What is your take on the pros and cons of each university’s program? I understand that Berkeley’s computer science is ranked higher, but how much of a role should that play in my college decision? I find it hard to say no to Berkeley but Princeton’s remarkable focus on undergraduates and faculty to student ratio is also compelling. What do you guys think?
If your goal is to go to work at one of the top IT firms out of UG then Cal might be a better choice. All the top firms recruit heavily from Cal and that’s not necessarily true about Princeton. Still Princeton is a top CS school and you should have relatively easy time finding top internships and a job and still have all the other advantages that Princeton offers.
@Fluflaydepas I think so many other factors should be involved:
- Are you solely focused on just a CS degree, might you want to study other areas? Do you value flexibility?
- Are you a large school, or small school person?
- Do you like being in big classes, scared of being in smaller classes?
- Do you want seasons or do you like Bay Area 75 degree consistency?
- Do you like the idea of a thesis / research? Or just wanna code?
- Does the concept of eating clubs intrigue you? Do you want Greek life?
- Do you want to stay in California after school?
- Affordability an issue?
Life is so much more than optimizing around the best undergrad program, when you have two or more excellent school choices, you’ll be fine either way, and perhaps you should consider more data points.
my coworker’s D in Cal EECS. She regrets the decision, saying the class of 1500 people is like an on-line class.
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@Fluflaydepas
Princeton
Undergraduates 5,400
Student to faculty ratio 5 to 1
4 yr graduation rate 90%
75% SAT Critical Reading 790
75% SAT Math 800
Berkeley
Undergraduates 29,310
Student to faculty ratio 18 to 1
4 yr graduation rate 76%
75% SAT Critical Reading 750
75% SAT Math 790
I think @psywar has a good approach. Consider the educational environment that best suits you. Berkeley has more than five times as many students as Princeton. Do you prefer a small town friendly atmosphere or do you prefer the anonymity of a large crowd? Princeton’s low student faculty ratio means most classes have a small number of students and faculty directed student research is expected. Most Princeton students graduate in four years. About one-forth of entering Berkeley freshman will not graduate in four years. Do you know what prevents their graduation? I do not know the reasons for the low 4 year graduation rate at Berkeley. At some state universities the financial aid is not sufficient and students find that some required classes are over subscribed and they cannot register for the classes they need to graduate.
You can read about the history of computer science at Princeton here: http://www.princeton.edu/turing/ and https://www.princeton.edu/turing/alan/history-of-computing-at-p/ Princeton engineers have had an important role in the development of networking and the Internet. David Boggs BSE ’ 72 was a co-inventor of Ethernet. Robert Kahn MS *62, PhD 64 co-invented the Internet protocol TCP/IP. Professor John McCarthy *51 was a founding father of artificial intelligence, designed LISP and first used the term artificial intelligence, and won the Turing Award in 1971. Marvin Minsky *54 was a founding father of the field of artificial intelligence, and is a winner of the 1969 Turing Award. John McCarthy and Marvin Minski co-founded MIT’s artificial intelligence lab. Fei-Fei Li ‘99 is the director of Stanford University’s artificial intelligence lab.
Silicon Valley proximity to Berkeley is a plus for Berkeley. Each year Princeton Tiger Trek makes a trip to Silicon Valley to visit with companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Khan Academy, Telsa Motors, Twitter, Square, Juniper Networks, Hewlett-Packard, and several venture capital firms. Princeton alumni are scattered throughout Silicon Valley. Brad Smith '81 is the president of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos EE & CS ‘86 CEO of Amazon operates the largest cloud service with over 2 million servers, Eric Schmidt EE '76 was the long time Executive Chairman of Google. Both Princeton and Berkeley will prepare you for IT jobs; chose the university where you are most comfortable.
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While your gender is not important Princeton has made an effort to attract all races and genders to study STEM. Princeton is almost unique in it ability to attract well qualified women engineering students. 48% of the entering freshman engineering class are women. Jennifer Rexford ‘91 is the chairman of the CS department. Rexford won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (the award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or service contribution at or before age 35) in 2005, for her work on introducing network routing subject to the different business interests of the operators of different subnetworks into Border Gateway Protocol. Rexford says “Our great Princeton Women in Computer Science group runs fantastic events, provides mentoring to first and second year students, sends a large group of students to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and generally fosters a wonderful sense of community.”
Net price at each? Debt, if any, at each?
Also: do you prefer Silicon Valley or Wall Street?
