Choosing your Courses for Next Semester

By: SWE Officers

With it being course registration season, choosing what courses you want to take can be stressful. Coming into the process, it can be difficult to know which classes are the best to enroll in for your major and degree plan. Whether you are looking to fulfill a major requirement or simply want to find a fun class to take, our officers have compiled a list of course recommendations for you below!

Kirthi Kumar
UGBA 194.1 Colloquium on the Social, Political and Ethical Environment of Business with Ross — a p/np upper div business class (satisfies Haas upper div requirements) which is a speaker series on cool people in the realm. Some speakers who came my semester were the founders of Back to the Roots (started at Berkeley), the Oppenheim Group brothers (also Berkeley alums) from Selling Sunset (the Netflix show), and many interesting others! highly recommend

Esther Shin
CS161 — Computer Security
It satisfies a cs upper div requirement as well as the eecs upper div design requirement! It was really interesting to learn more about computer security that I’ve been unaware of before and also gets you thinking of how vulnerable everything might be Although it’s pretty high level, it gives you a good idea of certain things you should be aware of to make sure you’re developing safe code. The projects are basically hacking into a bunch of things, which was also super fun! 😄💻

Jennifer Zhou
CS152- Computer Architecture
Satisfies: CS upper div requirement
I loved this class. I was never bored — each lecture just gave me such insight into what goes into making a computer work and I was constantly switching between “You can do that??” and “That’s how that’s done??” and “Whomst??? Thought of this??” The labs were also insanely cool: you got to mess with superscalar out of order machines, vector machines, and even recreate the Spectre attack??
My professor (Krste Asanović) was an amazingly clear lecturer and my two TAs (Jerry Zhao + Albert Ou) were super knowledgeable but not intimidating at all. The professor would not only answer any course-related questions, but also share some of his own viewpoints and talk about current trends in academia/industry. The TAs would even stay past their designated OH times to help students + just chat with us. I was actually able to get a research position at ADEPT lab through this class (I’m convinced it’s because I showed up to discussions/OH and they professors/TAs couldn’t not know me 😆)

Andrea Palomo
BioE/MSE C118- Biological Performance of Material
It is a requirement for BioE/MSE joint majors, but I just think its a great class for anyone interested in biomaterials. I’m taking it right now and I really enjoy it. It’s taught by Prof. Healy and he does a great job at delivering the material without making it overwhelming. There’s only one midterm and there’s no final. There’s a final design project and you get to work with grad students to design a biomaterial product/therapy. It’s based on materials selection and design, structure-property relationships of biomaterials, and their interaction with biological systems . Applications of the concepts developed include blood-materials compatibility, biomimetic materials, hard and soft tissue-materials interactions, drug delivery, tissue engineering, and biotechnology.

Phoebe Chang
MSE 136 (Materials in Energy Technologies), which satisfies the upper div engineering elective requirement.
I’m currently taking it with Kristin Persson (who’s an amazing professor btw!) and its so cool learning about all the different energy fields and research related to materials. It covers a range of energy sources and emphasizes a lot on renewables + sustainability without super complicated math (which some MSE courses do have…). Some of the things we’ve talked about are how the Flint water crisis was fundamentally a materials issue, and how the main issues stopping the hydrogen fuel economy from booming are with the materials involved. I have Energy Engineering friends in that class to, so it’s totally doable to take this class without an MSE background :) Also the grade is dependent more on a final project presentation on a materials + energy topic of your choice, which I really appreciate instead of more midterms or homework!