Curriculum
There's a lot of freedom in the EECS curriculum, but with great freedom comes great responsibility. I learned this the hard way: upper-division courses DO NOT by any means have equal workloads, and some combinations (with some professors) are much more difficult than others. Below is the curriculum I'd recommend (under the assumption that you don't need to take Math 1A/B or R1A). DISCLAIMER: this recommendation is entirely based on my personal experience, so change it to suit you however you please. I personally find math courses easier than EECS courses, and any upper-division courses I leave out are not necessarily not worth taking; these are just the ones against which I've brushed, either by taking the course myself or witnessing friends take the course.
Freshman Year
| Fall |
Spring |
Summer |
| EE 16A |
EE 16B |
CS70 + research
OR
internship |
| CS 61A |
CS 61B |
| Math 54 |
Math 53 |
| Freshman Seminar |
R1B |
I switched 53 and 54 when I was a freshman, and that made the fall way more difficult than it had to be due to the considerable overlap between 54 and 16A. Prepare for the spring to be quite difficult: this is your chance to show yourself how strong you really are (it may surprise you). I came in with no coding experience, so 61A was quite hard for me: 61B was easier, and when I got to the great equalizer that is 61C, I was very much used to being thrown into something in which I felt quite out of my depth, and unlike people who came in with enough experience to find 61A/B easy, I had plenty of practice with rapid learning in the face of severe discomfort, so compared to 61A/B, I found 61C easy. Another consequence of my comparative lack of coding experience (vs. math experience), I found EE16A/B way easier than their CS counterparts: in my experience, EE classes expect you to find them hard, while CS classes make you feel stupid if you don't find them easy, so I found the EE environment much more welcoming.
Learning philosphy epiphanies to have:
- Even if you don’t feel fully confident in your solution or in yourself, have the hubris to try your solution anyway. Even if the first thing you try doesn't work, the process will reveal a solution.
- A problem is a sandbox, not a path between two points. This is perhaps the most important thing. Especially in lower-division classes, don't be overly focused on finding the solution right away, because you may stumble onto a topic that sparks your interest or have an epiphany that's only tangentially-related to the problem at hand that becomes a guiding principle for your future academics. This is key for maintaining your intellectual curiosity, which is the key to not burning out. Ask your professors those weird cross-disciplinary questions you have, and follow your tangential trains of thought. Engaging with the material like this is evidence that you're thinking deeply about it, and it will help you learn more deeply; to use Bloom's taxonomy, by synthesizing material across disciplines, you're closing in on the deepest level of learning: creating.
- Stick with something for long enough to accurately judge your interest in it. This is especially important for EECS because you have to lay a lot of groundwork before you get to the interesting parts. After my first semester, I honestly wasn't sure if I had made the right decision with my major. I'd applied to a different major in almost every college application I submitted, including architecture, art practice, graphic design, music theory, physics, computer science, biomedical engineering, art history, philosophy, applied math, pure math, nuclear engineering, and electrical engineering, and I went for EECS despite having no experience because I had the intuition that it was broad and abstract enough (while still being a design discipline) to form a mental structure robust enough in creative critical thinking and problem-solving to enable me to more deeply understand all the things I loved. EE 16B was the class that convinced me I was right, which is why I'm still here as a TA.
- Think about your values NOW and prioritize based on them. What do you want to get out of college? Are you considering grad school (even just a little)? Which parts of yourself do you like/want to further develop? This will determine how much you should care about your GPA vs. maintaining a broad social network vs. spending time on your hobbies/external interests. Even though it doesn't seem like it right now, this is probably the most unstructured free time you'll have during college.
