ESS 703: Engineering survey

Laura Vogt:
Hello. Thank you for joining me this week on our podcast, The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host Laura Vogt, the Associate Director of Marketing and Communications in the College of Engineering. And this week I’m excited to have Shareena Sampson with us to talk about the engineering survey that each of you were assigned on your CalCentral task list. So Shareena, please introduce yourself and tell us about your role for Berkeley Engineering.

Shareena Samson:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here. I’m the Associate Director for Advising in the College of Engineering, and many of you have probably already gotten emails from me because I like to send out a ton of emails. I’ve been working in engineering student services since about 2018, and before that I was a department advisor in mechanical for many, many years. I did my undergraduate degree at Cal and I’m a very proud Golden Bear.

Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for being here today. And we were talking about this before we started recording that the engineering survey is something that you started doing last year, so I think it’s a really nice way for you to be able to get a little bit more information about students and give them some more tips. So why don’t you tell us more about the survey, and what are we hoping to learn from it, and how is it going to support the students’ first year at Berkeley?

Shareena Samson:
Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. We created the survey to help advisors figure out how prepared students are for their majors, particularly in the space of math and programming, and to learn more about their outside responsibilities and interests. For the preparation piece of this, for example, we notify students who haven’t yet taken Pre-Calculus, to take it over the summer if at all possible, as all of our major requirements start with Pre-Calculus. The same if students have no programming experience, because all of our majors have a programming requirement, and we don’t want students to feel completely lost in that first year programming requirement because of the fast pacing of our courses.

Though it’s not ideal to have students doing summer coursework for anybody, this will help make their transition to Berkeley a little bit smoother. In terms of responsibilities, a good example of how we use this is say if you plan to have a job in your first semester. Well, if you plan to work 14, 15 hours a week, we’re not going to recommend that you do three technical courses on top of that. It just wouldn’t be practical. We’re going to work as much as we can around those other responsibilities you may have so we can make a viable schedule together.

And regarding your interests, we may also make specific recommendations in terms of student groups and our extracurricular activities we think it would be fun for you to join. Of course, that’s completely optional. And as advisors, we already know that your first semester is going to be a huge transition, and we hope to use this information to get you started on the right foot.

Laura Vogt:
And so the reasoning behind adding this engineering survey then was to get students so that you’re more prepared, you know more about them. So what kind of specific questions give you that information or make it so that you’re able to do advising a little bit better?

Shareena Samson:
Yeah, so we specifically ask questions about math preparation, like which maths have you taken? Which mathematical subjects have you taken in high school? And if you have programming experience, what type of programming experience you have. So we hope that asking these questions will help us figure out whether or not you’re ready for those first year math courses, whether if you’re ready for Pre-Calculus, or Pre-Calculus, or what type of programming course we’re going to point you towards in your first year, in your first semester. We acknowledge that though everyone we have admitted is an excellent student, all students do not have the same access to STEM courses in high school, and we will need to start at a different place in terms of our requirements. So we use that form to get a set specific information.

Laura Vogt:
Does this form, and I think that some students coming in might question where they are in math in some ways, so does the form help them navigate that a little bit better maybe? That even if they’re like, “Okay, well I should be coming in, I can take Math 1B or Math 53, but maybe I should start at Math 1A, or maybe I should do a refresher course over the summer of some Pre-Calculus to get ready for this Pre-Calculus that I’m going to be doing.”

Shareena Samson:
Well, I think if students have already done Pre-Calculus, they should be pretty prepared in the fall to start with Math 1A. We will be asking additional questions as part of Golden Bear Advising to make sure that that is the case, and they’re actually self-assessment exams as part of that, that students can do to really figure it out what they’re going to be comfortable with starting with. But generally speaking, this form is really geared towards finding out if students are ready for that first Pre-Calculus course, if we’re talking about the math preparation.

Laura Vogt:
Perfect. And where’s the data from the survey going and how is it going to be used? Is it being shared outside of the college or?

