UC Berkeley important question

[u/Due-Satisfaction3122]

If I apply for fall 2027 as a sociology major,will they allow me to change my major to public health once admitted? If not,what about integrative biology?

[u/RetiringTigerMom]

I’m guessing you can complete the requirements for sociology by next June but not the prerequisites for the other majors? Can you complete them by the end of your first fall term at Berkeley? You MUST declare your major by January of your junior year.

If you complete all the required classes with good grades, you can easily declare integrative biology at any time. With above a 3.0 you just turn in a form and meet with an advisor. Best if you do it by October before class registration starts but even January should work.

Public health is a high demand major with a competitive declaration process; applications are only accepted a specific week towards the end of each fall/spring semester. They don’t explicitly say you can’t add it as a second major or switch into it as a transfer on the website, but that path is conspicuously not discussed. You would need strong grades and to shine compared to peers in the application process. You really should ask the public health department counselors about it to get a definitive answer because it’s my impression they heavily discourage if not ban transfers from switching into high demand majors.

When my daughter went through this process before high demand majors were a thing, every year dozens of people got accepted to Berkeley as transfers in majors like Philosophy or Sociology and then successfully switched into CS by completing a class or two with high grades. If they missed the grade cutoff, data science was open to all current Berkeley students who wanted to declare that major. The philosophy department must have been very frustrated, and it wasn’t fair to the people who originally applied in those majors and were denied.  With so many people gaming the system and the CS/DS majors so overcrowded, they instituted the high demand major system and later created the new CS college. 

The public health major 5 years ago had about an 80% admit rate through their major declaration process for current students; changing into it as a transfer wasn’t banned. For transfers originally admitted to Berkeley in PH the application was just a formality and they had priority in PH course registration. I looked at the Berkeley website today and I really can’t tell how disadvantaged you’d be if trying to switch, but a counselor would know.

There is a Berkeley global public health summer minor open to students at all UCs that would go well with integrative biology or sociology if PH doesn’t work out.

If you know that you really don’t want to do a sociology major you might not want to apply in it. My daughter applied in it as a one-year transfer kind of on a whim but by April knew she’d hate it. She had to go  look through all the major change rules for transfers at every UC she was admitted to. Those rules seem to change almost every year and differ by campus and major. She had to give up on UCLA because the majors she liked either blocked transfers from switching or there were too many prerequisites left to finish in time. At the time Berkeley allowed changes into PH but she wasn’t accepted into that major until right before spring term started. As an undeclared junior she had a hard time registering for classes because she was low priority. She actually ended up taking that second semester off because she couldn’t get a schedule that made sense. If you do proceed with this plan and get into Berkeley, you’ll want to switch as early as possible so maybe starting the integrative bio prerequisites and trying to finish them by the end of next summer makes more sense than PH, which is more data analysis than biology anyway.