<p>I got accepted to all of these schools and the scholarship money is about the same, so its a pretty hard decision for me. Unfortunately, I cant go visit any of the schools since I just dont have the time or resources to do so, so Ima have to depend on research and what other people tell me:(</p>
<p>I got into the engineering school for every college, but truthfully Im not too sure what I want to do in the future. I might become an actually engineer or maybe go into medicine or something else entirely! Berkeley is offering me the Regent's Scholarship and will only make me pay 6k a year. Cornell is 8k, Rice is 10k, and Hopkins is around 13k. Berkeley is for EECS, Cornell is CompE, Rice is Bioengineering, and Hopkins is Biomolecular engineering. </p>
<p>Any suggestions on what to do? Thanks everyone!</p>
<p>If you do not have any personal preferences worth sharing, then about all we have to go on are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The school reputations. All are excellent. Berkeley is especially well-regarded for general engineering, EE and CS (w/Cornell #2); Hopkins is highly regarded for biomedical engineering (w/Rice #2). I’m just going by the US News engineering rankings, which you can examine online for yourself in greater detail.</p></li>
<li><p>Cost. Depending on where you live, some of the differences may be eaten up by travel expenses. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>So, based on these two criteria alone, it looks like Berkeley is the fairly clear choice. </p>
<p>There are all sorts of other interesting differences among these schools, but you have not told us enough about yourself to know what might matter to you. Cornell gets cold; Rice gets very hot and humid in summer; Berkeley stays fairly mild; Hopkins gets a mix (>90 degrees and humid in the summer; occasional heavy snow and 15 degree days in winter). Rice is small (~5500 students); Berkeley is huge (~36K students); Cornell (~21K) and Hopkins (~19K) are in between. The Berkeley and Rice undergraduate programs have a little less national drawing power than the other two ( they get relatively more students from California and Texas respectively). Many Asian students go to Cal … and so on.</p>
<p>If you think there’s a good chance you might switch out of engineering, then Rice would be perfect. It has an engineering program on par with the other schools, but allows its students complete flexibility to switch into its other schools and other majors easily.</p>
<p>I would pick Hopkins considering how well regarded their BME program is. Then again, I’m kind of biased since JHU is one of my favorite schools.</p>
<p>Just a clarification of TK21769’s post which indicated that Hopkins has 19,000 students. That’s technically correct but largely misleading. Arts & Sciences students and engineering students share the Homewood campus–which has about 4700 undergraduates and 1600 graduate students. Hopkins has a large number of part time graduate students on satellite campuses (such as Montgomery County, Md.) which make up the bulk of the total student population. Undergraduates at Homewood are not impacted by those students, will probably never see them, and, to a large extent, are not even aware of their existence. The bottom line is that Hopkins is effectively much closer to Rice in size than it is to Berkeley or Cornell.</p>
<p>I think that size makes a difference. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, you’re going to know your TA’s a lot better than your professors because of the huge numbers of students in each class, particularly in lower level classes. While all four schools are fine institutions and peers academically, as an undergraduate you will get much more of a hand tooled education at Hopkins or Rice.</p>
<p>Guess I should add my $0.02 (complete with Berkeley bias).</p>
<p>Let’s see…1. Berkeley EECS is one of the top/most competive admission engineering programs in the nation. 2. The university is located in the SF Bay Area…home to Silicon Valley and the tech industry. 3. It’s cheapest and you’re Regents.</p>