University of California,

Berkeley

Haas School of Business

Fall 2018-19 Exchange Report

By Siddhartha Datta, GBUS & IS

I. Monthly Activity Log

Aug 2018

As the semester began at around late August, I headed up to San Francisco and stayed with a high school alumnus of mine. I stayed with him in Millbrae, California, where I lived the life of an Asian Californian for about a week. I then went on to live with another high school alumnus currently working in a biotech Silicon Valley firm and stayed with his family in San Jose for a few days.

While in San Jose, I headed down to Mountainview to explore the Googleplex and cycled around the marshes using one of their bicycles. I then visited Fremont, which consists of five distinct districts. The Niles district was notably historic, as it was Hollywood before Hollywood existed; Charlie Chaplin and other filmmakers in the 1920s used Niles as their base for film production.

Towards the last week of August, all transfer and exchange students participated in the “Golden Bear Orientation”. I made some of my closest friends throughout the whole semester during orientation. I was able to have fun at activities I normally would not have engaged in Hong Kong, such as silent discos, piano duels, etc.

View of the waterfront at Millbrae, at the outskirts of SF

Trip to MountainView

Visiting Fremont and Niles

The Haas School of Business

Golden Bear Orientation – a silent disco

Sept 2018

As I prepared for the semester and audited classes, I decided to “be an engineer” for the semester. Berkeley is world-renowned for its engineering and computer sciences faculty, and I wanted to be in the center of its education. I attended lectures on artificial intelligence, statistical thermodynamics, computational mechanics, etc. Thankfully I had declared a second major in Information Systems, as it permitted to let me enroll in more technical classes and permit some leeway towards credit transfer. I also attended tech conferences and talks (e.g. Google, Apple, Jane Street).

The campus itself was large and takes about 10 minutes to get from one class to another (hence there is a buffer period to be late to class by 10 mins, called “Berkeley Time”).

Beyond schoolwork, I decided to join two research labs. I worked with the Laboratory for Children Education, where I helped develop tools to analyze word meaning usage by children. With Cal Unmanned, an autonomous drone (i.e. drones that fly themselves) lab, I worked with graduate students on reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous flight.

Outside class, I spent a lot of weekends checking out San Francisco, taking long walks along the Piers on Embarcadero, visiting Union Square, trotting through the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. A few friends and I also attended the first football game of the semester (which Cal won). Soon enough, I was watching my first baseball game starring the Oakland Athletics (also stars of the film Moneyball). American sport was one thing; watching Americans spend so much time and money on sport entertainment is something you must see for yourself.

Soon enough, the International House (the dormitory I was living in) opened a fashion show (entitled “Global Homecoming”) to share the wonders of different cultures around the world. I dressed in traditional Bangladeshi clothing (called a Panjabi) and strutted around with my country’s flag: I have never been so patriotic in my life.

Sather Tower The Golden Gate

My first football game at Cal Stadium

My first baseball game at Oakland Coliseum

Representing Bangladesh at the I-House Global Homecoming

Oct 2018

During this month, I travelled around California. I took the bus down to Los Angeles, where I stayed with a friend and his family. Took a trip with them throughout Burbank, downtown LA, Hollywood, USC, Santa Monica Pier and its beaches, Universal City, and savored the breathtaking view from Griffith’s Observatory.

I also celebrated the Mexican version of Halloween, “Dia de los Muertos” (Day of the Dead), where makeup artists painted me as a white skeleton and I roamed around to various altars around campus to respect the dead.

Nov 2018

November was the month of technological innovation for me. I won two major hackathons (hosted by the largest, most prominent hacking organization in the world Major League Hacking): CalHacks and SacHacks. At CalHacks, me and my team built a pair of glasses where users with Alzheimer’s or similar mental disorders would see a world of “grey”, and when they utter the object they are searching for, our object detection algorithms would detect the object in their surroundings in real-time and highlight it for them to find. SacHacks was also a great opportunity for me to explore Sacramento, the capital of California.

Santa Monica Pier

Universal City

View of LA from Griffiths Observatory

Dia de los Muertos, aka Halloween

Winning CalHacks, the biggest hackathon on the

West Coast Winning SacHacks

Dec 2018

California was full of danger when I visited. When in Niles, I misinterpreted Google Maps and walked along a train track, almost got runover by a train, and found there was a footbridge a few miles off. When coming back from Sacramento to Berkeley, I almost got stabbed by a “high” African American and talked my way to safety. Watching the highly anticipated Stanford v. Cal football game was no exception. Rather than watching in the stadium as usual, me and my friend decided to watch from the hills overlooking the Bay Area and the stadium. The view was to die for; literally unfortunately, as during the middle of the game, a tree suddenly snapped, started falling upon the camp of Berkeley fans, and branches, twigs and debris exploded everywhere. I was not injured too badly, though others had it bad. The group of game-watchers quickly got to their feet to continue watching the game, humoring the irony of the falling tree (context: Stanford’s mascot is a tree).

