Very Diverse

Introduction
I’d say Cal is really diverse. You get a good mix of everybody. There area lot of international students, definitely a lot of people from California. And there area lot of different majors that are good so you could have a computer science major, a business major, science major, all that in your GE classes, and I’d say in general the students at Cal are really diverse so that’s probably the best part. Actually surprisingly they’re not too liberal at all. Actually it’s more the people around Berkeley who live here are really liberal. The students themselves are all conservative. I mean especially if you go to Haas. A lot of them are business majors or all political science majors, surprisingly they’re not too liberal at all.

Campus Life and Social Life
The city of Berkeley is probably really interesting for sure because you have a lot of interesting people. And it’s really funny that there are a lot of nicknames for different bums or characters. Because there are a lot of activists, sometimes they come on campus and do this or that so they have nicknames so it’s really interesting to go and see what they’re up to. There’s this Asian guy. His name is Happy Happy Happy. I’m pretty sure that’s not his real name, but he always stands right in front of Sprowl where everybody goes to campus. He always has these huge signs that he just puts up, his political message up there. A lot of times he’s pretty satirical. Like when we had the California Recall, he pretended to be Schwarzenegger and say, “oh I support the Nazi’s, I’m going to be here next summer, Ha, ha, ha,” and just get people to not vote for him. Academics
When you’re a first year because you live in the dorms and you’re required to buy meal plans, you have to. But good places to eat, there area pizza place called Cheese Board. I think there area really famous restaurant called Chez Panisse. There’s great Italian food down on College. So there’s a lot of good food in Berkeley. The reputation of opinionated students comes from just the type of students you got at Berkeley. All of them are pretty well read and keep up with current events and taking classes like political science and learning about what’s going on so it’s kind of natural for them to be really opinionated. I’d say since I’m a business major, the workload is not that tough, but I definitely have some friends who are Computer Science or engineering majors and those just say, “drop me off at the Engineering building and I’ll be back tomorrow night after I finish my project.” The biggest lecture class was Astronomy and it was about 800 people. I think more than 800 probably. Pretty much all classes here at Berkeley have section groups to kind of alleviate the situation I guess.

Student Body
I’d say the caliber of Cal professors is very good. It’s pretty sweet that sometimes you take a class and your professor’s a Nobel Laureate or is a really well known professor who’s traveling around all the time or doing research projects or at the Hospital of Business. My econ professor is this consultant. He travels around all the time helping out companies and stuff, so it’s nice to know that your professor’s a professional and they know what they’re talking about. They definitely do care about their research, but I think the majority of them also love to teach. And it’s really nice, they’re always saying come to office hours, we really want to talk to you and for the most part they don’t know your name unless you go talk to them because the classes there are so big. Especially if you’re in a 700-person lecture.