Berkeley Courses Pt. 4

CS162, EE16A, IEOR191, MCB C62

Posted on January 29, 2020

As this semester starts up again, I’d like to reflect on the classes I took last semester: CS162, EE16A, IEOR191, and MCB c62 (Drugs and the Brain). It was a rough semester for several different reasons, but I think things turned out okay.

CS162 (Operating Systems) was one of more time consuming classes I’ve taken at Berkeley. It’s a project based class, and I can say I am very grateful for having an awesome team (shoutout to Chuck Tang, Matt Khudari, and William Gan!). There were a lot of complaints at the beginning of the semester about how the workload was very high, but I thought that even though it was high, it did make the rest of the class easier to understand once we had a stronger understanding of the basics and that the course staff did a great job improving the course structure. It turned out to be a very rewarding class, and a lot of fun bonding with my teammates. We had a bet at the end of the semester to see who would get the lowest final exam score, and turned out, I got the lowest score in my group by AT LEAST 1.5 standard deviations. I am shook, since it was not that I did bad on the final (I got an A- in the end), but that the rest of my teammates just absolutely murdered the final (Will ended up with an A+ in the class. Incredible. #JustWillGanThings). I am so proud of my teammates and I’m glad that we had a tough and bonding experience of going through that class together.

EE16A (Intro to Circuits/EE), on the other hand, is my least favorite class so far. There was mandatory attendance, which I’ve never had in a tech class, they didn’t share grade distributions, and I just found the class uninteresting. It’s also a class meant for freshman, so take my advice with a grain of salt. They claimed to not share grade distributions because it’s on a fixed scale grade, yet CS61A/B/C are also graded on a fixed scale and they share grade distributions. Yet these professors then go on to teach other classes that share grade distributions. Also, the second midterm was ridiculously hard compared to previous years, which is of course their right to do, but it’s also something we could have anticipated if they shared the first midterm’s grade distributions. I also think that it’s not representative of EECS courses at Berkeley, because all other classes share grade distributions (for better or for worse). But enough about the grade distributions. I also felt that the material felt at times I could just follow steps blindly without knowing what was really going on, that some concepts were very poorly explained such that every question on the subject was still impossible to solve (for example, charge sharing), and that compared to the other lower division courses I took, it was just rather uninteresting. My study group agrees with me on these points, but like I said, this is probably not reflective of most people who take the class. Probably my harshest class review so far. But take it as you will.

IEOR191 (Tech Entrepreneurship) was a very different class that what I usually take. It made us get into groups and then over the semester take a “startup idea” that we had and take it through different parts of the startup lifecycle such as finding market fit, talking to potential consumers, pivoting if your idea doesn’t work, creating a prototype, recruiting, pitching to investors, etc. The most interesting part of the class to me was that we got to hear executives and founders from different startups. My least favorite part was how the class was a three hour lecture every week. It’s very hard to sit through three hours, even though sometimes they were split with other speakers or group activities, but this is because of scheduling reasons from the school that they have to do this, so it’s not the class’s fault. I thought that the class did the best they could modeling a startup environment and growth while teaching us, because it’s impossible to model a startup process in a class. Startups are inherently not made to follow a schedule and it’s completely hectic. There is no close substitution for making a startup, especially not a class. Just go make your own startup if you are interested.

The last class I took was on Drugs and the Brain, and I do not have much to say on this class because I took it pass/no pass, so I did not put in much effort. We learned about different drugs and their effects on the brain (as stated in the title), and there were cute moments such as the GSIs and Professor dressing up as DEA agents on Halloween for our midterm. We also had group debates in class about different controversial topics in the drug law world, and those were quite fun to listen to. Overall, it was a very standard breadth class experience.

This semester I’m not taking any tech courses and taking quite few classes so I could focus on some different goals before I graduate college. It’s a very strange feeling that after the first week of class, I’m not extremely stressed about school. I hope my last semester continues well!