<p>Hi everyone! So I got into Berkeley EECS and Columbia SEAS and am torn as to which to attend. Ideally, Id like to get an electrical engineering Bachelors degree and eventually get a J.D. at some top-flight grad school. However, Im not totally set about my plans and want to keep my options open for the future. So, what would you guys do? Any advice?</p>
<p>Cost differences?</p>
<p>If you are planning on grad school or want flexibility, then go to Columbia. Don’t get me wrong–Cal’s EE program is top-notch. But the school environments are completely different. Here’s why…</p>
<p>Let’s say you change your mind about majoring in EE. When I attended Berkeley in the 1990s, you had to declare your undergraduate major from Day 1. If you changed your mind later, you faced a bureaucratic nightmare that strongly discouraged students from switching, particularly if you wanted to move to a program that was “full”. The Computer Science department comes to mind. By the way, I was a grad student at Cal, but learned about their undergraduate engineering program just by being there.</p>
<p>This scenario will not happen at Columbia SEAS. You select your major in the latter part of your sophomore year, as everyone takes almost the same classes the first two years. That makes more sense. What 17 or 18-year-old knows what he or she wants to study for the next 4 years?</p>
<p>Another thing to note is that SEAS offers the 4-1 program, where you can get a B.A. from Columbia College by staying an extra year. That extra year will prove invaluable if you want to get into a top-ranked law school. Columbia’s placement record into top law schools is much better than Cal’s. Cal also has a dual degree program, but be aware that most people there take 6 years to get their BA/BS because many classes aren’t available every year (state school).</p>
<p>You haven’t mentioned cost, so I assume that everything is basically even between the two. But consider this nit-picking experience of mine:</p>
<p>Believe it or not, one the the differences I noticed was that at Columbia, they give you exam booklets with the school logo on it when you take exams. The same is true at Cornell, where I later transferred. At Cal, you have to supply your own paper. So when I arrived at my first exam at Cal, I did not bring my own paper and I had to borrow some from a classmate. I also remember that Cal professors kept having to bring their own chalk (in the days before white boards), whereas at Cornell/Columbia, there was staff that delivered fresh chalk to each classroom every day. Little things like that differentiate Cornell/Columbia and Cal–private versus state school. Edge to Columbia.</p>
<p>Lastly, the State of California is on the verge of bankrupcy. Cal will be hard hit. Class sizes and availability will be greatly affected by the budget crunch. You won’t see this happening at Columbia. Sure, some building projects have been postponed, and they’ve increased the class size at CC by a whopping 50 students. But most students won’t notice a thing.</p>
<p>Do yourself a favor and go to Columbia.</p>
<p>for law school placement, you’ll find few places and environments better than Columbia. SEAS is speficially about learning engineering as a set of lifelong-analytical skills rather than a training for a specific industry.</p>
<p>@jamcescchen – Why did you transfer from Columbia to Cornell? Which did you end up liking better for engineering?</p>
<p>I faced the same choice… with even more financial incentive for Cal (Regents+Alumni) and still picked Columbia. </p>
<p>I feel that Cal is a great place-- if you don’t get into any of the other top flite schools. The social scene/environment up in Berkeley is kind of cool, and if you really like that, Berkeley is for you. Academically, though, from friends who are current students, it’s a nightmare. Scheduling is very difficult and it’s pretty common for people to stay for an extra year to finish up major requirements. Also, you’ll be in much larger lectures (SEAS first semester is also lecture heavy but it gets much better from there on out) where it’ll be hard to access the professor for help/questions.</p>
<p>@dococtopi: As a silly 18-year-old, I was too busy chasing the rankings. Cornell’s engineering school was ranked higher than Columbia’s. In retrospect, the rankings at this level makes very little difference. I want kids today to understand this.</p>
<p>I ended up regretting my transfer to Cornell. Columbia’s social life was better, I feel. It was also a better fit for me academically, as I noticed that Cornell’s engineering graduates were slightly better technically, but couldn’t write well at all. One year of Columbia’s Core made me a much more balanced student. Classes at Columbia were smaller, too, which made the classroom experience better as well.</p>
<p>To get out of the larger classroom sizes that are the norm at Cornell Engineering, I ended up taking bizarre classes. So there I was, an engineering student taking classes in Hotel Management, Labor Relations and Agricultural Economics. It was amusing at the time, but really a complete waste of time now that I think about it.</p>
<p>No argument with someone’s real experience, just some thoughts:</p>
<p>-comments on class sizes undoubtedly accurate, as an average. But unmentioned is the size of the course catalog, what you can study there, number of areas/ subareas represented. The subarea I eventually went into, and studied there, is completely absent at a number of other engineering programs (don’t know about columbia). </p>
<p>-It would be entirely reasonable if Columbia’s engineering school attracted people who were atypically keen on writing, study of Western civilization,etc,as a group, compared to engineers in general. After all, people who decide to go there know they are getting the Core. Hopefully they actively want that.</p>
<p>Still, a given individual who is interested in the liberal arts, et.al.,can have these interests advanced at Cornell as much as they want to. For example, the author Richard Farina was an engineering student at Cornell who took English classes taught by Vladimir Nabokov and decided to go in that direction. Nothing about Cornell’s engineering program makes someone a poor writer. But quite possibly, like nearly every other engineering school not everyone who enters the program is equally enthused about those types of courses. But many are, and those who are have tremendous opportunities to explore these interests. </p>
<p>It’s just that those who don’t have those interests, to the same extent, have the freedom there to study what they actually do want. They aren’t forced to take The Core.</p>
<p>-huge quantity of courses available for electives outside engineering, including fields of study probably completely absent at Columbia: yes, including Hotel Management, Labor Relations and Agriculture. However engineers at Cornell are not forced to choose courses in Hotel Management, Labor Relations,and Agriculture. They can, alternatively, study pretty much anything one can study at Columbia, and then some. If someone feels, in retrospect, they chose elective courses suboptimally, that’s a shame, but it was their choice to make. There are many classes one may have selected instead. Including small ones. One of the best courses I took there was a French Literature seminar with 12 people in the class. </p>
<p>-You were not at Columbia as upperclassman, maybe if you were you might have only wished you could take courses in Hotel Management, Labor Relations, and Agriculture. Relative who graduated from SEAS was virtually dying there, last two years; it’s no picnic either.</p>
<p>-Impressions of social experience evidently vary, I get exactly the opposite reports.
