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I'm Arjun, I'm from Fontana California, I'm a first year here at Cal, and I'm a Bioengineering major.
I decided to come here because it was great for my major. Also, it was the farthest
college I got accepted to away from home. So, I kinda wanted to reinvent who I was,
or kind of do things for myself more. So I came all the way to Northern California.
I did a summer session here, a six week summer session, before I enrolled as a freshman in
the fall. Before that, I kind of just slept at home for a month, but when I came here
I took two classes, and I just got more accustomed to the campus. My first semester I actually
lived here in Clark Kerr. This is the courtyard. Move-in was pretty hectic, hundreds of people
trying to get in at the same time, but the moment I moved in I met my roommates, who
are both great people. I get along very well with them, we're all messy together.
Clark Kerr is about, I would say, 15 minutes from campus so it's less than a mile. Luckily there
is a bus, the 49 that comes every 30 minutes. Yeah I would say that's one of the major cons
of Clark Kerr, that it's so far away, but as you can see it's beautiful, and the rooms are
generally larger so it's great living here. Convocation was, I know other people wouldn't
describe it as such, but I thought it was beautiful in a way because it's an entire
stadium of people just here for the same reason. They're here to join Cal, they're very enthusiastic
about joining Berkeley. And then you have the Chancellor and other noted faculty acknowledging
that and saying you will have a great time here. The people on both sides of you are
as eager to be here as you are. I did go to Calapalooza, that's where all of the clubs
and some of the DeCals meet just to try to advertise for you to join them. And that's
how I joined a club that I'm very involved with, Cal Rotaract, and it was hectic. The
entirety of main campus where Sproul and even past Sather Gate just has booths everywhere.
And people just flyering and thrusting flyers in your face, so it's not even that hard to
join a club here; they want you so badly.
So we're on our way to campus from Clark Kerr. Normally I walk, so driving is amazing.
The Frat Row extends all the way from Dwight Avenue
which crosses with Piedmont and Warring all the way to Bancroft Avenue.
And this is International House.
This is the stadium where a majority of major football occurrences happen.
This is Yali's Cafe. It's inside Stanley Hall. It's a great atmosphere, they have great employees.
My first semester here, contrary to how it seems, was actually pretty relaxing.
To be in the college of Engineering, you have to take at least 3 technical courses every semester.
So for me, that was Math 1A, Chemistry 1A and 1AL and Bioengineering 10.
Bioengineering 24, yeah it just showed you different ways bioengineering affects the world.
Oh yeah right here, that's why it was only 1 Unit
because it was only a Freshman seminar, it was very interesting
just like a lecture once a week so very relaxing. Asian Studies 98 that is actually a DeCal
for Chinese Dance because I wanted to do, I'm already paying so much money to come to
Berkeley I may as well do stuff I would never ordinarily do. So I took a Chinese Dance DeCal
and was in a showcase that I will never show to anyone. It's on YouTube, and it's going to
be hidden. Anthropology 3AC was kind of right up my alley. I'm a Philosophy minor, and that
was very close to what I'd studied before. It showed you just the way different people think.
Bioengineering 10, it has one of the best lecturers at Berkeley, in my opinion, and according
to RateMyProfessor.com, Mr. Terry Johnson. He is amazing, he would make everything relevant,
he would make jokes so he actually keeps you awake. The class itself was very, I would
say, difficult for me. That's one of the only classes that was ever actually difficult.
Math 1A was calculus. It's single variable calculus, the first part here at Berkeley,
I did it in High School already so it wasn't much of a challenge. Really it was just more
theoretical, in that aspect I was a little lost but I was able to catch up again. So General
Chemistry, that was also not that bad, there's three midterms and a final so it seems like
a lot of work but it's not that bad. The 1AL, Berkeley's recently split up General Chemistry
into 1A and 1AL. 1AL is the lab portion and 1A is the actual learning portion I guess.
The lab portion is a three-hour lab and a lecture every week, and that was actually
really fun you get to mess with chemicals and that's always fun. You just have to make
sure you don't burn things down; that's always been an issue. Total units, I took 19 units,
The maximum allowed without petitioning is 20.5 for College of Engineering, and the minimum
you need to be an enrolled student is 13. I took 19 because I just kinda wanna keep
on track, get requirements out of the way, and it wasn't much of a big deal. That's why
this semester I'm taking 20. College is much different from high school in the way the work is not
necessarily more rigorous, but it's more fast-paced. You're more on your own, you're more independent.
Don't skip 8ams. That's a lesson learned; never skip 8am's, it's a bad idea.
For new Engineers, it may seem hectic at times, I know some Engineers actually bag on the
other majors, and don't do that. Everyone has their own difficulties. Engineering is hard,
at least for Bioengineering because it combines multiple disciplines, and that's how Engineering
is in general. You're going to have to take math classes, physics classes, chemistry,
biology, and then and some programming classes and expect to be proficient in all of them.
One of my campus activities was one of my classes which is the Chinese Dance DeCal which is
part of the great organization, Fei Tian Dancers; they are an amazing group of people who really
support each other. Another organization I'm heavily a part of is Cal Rotaract. I did Rotary
Interact in high school. Rotary itself is an organization I'm very fond of. They do
a lot of hands-on community service. Another organization I was apart of was Alpha Sigma
Phi Fraternity. I rushed last semester in the fall, and I ended up pledging, and now I'm a brother.
I loved being away from home when I first got here, for a good three months,
and it was kind of sad, but I really enjoyed doing stuff on my own. That's how I've always
been and now I realized that's how I'll always be. Then I started to get a little homesick,
because I came here in June, and I hadn't seen my parents until when they surprised me when
they came up for Thanksgiving. So it'd been a good 5 months before they came up here, and
I guess I realized how much I did miss them. Berkeley is very different from my hometown.
When I went back over winter break, I realized how spaced-out everything was at home.
Over here there's so many buildings just clumped together. There's always something to do at
10pm, at 2am. Over there everything shuts down by 6pm.
The hardest part of my first semester was just getting everything organized.
I would have a pledge event one night, I would have
a Cal Rotaract event the day after on a Saturday at 6am, and then I would have midterms just
compounding on each other, and I wasn't used to it. Best part of my first semester would
definitely be the new people I met. I'm typically an anti-social person. I'm quiet. I'm in my
corner eating my, drinking my coffee, eating my coffee. So it was a bit uncomfortable meeting
people, but the people I did meet, I love.
They even make designs in the coffee like
a heart or a leaf, and it's really cute. I don't know, I feel happy.