- Learn the difference between pride and self-sufficiency. Strive for self-sufficiency and humility. Make the most of each course's resources: go to office hours, don't rush through homeworks/labs when possible (when it's not, go back over the material and then talk to other students/go to office hours). When a course's resources aren't doing it for you, try hunting down some resources of your own online or (gasp) in the library. Persevere when you read those — they may be difficult to grasp at first, but being able to recognize the same concept described in different ways is incredibly beneficial for learning. But, don't wait to be told by an external source (e.g. an exam) that you don't understand something: ask for help before the situation becomes dire. Freshman year, people can be really insecure, and they try to flex constantly during lower-div courses, which can be really off-putting (especially to people who come in without experience). Ignore them and focus on the humble people who, even though they might know more than you, don't try to put you down. The others will gradually calm down, too.
Sophomore Year
Now is the time to start focusing in a bit more on what you like. Are you leaning more toward CS or EE? If you're more CS-oriented, this suggested curriculum will not be very useful to you, but I personally think 120/126 would still be good background, especially if you're interested in AI. DISCLAIMER (again): this recommendation is entirely based on my personal experience, so change it to suit you however you please. I personally find math courses easier than EECS courses, and any upper-division courses I leave out are not necessarily not worth taking; these are just the ones against which I've brushed, either by taking the course myself or witnessing friends take the course. I have taken or am taking courses marked with °.
| EE-Leaning Upper-Division Courses |
| Fundamentals |
EE 120°, EE 105° |
| Entry-level specialization |
EE 128°, EE 140, EECS 151, CS 152*°, CS 188, EE 106A, EE 130 |
| Hard but important |
EECS 126° |
| Higher-level specialization |
EE 123°, EE 142, CS 152*°, CS 189, CS 162, EE 106B |
| Lower course quality but maybe important/interesting enough |
EE 127, CS 164 |
| Upper-level specialization |
Special topics courses, grad courses, project courses |
| Extracurricular Options |
| Course staff (reader/tutor/lab assistant) |
6-8 hours |
| Course staff (TA) or CSM |
8-20 hours |
| Research |
10-20 hours |
| Clubs |
4-20 hours |
| Fall |
Spring |
Summer |
| CS 61C |
Fundamental UD |
Research
OR
Internship |
| Fundamental UD |
ELS UD |
| Lower-div tech (CS70 or physics) |
Breadth/Ethics |
| Less than 20 hours of committed extracurriculars (i.e., 1 or 2 things) |
Less than 20 hours of committed extracurriculars (i.e., 1 or 2 things) |
Learning philosphy epiphanies to have:
- Don't panic if it feels like you can't do everything. That's not a bad thing. It might feel like everyone else is having a really easy time and doing a million different things, but that's probably not true. Focus on the things you actually care about, and prune the things you've determined you don't.
- Intellectual maturity is at least as important as experience. It definitely feels like upper divs get easier over time, so don't freak out if you find your ELS upper-divs hard.
- Right now, it is extremely important to maintain your intellectual curiosity and bolster the parts of yourself you don't want to change. Sophomore year is when most people start feeling burnt-out, and maintaining your principles/continuously re-evaluating what you're doing in terms of intellectual fulfillment will help ameliorate this. Stop doing things just because you feel like you should; don't force yourself into the "pure EECS" box if you don't fit there. Do things for yourself: maintain your hobbies and your friendships, and remember to take a break once in a while. If your extracurriculars aren't doing it for you anymore, quit and try something new: you still have time to develop it well before you graduate.
- Start EVERYTHING early. Whether it's an assignment, studying for an exam, or thinking about/planning your future, starting early will allow you to get as much out of it as possible. Freshman yeah is a bit too chaotic for solid habits to form, so make them now.
Junior Year
I'm still a junior, so I haven't yet synthesized what I've learned this school year. glhf fam wish me luck
| Fall |
Spring |
Summer |
| ELS UD |
Hard/HLS UD |
Research
OR
Internship |
| Hard/HLS UD |
HLS/ULS UD |
| Lower-div tech or breadth |
Breadth/ethics/ULS UD (if under 4 units) |
| Less than 20 hours of committed extracurriculars (i.e., 1 or 2 things) |
Less than 20 hours of committed extracurriculars (i.e., 1 or 2 things) |