Coming into a university as a transfer student changes everything, since so many relationships are formed in the freshman dorms. This is the case everyplace. Though I know people who’ve come in as transfers and loved it.</p>
<p>jameschen, you might be uniquely able to advise me here.</p>
<p>I have to choose between Cal and Cornell, and to complicate things, I’m waitlisted at Columbia. I’m looking to study either or both political science or economics, and possibly go on to law school. I’m not at all committed to this provisional plan though, and it’s entirely possible that I’ll end up wanting to do something else, though it will definitely be in the social sciences arena and not engineering or natural sciences, etc.</p>
<p>given how noncommittal i am and my areas of interest, would you recommend cal or cornell, and how do you think columbia compares in terms of academics and graduate/job placement prospects?
thanks for the input</p>
<p>“jameschen, you might be uniquely able to advise me here.”</p>
<p>Recurring topic on Cornell & Cal sub-forums, suggest do search there. IIRC he has commented on this previously, over there.</p>
<p>As monydad mentioned, I spoke earlier about the budget problems that are about to hit the entire University of California system. There will be very large cutbacks in course offerings and financial aid, naturally, at Berkeley and its sister campuses. Clearly, you should pick Cornell over Cal for purely academic reasons and if money is not an issue. And if you end up changing majors or even colleges at Cornell, it is a relatively easy process to transfer between the colleges (except for transferring into the Hotel School). This is not the case at Cal.</p>
<p>I apologize if I gave the impression that Cornell’s academics were subpar. Not being an ordinary engineering student, I tried to take as many courses outside of engineering as possible and I managed to take some interesting courses in the History, Economics and Political Science. However, all of them had at least 100 students enrolled. It was not what I had envisioned in terms of low student:teacher ratio.</p>
<p>Major requirements at Cornell Engineering meant that students typically had only one “free elective” per year. To get around this, I simply loaded up with 6 classes every semester. Many of my fellow engineers thought I was crazy for taking 20 units a semester, but I just did not enjoy my experiences with Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering classes that typically had 200-300 students. For a while it seemed to me that everywhere I turned, class sizes at Cornell were just too large for me to enjoy them, and so that led to my further adventures in Hotel Management and Labor Relations.</p>
<p>Academically, Cornell and Columbia are comparable, but my experiences with larger class sizes at Cornell makes sense when you look at the overall size of the Universities. Cornell’s engineering school is 3X the size of Columbia’s, and this is probably the same ratio of the undergraduates as well. Since my college days, I’ve been a believer that smaller is better in terms of getting the most out of your college experience. For the same reasons, you should consider going to Cornell over Cal.</p>
<p>It’s interesting, I felt basically the same way about it until my own kids went off to college. I was encouraging them to consider LACs. Then D1 actually went to an LAC. And wound up not fitting in perfectly with the prevailing campus culture-which made a difference in a smaller school- and, more importantly, negatively experiencing the limitations in the course catalog. As one example, she got interested in one particular sub-area of political science, and her school simply didn’t offer it.</p>
<p>Her experience there made me more sensitive to the issues of breadth and depth of offerings in all major sub-areas of a field; one does not want to be limited, or steered, due to the school’s lack of depth or breadth. Then I considered what I myself chose to pursue, and the fact that it was not universally available at all engineering colleges. And I considered the issue of on-campus recruiting, since her small college had virtually none. After that I looked at what Cornell offers to students interested in engineering careers in a more positive light.</p>
<p>Subsequently, D2 went off to an urban LAC, found the social scene there identical to as described by slipper1234 on this sub-forum, and, with some trepidation on my part, chose to go off to Cornell. And you know what, she’s loving it there. Loves her courses, the people she’s met, the place itself. Prefers the social scene there to one where people were constantly traipsing downtown, and basically scattering all over the city.</p>
<p>So I no longer think the best answer is that clear-cut. The issues you experienced were real, and are definitely weaker points and should legitimately be evaluated as such. But I now feel there are tradeoffs, there are strong points as well, and the best decision is a matter legitimately subject to individual choice.</p>
<p>So. BS at SEAS won’t cut it for law schools like Harvard or Yale or Columbia?</p>
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<p>Just wanted to note for the record that this is an absolutely complete crock of BS, for the reasons I state on Cali101’s other thread.</p>
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<p>Um, I know a number of SEAS kids who got into all the top schools without wasting $50K and a year on some stupid 4-1 program.</p>
<p>OT, sorry: also jamescchen, you are the only non-ILr’ie I’ve ever heard of who actually took a course in that college. Some day you will have to tell me what it was like.
I ddn’t think much of the people in that program I knew while I was there, but I have subsequently had to do some major re-assessment. As seemingly all of them are now partners at major NYC law firms.</p>