Shareena Samson:
Yeah, so all of the data goes to engineering students services advisors who are advising the students directly. It will also be shared with those who work on prep programs, and these are engineering boot camps that happen before the semester begins. It’s also shared with a select few in the Office of Planning and Analysis so they can pick up trends between preparation in grades.

Laura Vogt:
And what I didn’t specify earlier, is the survey, was it only for fresh or is it also transfer students that’d have to take a version of it?

Shareena Samson:
It’s only for fresh.

Laura Vogt:
Okay. And what do you think that students might learn from the survey that can affect how they’re preparing the summer?

Shareena Samson:
Well, depending on what they’re telling us, they may be advised to take a math or programming course over the summer. But if students can’t follow our recommendations for whatever reason, say financial reasons, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just important for the student to convey that to their engineering student services advisor after completing Golden Bear Advising, because the student and the advisors will need to work together to make sure that they have a course plan that’s reasonable for them in the fall.

Laura Vogt:
And so when they make these course plans, are they planning out their next four years or are you mainly focusing on this first semester right now?

Shareena Samson:
For the purposes of this survey, it’s mainly for the first year.

Laura Vogt:
And then the advisors are there to help you plan out the rest of the time if you need it later? This is just getting you door kind of thing.

Shareena Samson:
Absolutely, yes.

Laura Vogt:
And do we think that students will learn about their outside commitments from some of the survey questions and answers?

Shareena Samson:
I hope so. Time management is a work in progress for most of our first year students. Many students come to Berkeley and they get a little bit blindsided by the pacing of our courses because it’s so different from high school, and even community college. And that can be a problem obviously that could be made worse if people feel unprepared. So I’m hoping as students answer the questions, they will imagine how much time those outside responsibilities take and how they’re going to juggle them with courses that are very time consuming. I’m going to warn people now that homework will take more time than ever before. They won’t be able to phone it in. They will need to set stricter personal boundaries and prioritize their academics more than they have in the past. So hopefully this form will help them see a bigger picture, because there is only so many hours in a day.

Laura Vogt:
I want all the hours.

Shareena Samson:
All the hours. Wouldn’t it be awesome if every day was 48 hours?

Laura Vogt:
Is there anything else that you want to… Like advice that you would give? Because right now our students are going through the Golden Bear Advising, so do you have any advice that you would want to share with them as they’re finishing out this month of June?

Shareena Samson:
In terms of the information that they give us, it’s always best to be as honest as possible with their advisor. Posturing doesn’t help if you know that in the end it might lead to a schedule that’s not appropriate for you. So it’s always best to be as completely honest as possible about your outside responsibilities, if you have caretaking responsibilities, if you have other concerns, please share them with your advisor. So I think that’s the biggest takeaway is that the more communicative a student is with their advisor, the better advice they’re going to get in terms of how to schedule their courses.

Laura Vogt:
And I feel like students are going to learn about a lot of resources over the summer and I don’t want to downplay, I want to give a lot of props to the resource that is the ESS advisors, that all of you have years of experience. Sharon was saying in our podcast last week that all of you are actually Berkeley engineer, or not Berkeley engineering, but you see Berkeley undergrads. So you’ve been through [inaudible 00:09:31]-

Shareena Samson:
Not all of us, but most of us.

Laura Vogt:
Most of you. So I think that you are such a resource to make sure that they use, and that it’s not a wasted opportunity that you have these folks that can give advice for you.

Shareena Samson:
Yeah. And the sooner you start building a relationship with us, I mean the more comfortable you are going to get for any question that you may have to ask somebody on campus.

Laura Vogt:
Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Shareena, for being here today.

Shareena Samson:
Thank you so much for having me.

Laura Vogt:
And thank you to everyone for tuning in to The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. And we’ll be back next week with more tips from students on your first year and first steps as you become a Berkeley engineer. Bye.