<p>This same question was asked in the engineering forum. In choosing between the two schools, one thing the OP wanted to know is who would be hired first, a Berkeley engineering grad or a Cornell engineering grad. A terrific response from that forum is as follows:</p>
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<p>If you took two candidates, one from each program, and plunked them down in front of an interviewer at, say, Sandia National Labs or Raytheon or Microsoft or whatever top employer you'd like, and the interviewer has to choose exactly one candidate to hire, there's pretty much no chance that the determining factor between the two candidates is going to be whichever of those two programs they chose to attend. It'll come down to interviewing skills, interpersonal skills, references, research experiences, special interests in a certain subfield, salary requirements, and other random factors.</p>
<p>When an employer looks at your resume, it's like a checklist. They're not getting out their US News & World Reports for this year and saying, "Oh... hmm... Berkeley has eight more points on the scale than Cornell, this candidate must be the superior candidate." The employer's going to say, "Hmm... Cornell. That's a good program." Or they're going to say, "Hmm... Berkeley. That's a good program."</p>
<p>Making a new hire is like choosing apples at the grocery store. There are the obviously bad apples that you can rule out for sure, then there are a ton of pretty good apples that you might disregard because there's a bruise, or its skin is broken in one spot, and then there are the good apples. You'll end up with a small number of apples that look really good. So what do you do? You only want one apple. So you take the one that has two stickers on it, because you like stickers. Maybe you take the one with the nicer stem, or something. You're not going to call the apple orchard and see which apple's tree had more branches, or something. </p>
<p>I think you guys think that there's a lot more research involved in hiring an employee than there actually is. Most of the times I went on interviews, the interviewer couldn't find my resume in their stack (I always carried extra ones, and extra reference sheets, and I made up CDs with writing samples and mpegs of presentations I've done and my transcripts and such, which made a good impression and helped a lot) or if they <em>did</em> have my resume, they read it aloud to me, giving their general impressions sotto voce as they went along ("Hunh... Rice... good school... You from Texas? There's a really good Tex-Mex place that we went to at the last company happy hour...") and not once did someone say, "Rice... Did you not get into Duke or Stanford? They're higher ranked than Rice," or anything of the sort.</p>
<p>Both programs are good. Best to spend time networking, or getting involved in public speaking, or prepping for your interviews and getting good grades once you get to college, than using rankings or job opportunities to choose which school you go to. Develop yourself as a person at whichever university you feel you'd be a more well-rounded person at, and that will be the better program choice for you.
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