Many of the current CS faculty are considered outstanding researchers and teachers. Read through their bios. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/people/faculty There are two many outstanding faculty to list here. I decided to provide a short description of five faculty members. Professor Brian Kernighan* 69 is the co-author of the first book on the C programming language (The C Programming Language) and contributed to the development of UNIX. Google’s Alan Donovan commenting on Kernigham’s C book which he “called the most influential book in the history of computers.” Kernigham’s most recent book, The Go Programming Language is the #1 Best Selling programming language book on Amazon. [The Go language’s built-in concurrency gives it an edge for networking, distributed functions, and services.] https://www.amazon.com/Brian-W.-Kernighan/e/B000AQ1TNQ Professor Edward Felton is a national expert in computer security and privacy. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/people/profile/felten and http://wws.princeton.edu/faculty-research/faculty/felten Professor Sharad Malik is the director of the GigaScale Systems Research Center (GSRC) which is a consortium of 15 universities (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Harvard, Berkeley, GIT, etc.) designing the hardware, programming techniques and applications of computing of future computers. Princeton is the lead university and Princeton students can be GSRC researchers. https://www.futurearchs.org/team/sharad-malik Professor of EE Andrew Houck '2000 has been named one of the world’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine and is a Sloan Research Fellow. He was honored for his work to build a quantum computer by using superconducting circuits as quantum bits, or qubits. He has been honored by President Obama as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and won a NSF Early Career Award. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FDaDebbNmQ Professor Olga Russakovsky was named to MIT’s list of young technology leaders, Innovators under 35 for her research into computer vision. https://www.technologyreview.com/lists/innovators-under-35/2017/inventor/olga-russakovsky/
@“Cariño” no surprise Princeton doesn’t make the list based on “volume of hires”. Santa Clara has more engineering students (7k) than Princeton has total undergraduates (5.4k).
Where did you get the following SAT scores for Berkeley?
75% SAT Critical Reading 750
75% SAT Math 790
The link below stated differently.
https://admissions.berkeley.edu/student-profile
SAT Composite (25th & 75th percentiles) 1290-1480
SAT Math Section (25th & 75th percentiles) 640-760
SAT Evidence-Based Reading & Writing Section (25th & 75th percentiles) 640-730
OP: It is important to read through this very informative thread, visit both schools, determine your comfort level at each school, consider COA at each school, then enjoy your 4 years at Princeton.
P.S. It would be interesting to read if @PtonAlumnus has any thoughts on this matter.
I think Berkeley EECS is more plugged into the Silicon Valley ecosystem-for example Professors are more likely to be be on Boards of Directors or advisers to PE firms- hence better networking and better access to internships/jobs
@StevenToCollege
The SAT scores that I cited are from https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?s=all&q=berkeley&id=110635#admsns Look under admissions. I have used nces.ed/gov since I think the data is not biased and it is easy to compare universities. I have not researched their data for accuracy.
@Publisher
I have interviewed students for Princeton for almost two decades. I think most students are leaning to one university before they receive their admissions decisions. I attempt to provide readers on this forum factual information so that they can make an informed decision. One of my best friends in graduate school was a Berkeley graduate. He enjoyed the university and spoke highly of his undergraduate experience. I know that Berkeley has a very good reputation in California.
I am concerned that cutbacks in state funding has had a negative effect on most state universities. I do not have personal knowledge how state support has effected the undergraduate experience at Berkeley. Here are two articles that explain the problem. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/uc-berkeley-and-other-public-ivies-in-fiscal-peril/2011/12/14/gIQAfu4YJP_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6bc34719d19e and https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/us/university-of-california-berkeley-deficit.html. I support state support for public universities and hope that state governments will increase their support for their state university.
Princeton has the largest endowment per undergraduate. This enables the university to be generous to fund student’s education. I know one undergrad that received funding to study in Europe after their freshman year. I know another grad that recently received funding so that she could work for a non profit after graduation.
Here is another discussion of Berkeley vs Princeton for engineering. http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1877363-engineering-meche-or-eecs-berkeley-or-princeton.html
I suspect that one of the biggest differences will be class size. Using USNews data:
Princeton Student-faculty ratio 5:1
Classes with fewer than 20 students 73%
Berkeley Student-faculty ratio 18:1
Classes with fewer than 20 students 52.3%
I wish Fluflaydepas success wherever they decide to attend.
thank you everyone for your input. As of now, I am leaning toward Princeton, but will be attending Princeton Preview tomorrow to completely make sure it is the right choice.
I definitely wouldn’t pass up the chance to study at Princeton.
Jeff Bezos went to Princeton. Just sayin’.