<p>I see, I see. Cool.</p>
<p>If you go to Cornell SEAS, someday, someone from the college of Arts & Sciences will call you a fraud if you dare to lie about your "ivy league" education. Ask Keith Olbermann. </p>
<p>YouTube</a> - Keith Olberman tells Ann Coulter, "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours!"</p>
<p>And then this,
YouTube</a> - Olbermann is So Insecure, I Pity Him</p>
<p>^ Haha...he seriously should have stuck to Socal sports reporting.</p>
<p>Add insult to injury, Greg Gutfelt is Berkeley '87.</p>
<p>Berkeley
I'm not willing to pay more than 20k more for Cornell when Berkeley's program is even better and cheaper.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying, Xylitol. It's just absurd to pay 20k more for the same (maybe even an inferior) education. Unless you're doing it for a change of environment and your parents wouldn't really care for the extra cost of attending college in NY, then going to Cornell would just be fine. But I would imagine very, very few students do that.</p>
<p>I had to make the same decision a year ago and picked cal. cornell was really pretty, i had a relative that went there, and my family pretty much assumed i'd go. but it was way too expensive and a bit too far for my tastes (i'm from california) so i went with cal. sometimes i wonder what would have happened if i had picked differently but overall i'm pretty happy with my choice. (helps that i got into the chem program here too and was undeclared at cornell)</p>
<p>Cornell is extremely humid in summer and freezing in winter. Itaca is more liberal than Berkeley. The school makes Berkeley seem conservative by comparison. However, if you never thought you'd get sick of trees, you haven't spent any time in upper state New York. Between NYC and Ithaca there are 4 to 5 hours of trees so thick that they are like prison walls beside the highway. If you can handle the weather and isolation, go to Cornell.</p>
<p>I'm hoping I will be in the same place as you and have to make that decision (waiting and hoping from Berkeley, and "accepted" to Cornell with a very blunt and obvious likely letter). I'm from CA too and I think Berk is the better choice.</p>
<p>Cornell is far, cold, isolated, and expensive. And plus, I assume and only assume, that people that end up at Cornell only went there cause none of the other ivies accepted them. Hence, people would seem very "boring" - just saying and obviously generalizing.</p>
<p>but then again, it is an ivy and I heard it is beautiful. It also won't be as crowded as the UC system is.</p>
<p>plus Cornell probably won't feel the economic crisis as much as the public UC schools will and have</p>
<p>"If you go to Cornell SEAS, someday, someone from the college of Arts & Sciences will call you a fraud if you dare to lie about your "ivy league" education."</p>
<p>Assuming the College of Engineering is now called "SEAS": there is some (low level) internecine occasional bickering among the colleges, but the engineering college is never the target of these negative comments. The state-subsidized "contract colleges" get some ribbing, and the hotel school. But of course they are all equally part of the university and Coulter is an idiot.</p>
<p>"Cornell is extremely humid in summer .."</p>
<p>That is not my recollection, and I stayed there multiple summers. Leaving aside the fact that many students are not attending college in the summer. I loved it there in the summer, but particularly in the Fall. It is about the most beautiful place I've ever lived in the Fall, and I've been back for it several times since. It is great in the Spring as well.</p>
<p>There is all this chatter about the winter, which is really pretty similar to much of the northeast, but that's not really the image that made the most prominent lasting impression on me after all these years. When I think about Cornell and Ithaca, this is truthfully what comes to my mind, first and foremost: </p>
<p>File:Ithaca</a> Hemlock Gorge.JPG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Around</a> Ithaca, New York Photo Gallery by Unexplained Bacon at pbase.com
Explore</a> Cornell - Natural Beauty - Introduction</p>
<p>With about 20,000+ students in the area I didn't find it terribly boring; any "isolation" issues would have only been material if that had not been the case.</p>
<p>I certainly wanted to go there, and many others did as well.</p>
<p>If one is admitted to Cornell Engineering (likely letter) and lives OOS, what are one's chances for admission to Berkeley Engineering (Mech)? </p>
<p>all purely hypothetical. lol. money sucks for me either way..</p>
<p>Berkeley EECS is definitely better if you are really interested in getting into the theory and complexities of the subject and you are committed to working pretty hard for 4 yrs. But if you want to focus on student life, diversity, flexibility in choosing classes and majors, Cornell is right for you.</p>
