academic records in UC Berkeley’s

Cal students have more in common than their strong academic
records — they all have demonstrated the potential to add to UC
Berkeley’s rich intellectual environment and spirit of pluralism.
Berkeley’s academic programs are recognized internationally for
their excellence. More than 7,000 courses and more than 100 undergraduate
majors are available in the sciences, humanities, arts, social
sciences and natural resources. Students also may design their own
undergraduate majors. Nearly 100 freshman and sophomore seminars
are offered each semester, featuring small classes on topics of
special interest to the professors.
Even fi rst-year students may fi nd themselves in a classroom with one
of Berkeley’s 131 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 28
MacArthur fellows, 299 members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences,
14 National Medal of Science awardees or four Pulitzer Prize
winners. These faculty members and their distinguished colleagues
choose to teach and study at Berkeley because of its legacy of innovative
thinking and its exceptional standard for scholarship.
Through the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, students
reap the benefi t of attending a renowned research university by getting
hands-on, real-life experience in the labs of some of the foremost
researchers working today.
Berkeley has one of the top university libraries in the nation. With well
over 10 million volumes and more than 400 special collections, Berkeley’s
library holdings are the fourth-largest in North America and
have been ranked fi rst in the United States among public libraries by
the Association of Research Libraries. In addition to the Doe/Moffi tt
libraries for undergraduates, some three dozen subject-specifi c and
affi liated libraries serve schools and programs across campus.
Distinguished museums of anthropology, paleontology and science,
and the Berkeley Art Museum, which includes one of the country’s
leading fi lm exhibition centers, the Pacifi c Film Archive, are all housed
on campus.
The Berkeley campus is divided into 14 colleges and schools, most of
which are subdivided into departments. Colleges and schools that
offer programs for undergraduates are the Haas School of Business,
College of Chemistry, College of Engineering, College of Environmental
Design, College of Letters and Science, and College of Natural
Resources. The College of Letters and Science is the largest, comprising
more than half the campus’s faculty and nearly three-quarters of its
undergraduate students.