Published 4/30/2025 by Praniti Gulyani
If you’re a Berkeley student, chances are that you’ve come across Berkeley Time, an invaluable resource that helps you plan your classes, assess the difficulty level of classes that you want to take, and check grade distribution. It also helps you get a sense of what a certain professor is like, taking the otherwise vast essence of a classroom and bringing it to your laptop screen. This week, We Are Cal was fortunate to be joined by Advay Ratan, a third-year-undergraduate at UC Berkeley who is pursuing a major in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. Advay, who will be a Summer Intern at Optiver this year, is the President of Berkeley Time and has worked with Apple in the past. He is also an SC (Safety Coordinator) at the Berkeley Residence Halls.
I decided to meet Advay at Peet’s Coffee, one of my favorite places to conduct my interviews. As we begin the interview, I ask him a question that is possibly the most basic of all. But I want to hear the answer in his words. “So what is Berkeley Time?” I ask, making sure to emphasize the ‘is’ as my journalistic instinct tells me that there’s more to Berkeley Time than meets the eye. But Advay’s straightforward response emphasizes the simplistic and user-friendly nature of the platform.
“It’s a student run platform that helps students plan for classes. It also helps them see grades and enrollment, and that’s somewhat transformative because when people come to Berkeley, they don’t usually expect to have this kind of information. It’s definitely great for course planning. You can see how hard classes are, and this can be gauged at looking at the kind of grades that people are getting. You can also see what’s the best time to enroll. There is a lot of catalog information also. Basically, it’s just a course planner that helps you plan your academic career at Berkeley,” he says.
As a platform or an organization, Berkeley Time is an all-inclusive entity that welcomes everyone. “I think what’s nice about more engineering-based platforms, such as Berkeley Time, is that a lot of the time it doesn’t really matter who you are. It’s about the problems and just trying to solve them. There are a lot of different solutions to one problem, and who you are doesn’t really determine what solution ends up being the best,” he says, emphasizing the non-discriminatory nature of technology that almost equates it with the arts. “I think that’s what’s so interesting. In a lot of ways, my Berkeley Time has been so different being an international student. But the one thing that’s remained the same is my experience in clubs like Berkeley Time,” he adds.
Like all things technical, Berkeley Time also has significant areas of improvement, and Advay makes sure to talk about them as well. “One problem that we’ve identified with Berkeley Time is that it doesn’t allow you to make a plan for multiple semesters, it’s just limited to one semester right now. So we’re working on a tool that helps you plan for multiple semesters. So you can drag and drop, and plug the classes that you’re going to take each semester. You can also create a track that will help you understand whether or not you’re taking all the requirements for your major. All these are features we’re working on,” he says. The one thing about Berkeley Time that stands out to me the most is its ability to serve as a response to the requests of students. When students requested or expressed their concerns about what could work better, Berkeley Time truly went out of its way to respond, living up to its reputation as a user-friendly platform. It’s hard to figure out what courses are actually valuable for people and what they enjoy taking. One way to figure it out is by gathering user feedback, similar to platforms like Rate My Professor and Reddit. This is another feature that we’re working on, allowing users to enter a rating to our three existing categories: usefulness, workload and difficulty,” he explains.
In addition to being a strong source of support for present students, Berkeley Time is also an effective way for incoming international students to rely on a source that is, as Advay puts it, not just word of mouth. “Sometimes, international students who are coming to Berkeley are the only ones from their school as compared to schools in the Bay Area and Los Angeles who send thousands of students every year,” he acknowledges. “For them, Berkeley Time is a website that aggregates information about how this class has been, how hard it is to get a certain grade, how many people have enjoyed their time in the course, and how useful it is in the future. It makes this information accessible for everyone,” he says.
For Advay, Berkeley Time has also been an effective way to give back to the community. “All of us always want to have something that has a lot of impact. And they’re thousands of students using Berkeley Time. It’s a small impact, and it feels really cool to be a part of it. For example, I’ve been the one who’s been releasing the grades on the website for the past three semesters, and it is so nice to have this kind of impact on the Berkeley community, allowing me to connect deeply on a personal level with the community.” I find myself disagreeing with Advay. “I’m done with my English major and in the beginning of this semester, I found myself logging onto Berkeley Time to look at breadth requirements. So I don’t think that the impact is small. It is somewhat omnipresent and made my life a lot easier,” I say with a smile, realizing that through this interview, I had just uncovered another way to measure the extent of impact— not by charts of numbers, but by the promptness of memory.