Lower Division Prerequisites: Fill & Download for Free

No.That’s because you’ll be a small fish in a big pond. There will myriads of high-school valedictorians in your freshman class, and the vast majority would have graduated in the top 10% of their high school class. (You’ll be on a totally different battleground, think: FIFA World Cup versus high-school soccer.) Quite a few lower division core courses will be graded on a curve, so a 38% on a midterm could mean an A+ and a 93% a C, depending on who you are competing with.You’ll also have to devise a strategy in addition to hard work and grit. Things like which professor is “easier” and prerequisites that kill two birds with one stone may seem trivial and nonsense, but mapping out your plan is essential to success at Berkeley. More than 50% of freshmen don’t make it to junior year, and Berkeley also has a 6-year maximum enrollment allowed for undergraduate degrees (the College of Engineering has 4).You also don’t want to end up at the bottom third of your major when you graduate from Berkeley (or else it will be quite difficult to get into a management trainee rotation program or an internship at Google, Intel, Genentech, or Disney.)Granted, some majors will be “easier” than others, but working out your game plan and navigating the maze at Berkeley isn’t easy, so be prepared. Berkeley isn’t a top school for nothing.

You cannot get a BA or any advanced degree in a community college. HOWEVER, you can get the basics of physics and math done and take every general education class you need and more lower division prerequisite classes for physics so that you can focus on only upper division classes when you get to a university

The biggest loophole that I have exploited is getting into a physics graduate program without a physics degree. I was, of course, interested in chemistry when I decided to major in it, but let me explain how in hindsight choosing to major in chemistry (even if I did know from the beginning that I wanted to go to graduate school in physics) combined with the fact that physics graduate schools don't require that your degree be in physics could have made a good loophole.When I started college, I was fairly behind in math. I placed into trigonometry and needed to get up to calculus before I could even start taking physics courses. Given that physics is one of the most sequential majors (quantum mechanics, for instance, is a three quarter series that requires classical mechanics and math methods which both require lower division physics which requires calculus), there is no way that I could have finished school in four years had I chosen to major in physics.Now let's look at the chemistry degree. Chemistry requires the same lower division courses as physics (calculus, differential equations, and physics for scientists and engineers). Chemistry also requires quantum mechanics and thermodynamics as well as some electives. But chemists take quantum chemistry which is in the chemistry department rather than quantum mechanics in the physics department. What is the significance of this? While quantum mechanics requires a string of upper division physics prerequisites, quantum chemistry does not; you can take it immediately after finishing all of your lower division courses.So, instead of majoring in physics and spending five years as an undergraduate student, I majored in chemistry and finished school in four years. I made the most of my physics and physics related classes, used my electives to ensure that I had taken all of the core physics courses (e.g. upper division classical mechanics), studied a lot for the GRE, and managed to get accepted into several physics graduate programs despite holding a degree in chemistry.(Since one of the topics was saving money, let me point out that time is money [especially when time costs tuition] and finding a way to get through school in less time means more money saved.)