<p>"Berkeley EECS is definitely better if you are really interested in getting into the theory and complexities of the subject and you are committed to working pretty hard for 4 yrs."</p>
<p>????? These are undergraduate students we're talking about, right, studying in departments which also provide graduate level instruction and research. FWIW I do not recall ever hearing a Cornell electrical engineering undergrad express disatisfaction with, or any limitations on, their ability to get into the theory and complexities of their subject. And I think pretty much all of them had better have been committed to working pretty hard for 4 years. For better or worse.</p>
<p>Well monydad, I would say that on average an undergraduate EECS major is FAR from caring about the subtlest distinctions between Berkeley and Cornell EECS faculty + research caliber, and they'd probably have much more down-to-earth concerns, such as which school is harder to do well in for them, environment, etc. </p>
<p>However, there are some reasons that a student who wants to do research + go to graduate school that I think could prompt such a student to choose MIT, Stanford or Berkeley over practically any other school, and in fact in some cases, one or two of the three will stand out particularly. For example, if you want to study complexity theory or something, there is something really special about Berkeley. Some undergraduates are just not undergraduates -- they already have the mentality of graduate students, and love their fields enough to treat their undergrad programs like grad programs. So it's not a matter of complaining that Cornell engineering is lacking at all, far from the case. Rather, it's a matter of going to the most exciting department for one's field of study.</p>
<p>So in conclusion, I'd say it really amounts to the kind of undergraduate we're talking about. Some of the absolutely most brilliant undergraduates would rather look to factors like environment + fit, and may even find Cornell's academic program tailored to their needs + wants. However, if an undergraduate is basically a grad student (in mentality) in disguise, there's a strong chance that for a field like CS, and I guess EE, he/she will lean towards Berkeley between these two schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
plus Cornell probably won't feel the economic crisis as much as the public UC schools will and have
[quote/]
</p>
<p>I don't know about that a month or two ago Cornell had announced it had already lost 27% of its endowment and probably more since then. Privates are much more dependent on their endowments now than even some state schools are on state funding.</p>
<p>Mathboy98, your post suggests cornell is some kind of weak sister in computer Science , to the point where a precocius undergrad doing research advanced for an undergrad would feel impeded. I haven't looked at any graduate rankings recently, but if Cornell was not still among the leading schools for graduate computer science, that would be a big difference from my day. I think you are raising a red herring here, for most practical perspectives. </p>
<p>but if you happen to be a student in his senior year in high school, who knows exactly what area he wants to do advanced undergraduate research in, knows that Berkely has this particular area and Cornell doesn't, and furthermore knows that the Berkeley grad professors will let you do meaningful research work with them in that area as an undergrad, </p>
<p>under those circumstances by all means go to Berkeley.</p>
<p>Just be sure that Berkeley isn't one of the many schools that have policies of not accepting their own undergrads into its graduate school; allegedly due to inbreeding. Because then you will have ironically excluded yourself from participating in in this great particular research group as a graduate student, where it counts the most.</p>
<p>And, the reverse might also be the case, and perhaps then someone should go to Cornell.</p>
<p>But I think most high school students have no idea about any of this, actually, and whatever they think they know will be proven wrong over the next two years, quite frankly. Many will needs be focusing on passing their courses in the first place, not so much on which graduate research group they should enter to start passing over the grad students there.</p>
<p>But to the extent research opportunities become highly relevant, it is not obvious to me that Cornell will not provide more than sufficient opportunities.
Undergrads I attended college with went on to top graduate programs. </p>
<p>But by all means interested parties should ask those questions to the departments, and current students, at each school.</p>