During this exam month, concluding a semester full of projects, presentations, research studies, programming, and insight-sharing, most of my assessments were in the format of a final presentation. For the Data-X course, our project had been a prediction algorithm of decision-making based on ECoG brain signals, which we then presented to a panel of machine learning experts, business development aces and entrepreneurs. The wonderful thing about Berkeley is that there are so many postgraduate students proactively working on interesting projects and are willing to engage undergraduates in their work (e.g. I was working with a neuroscience PhD in the Data-X project).

After a semester of positive stress, I set off for Vegas with a friend, and we entered almost every single casino to take in all the sights. The Vegas Strip was extremely compact (even more than Hong Kong), and in one building alone you could spend hours looking at slot machines, theatre shows, public displays (e.g. canals at the Venetian and fountains at Caesar’s Palace). We spent a day there, taking the night bus to get there and taking the night bus to leave, so we did not have to afford the exorbitant hotel fees.

Las Vegas Strip

Presenting neuroscience research at Data-X

Jan 2019

The semester was over but I still did not want to go home, so I decided to visit my blood relatives in New York City, whom I have never seen before in my 20 years of existence. Living with a Bengali family in the US has been a very conflicting experience personally, as every nuance in their lifestyle leads to some form of comparison in my head to how my family lives in Hong Kong.

Other than lifestyle differences, I also noticed cultural differences and similarities between New Yorkers and Hong Kongers. Of all the cities in the US, and dare I say the world now, I had the best feeling from NYC. The people move quickly and efficiently; once I saw a woman, leaving an investment banking building, pull off her heels and switch to Timberlands. The people also have some special bond: when I was waiting for a train at 2am that had been delayed four times and never arrived, me and a few other New Yorkers were concerned and decided to stick together and search throughout the station for the train; one of us found where the train was coming and had a minute to get on it, but instead went looking for the rest of us, risking missing the train.

In terms of sightseeing, I relished all that NYC had to offer: Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge, World Trade Tower Memorial Site, Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University, and the list goes on.

Times Square

Brooklyn Bridge

State of Liberty & Manhattan

Central Park

Towards the end of my trip, I entered the state of New Jersey and stayed with a friend I met at Berkeley. I stayed in his accommodating family house, and had a nerf gun battle across three stories. We went to see the old AT&T Building (the one that discovered cosmic background radiation), Holmdel Park, and the most beautiful place in NJ – Princeton. The campus was absolutely gorgeous, giving a rustic, medieval vibe; it felt very intellectually empowering.

Towards the end of the trip, I reflected on my experiences, which had been extremely dense over the course of five months. I had seen a much larger variety of people, not only in college, but in California and New York. I had travelled to a total of four states (California, Nevada, New York, New Jersey), and learnt that in the US you could walk for five minutes and still be in the same place. I have busted myths that I believed in, including that of Silicon Valley, its innovation, and tech giants. I witnessed firsthand the successes but also the hardships of its people. In the end, there is nothing to envy, only to empathize.

Columbia University

Princeton University

II. General Exchange Information

Visa Procedures

Apply for the visa as soon as you receive the I90 form Berkeley. You need to apply for it online as soon as the university allocation is confirmed, then you can apply for a student J1 visa to the US. It takes about two weeks to receive the form. Bring the form with you to the US Embassy on the day of interview. You should be able to receive the form in about three days.

Courses

For course registration, the procedures are similar to what we have at HKUST. Since my semester began on Aug 25, my add-drop period began at around this time for two weeks, where I could sit in for classes and decide to get in or not. The waitlists can get pretty long, so be sure to enroll in your desired courses as soon as possible during your assigned timeslot. There is an online system called Calcentral (the Berkeley equivalent of myust) to register for the courses, and bcourses (the Berkeley equivalent of Canvas) to view course content.

During my semester, I enrolled in the following courses:

(i) Power and Politics, under the Haas School of Business (ii) Data Visualizations, under the School of Information (iii) Applied Machine Learning (“Data-X”), under the Industrial Engineering & Operations

Management department (iv) Startup Disco, under the Haas School of Business (v) Networks Analysis, under the Computer Science department (vi) Amazoogle: Data-driven Business Models, under the Industrial Engineering &

Operations Management department

I highly recommend the classes I took this semester. The Data Visualizations class was taught by a current Google employee, where he demonstrates skills and nuances used in a professional work setting to build highly aesthetic yet functional visualizations, which would be useful for chart-making in decks. Data-X is a flagship Berkeley class where the instructors invite industry experts to teach an complete crash course through machine learning for students of all backgrounds, and the final output is a functioning project and decent coding skill. Amazoogle is a course taught by a product management expert and current venture capital partner, where they push students to build a complete business model, startup plan, technology system, and final pitch, with a special focus on how data is monetized to create more value for the business.

