freshman, were you able to call and get information about her and about her classes and things like that? Or is that something that the student needs to do and the parents can tag along if they want to, but the student is the primary point of contact, correct?
Sharon Mueller:
Yes. So yes, I did have this much to my chagrin, I had to rely on my daughter to ask those questions and she’s gotten better over the years. But yeah, now that students are in college, we will not talk to parents generally. In fact, we can’t talk to parents about a student’s schedule or a student’s record because there are privacy laws that some nice parents have a hard time understanding this. Even though they’re paying the bill in many cases, we can give them zero information. So we really need the students to contact us because we can’t answer parents’ questions because we’re not allowed to. So yes, you can let your parents know that if you’re comfortable with it, they can relay to you the questions they have, and then the student needs to contact their advisor. Yes, unfortunately, this is a no parent zone now.
Laura Vogt:
And that’s important when you talk about appointments and things like that because you’ll need to get permission to share if the parents wanted to come to the in-person appointment or something like that, they don’t just get to walk into the room.
Sharon Mueller:
That’s right. I mean, even on Zoom, the parents are not supposed to be involved in the appointment. If a parent wants to be involved, we have to stop everything. The student has to sign a FERPA waiver. The law is called FERPA, and it can be rather disruptive to the appointment. Now, if the student knows in advance that they want their parent to be on the appointment with them, that’s no problem at all. But they need to email their advisor ahead of time and say, “Hey, is it okay if my parent or my guardian sits in this with me or my sister, anybody?” And then the advisor will say, “Sure, I’m going to mail you a FERPA waiver. You need to fill this out and sign it and email it back to me before the appointment.” So we can definitely make those arrangements, but they need to be made ahead of time.
Laura Vogt:
Excellent. And is there a big difference between what GBA the process is for the first year and the transfer students?
Sharon Mueller:
Not really, no. I mean, the big difference is in the College of Engineering portion, we ask the transfer students different questions just because we know that they have certain courses done already at their college before they transferred to Berkeley. So they’ll get different questions, they’ll get different courses recommended for them. But other than that, it’s very similar.
Laura Vogt:
Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that we want to add?
Sharon Mueller:
I don’t think so. I mean, I think the key points are must complete GBA before being able to make an appointment with your advisor and pay attention to those tasks and those notifications on CalCentral. You do need to do those. And in some cases, it’s a pretty serious problem if you don’t do those. For instance, if students don’t do GBA, they cannot enroll. They will be unable to enroll, their enrollment will be blocked. So it is really important to pay attention to those tasks and those notifications on CalCentral. Listen to these podcasts. Even if this one wasn’t your favorite, I promise you they’re more exciting guests in future podcasts. Way more exciting than me, and please check your @berkeley.edu email every day. You’re going to be getting important emails, not just from our office, but from offices campus-wide. Could be about financial aid, could be about enrollment, so it’s really important to be in the habit of checking that email every day.
Laura Vogt:
This is almost the time to start making plans for your wellbeing and the new semester of things like you’re going to go on and check your email once a day at 11:00 AM or something like that. You could start developing these-
Sharon Mueller:
Those habits. Yeah, and those routines because I think, yes, we hear from students often that they feel that their best path to success are being organized, and that includes having time set aside for everything. I know it sounds kind of silly, but some students set aside time to socialize with my friends and do my math 1A homework and really putting everything in their calendar as part of bCal. We use the Google Suite, which means students have a Google Calendar now affiliated with their Berkeley CalNet ID. And we as staff and faculty use our bCals for everything. And so I recommend that students get in the habit of setting those routines and creating that structure for themselves because they’re not going to have mom or dad anymore waking them up in the morning telling them when to do their homework. And so some students, that’s a struggle for them to really create their own routines and their own structure. And we do hear from students that that’s a really important part of being a successful student at Berkeley.
Laura Vogt:
And I want to give a plug for our advisors, because they aren’t necessarily called academic advisors regularly, you can get advice from them about [inaudible 00:25:23] your schedules and how to manage things, how to find study groups, how to-
Sharon Mueller:
That’s right.
Laura Vogt:
Get connected with resources on campus that you maybe don’t know about.
Sharon Mueller:
That’s right. I mean, we are kind of like a one-stop shop. We may not know the specific answer. If you ask us about financial aid, that’s going to be a struggle for us, but we are going to know who you should talk to and when you should talk to them. So your advisor is a really good resource for all of that. Many of us, in fact, I think the majority of us were undergraduates at Berkeley, and so we’ve also been there. I myself was a transfer student to Berkeley, so we know what it’s like. We know the rigor, we know the demands on students’ time, and we also know all of the resources. So yeah, I think we’re a good resource.
And thank you, Laura, for also thinking we’re a good resource. We may not know the specific answer, but we definitely know who will know the specific answers. So we can help students in many ways. And often students will talk to us about personal struggles as well because we know that those affect their academics. And so they can really talk to us about anything. There’s nothing we haven’t heard. We’ve been advisors for a really long time collectively over a hundred years, so we’ve heard a lot in our time. And so please, our goal is to make sure students feel welcome and feel comfortable talking to us. So we really do hope students will talk to us about anything that’s on their mind.
Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for being here today.
Sharon Mueller:
You’re welcome. My pleasure.
Laura Vogt:
And thank you to everyone for tuning in to The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. We’ll be back next week with more info and resources for your time as a student here with Berkeley Engineering, and we’re so excited about it.
Sharon Mueller:
Yay, go Bears.
Laura Vogt:
Thank you. Bye.