I alluded to the competitive nature of the Haas earlier and I feel obligated to tell you why. At Haas, which is Berkeley’s school of business, has a “Haas Curve” which limits the grades that you can get in a class. In order to produce students breed to compete, Haas students will receive grades based on the following percentages:

A+ and A = 5%
A- = 10%
B+ = 20%
B = 30%
B- = 20%
C+ = 10%
C = 4%
C- = >2%

So those ideas of grandeur and graduating at the top of my class with a 4.0 GPA seem to be unattainable. But this doesn’t mean that I am going to give up hope. I still plan to immerse myself in school, just as I did at MiraCosta, and try to maximize my opportunities here while balancing school. The only problem is that there are so many opportunities. I don’t even know where to start.

A stark difference between MiraCosta College, or MiraCozy as I now think of it, and Berkeley is how centralized the services provided to students are. At MiraCosta if there is something that a student needs, nearly every employee can tell you what you need to do, where you need to go, and how to go about it. At Berkeley, there is definitely a wealth of support, just like MiraCosta has, but here at Berkeley it is so spread out and vast that it is difficult to know where to go. For instance, I went to the Transfer center here at Berkeley and asked a couple of questions about Haas, and financial aid, and I was told that I needed to go to the Financial Aid office and that Haas has their own informational office and that she didn’t know about it. Granted UC Berkeley is a big school that serves over 30,000 students, but I figured that it would be centralized in terms of student services like MiraCosta is. Oh how wrong I was, they have student clubs, services, tutoring and everything else spread out all over the place at Berkeley.

I learned some more valuable information today. Apparently the Haas School of Business isn’t looked at too favorably amongst the rest of the students on campus. There are a lot of services that Haas provides that are exclusively for Haas students which creates quite a commotion. The term “Haashole” and “Haastitute” came up to describe Haas students. I guess I am now a “Haashole” because I go to this school. Oh well, I will wear that name with pride knowing that I am going to graduate from one of the best business schools in the United States.