The teaching style, particularly at the business school, is very similar to that of HKUST’s business school; they adopt case-based learning, invite students to proactively participate in class, and use presentations as a medium of assessment. Examinations are similar to HKUST in the sense that cheatsheets may be permitted dependent on the class, and you have to study for it.

The assessment method for most of my courses were focused mostly on project output; most of my work included presentations, pitch decks, vlogs, weekly essays; for some of the more traditional Computer Science and Business courses, there would be midterms and final exams. The average workload is expected to be quite high for courses, as a lot of out-of-class preparation is normally expected; the good news is that if you are doing a course you enjoy, then the workload will not seem that high, as project-based courses are not strict about the assignments but about the final product.

Orientation Activities

The Golden Bear Orientation is for all transfer students, freshman and exchange students. It will be a one week programme where you will meet new students to Berkeley (so it is an important to make friends so you are not alone for the first few weeks). Activities in orientation include informational tours around the campus and the different faculties, meetings with your host exchange department, safety talks, and fun activities at the end of the day. In the evenings, groups had the chance to participate in silent discos, attend piano duels, and attend football cheering sessions.

International Services & Activities

There were not too many activities held by the Berkeley International Office (BIO). Most activities that students take up are found through friend networks; I personally found events through Facebook events and messages from friends. The BIO office does provide one-on-one sessions to discuss visa issues once you are on campus; their office is located at the International House.

Social Clubs & Networking Opportunities

There a lot of tech clubs, consulting clubs, fraternities and social causes clubs on campus (there are more than 500 clubs on campus); the purpose of most of the clubs is to socialize and meet friends passionate about a certain subject. In terms of networking opportunities, there are more than plenty of chances to meet leaders in the tech industry. There are events happening on campus every single day, whether it is a team from Google giving a talk on how their algorithms work, or a renowned academic giving a lecture on their specific field of expertise. Beyond Berkeley, there are talks taking place every week in San Francisco (which is a bus ride away), and, if you are willing to make the trip, networking events in San Jose / Mountainview (i.e. Silicon Valley). Most of the professionals I have encountered were from the tech field; there were not too many consulting talks or networking sessions, but there were a sufficient variety of talks from investment banks and quantitative hedge funds (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Jane Street, Citadel).

Finance & Banking

I used Bank of the West to store my money, and they provided a free debit card to carry out transactions. They do not charge money for keeping money in the bank, and the only bank charge is paper statements sent to your mail.

In terms of actual expenditure, this is a rough breakdown:

Cost item Cost (US$) Transportation (Flights, Buses, Trains) 3,600

Accommodation and Food 12,000 Orientation (“Golden Bear Orientation” 1,500

Basic expenses (necessities, phone bills, etc) 1,000 Miscellaneous expenses (game tickets, etc) 800

Total US$ 18,900

Accommodation and Food

I stayed at the International House for the semester, where they provide breakfast, lunch and dinner as part of the boarding costs. The meals are offered in buffet format with a large variety of dishes. The double rooms at the “I-House” are smaller than those of HKUST, and it is best to apply for any sort of accommodation as quickly as possible as space is limited for all on-campus accommodation.

Transportation

I used AC Transit (bus service) to travel around San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland. There is also the BART (train service) to explore the deeper nooks and crannies of San Francisco.

Communication

For phone communication, Berkeley had sent me a Mint Mobile SIM card; if you download the app, then you can basically pay for a e-contract to pay for internet and phone calls (about $70 dollars for 3 months). Having internet connectivity is quite important for getting around the US, especially if you cannot drive and need to walk long distance (and remember to carry a power bank with you).

Climate

The climate is quite hot and humid, though it can get quite chilly in the morning. Average daily temperature is about 22 degrees Celsius, and one normally wears a light jacket in the Bay Area, but no heavy temperature drops usually occur.

Health & Safety

While there, there was a wildfire nearby in upstate California, and smoke covered a great portion of the state, including Berkeley. I needed to wear a mask for about two weeks since the air pollution index in the area was extremely high. In terms of crime, students do not normally walk alone at night even on campus. Berkeley (particularly along Telegraph Avenue) and Oakland are crime-infested areas and one should be wary at all times.

Oktoberfest Meal at I-House The International House on a foggy night

III. Items to Bring

Clothing

Jackets / Coats / Sweaters Trousers / Joggers / Shorts Dress shirts / T-shirts Suit

Amenities

Pillow(s) Bedsheets Blanket(s) Laundry bag / Detergent Toothbrush / Toothpaste / Mouthwash Shaver / Razer Emergency medicine / Lotion

Work essentials

Notebooks / Stationary Camera / Mobile device / Chargers Money / Passport

IV. Useful Links & Contacts

Course catalog: https://classes.berkeley.edu/

Transport map (BART): https://www.bart.gov/

Transport map (AC Transit): http://www.actransit.org/

Campus police (emergency contact): https://ucpd.berkeley.edu/home (Dial 510-642-3333 or use a Blue Light emergency phone or dial 911 if you need help.)