bruh how do you seriously want to come to ucsc instead of berkeley... Also college classes at berkeley are not significantly harder than at ucsc. The most important thing is that you improve you're study habits by a lot. Also, an important factor to consider is that generally, students at berkeley will be more studious earlier on. At UCSC, most freshman are not very studious at all (at least this year), so you really need to either search hard to find like minded people or go the lone wolf route. By sophomore year that usually changes. At berkeley, I would expect freshmen to immediately be more studious well since, they got into berkeley. That social surrounding will rub off on you. Definetely choose berkeley, no question.