<p>Chicago’s math undergrad program has, similar to Harvard’s Math 55, the sequence Honors Analysis tested into by talented undergrads, and the program is a hotspot for people who eventually want to get a math PhD at a top notch university. It does not attract the culture of taking the Putnam, indeed. Perhaps you mean to suggest that someone with IMO/IPhO tendencies is likely to take part in the Putnam, although I’m not sure if that’s true, as there seem to have been exceptional performers on such competitions who don’t do very much competition math later on. </p>
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<p>On the undergraduate level, I don’t think there’s much of a “level.” I find the talent is pretty scattered, aside from the fact that schools like Harvard invariably grab a lot of those who compete most successfully in the olympiads. But I doubt the admissions offices necessarily discern for subtle field-specific talent to the extent that they grab all the best students. After all, perhaps that’s not even the point of their job the way they and many others see it.</p>
<p>As evidence for this, I’ve found great mathematicians hail from random undergraduate schools but uniformly ending up at the best rated graduate schools which are a long shot even for many students from those excellent undergraduate schools (though not all).</p>
<p>Anyway, the real point I was making by bringing in the graduate departments is that likely that’s what those who hype up Cal’s academics are actually talking about - ultimately, graduate departments and undergraduates are…departments, and essentially the same. So the reason your experience may differ from that of someone whose foreign acquaintances seem to hype the school up is that they’re not taking into account that Berkeley is chained to accepting mostly Californians. Which means that sakky’s argument of “let’s grab them” actually would work because a lot of internationals have terrific respect for the academics at Berkeley. The individual you spoke of who was looking at Stanford, MIT, Harvard probably was going purely from the perspective of American university selectivity, whilst this does not (in my experience) constitute something many international students are aware of.</p>
<p>Perhaps in the IMO camps, it’s just common to aim for Harvard and take Math 55. But it depends who you talk to. In the large crowd who wants to train as engineers, usually among internationals, the 3 schools mentioned alongside each other are Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.</p>
<p>Actually, that’s precisely why the Berkeley brand could be so marketable to the international market, and is also the same reason that Harvard or Stanford is likewise so marketable to the international market. With the possible exception of that small handful of Harvard students interested in Math55, students don’t go to Harvard or Stanford because they’re difficult, indeed, they go precisely because they are easy. Granted, while soaringly lofty grades (e.g. summa level) is extremely difficult to attain, at the same time, it’s practically impossible to actually flunk out. The ingenuity of the Harvard/Stanford package is that it bundles a world-class brand and alumni network access along with a ‘GPA-enhanced’ transcript and ample free time with which to devote to extracurricular activities that places you in prime position to compete for the top employers or professional schools(e.g. law/business/med schools). It is also for that reason that Harvard students generally abhor taking cross-reg courses at MIT (but MIT students love taking cross-reg at Harvard) because they fear MIT’s lower grading standards. </p>
<p>Now, granted, Berkeley probably can’t quite match the package that Harvard and Stanford provide. But Berkeley won’t be that far off. Berkeley can surely offer a GPA-protected pathway via its creampuff majors. {For example, a student from China who came to Berkeley and majored in Chinese would surely find the major to be trivially easy, and rack up a string of A’s for minimal work. With ample free time to obtain decent grades in premed coursework and MCAT testing and - boom - admission to a US med-school.} </p>
<p>The other major advantage that every US university can provide that is attractive to at least the Asian market (although admittedly less attractive to the European market) is possible entree to US immigration. Through a US undergrad program, you may have a chance of finding a US employer who will sponsor your work visa. Or, as alluded to above, perhaps you can win admission to a US graduate program - perhaps at the same university as your undergrad - who will then extend your student visa. Heck, maybe you can even find an American to marry you and hence allow you to stay. {Why not? That’s what Wendi Deng did.}</p>
<p>Sakky, in your argument you are assuming that employability depends heavily on the GPA. This may be the case for the American industry, but certainly not for European or Asian ones I know about. While a higher GPA certainly makes you a bit more attractive to employers, it’s a relative minor factor compared to factors such as relevant industry experience and major. Having a 3.8 at Berkeley won’t make you much more attractive than having a 3.0 at a local university. Just having a degree in Europe is often good enough. Your creampuff major argument does not hold either because creampuff majors are not very employable in the first place, even with a perfect GPA. (I actually know several people with 3.9 - 4.0’s in these majors who had a lot of trouble finding jobs in their home country).</p>
<p>You should also consider that overseas employers are not familiar with the American system and grade translation/evaluation services are not doing a perfect job.</p>
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Fair enough, good point. The question that is to be answered though, how many people are actually attracted by that? I know that many Chinese students come to Berkeley with the goal of bringing their knowledge back to China, not necessarily with the goal of staying in the US. Sames goes for many Koreans, who often are expected to enter the military or marry in Korea. Now, that attitude may or may not change over the course of their studies, but that’s another topic.</p>
<p>Actually, in my experience, it’s the Europeans that come to the US who are most likely to want to stay. The fact that a European student comes to the US often suggests that he has done so out of free will and an affinity towards the US, not because of university rankings or family expectations. Thus, I would say you have your argument backwards. Europeans will be more attracted by the increased chance of obtaining a US visa than most Asian students.</p>
<p>Just because (there exists) a difficult course does not mean that the program is a hotspot for people who want to get a math PhD. For example, just look at Caltech’s Math 1a, the course EVERY single undergraduate at Caltech must take. It is pretty much the honors analysis part of Chicago & Harvard’s hardest math courses, covered in the same amount of time. By your logic, most talented math [international] undergraduates would want to go to Caltech, which is simply false.</p>
<p>And of course there are people who do well on the IMO/IPhO who do not do much competition math later on and there are those who do not do math competitions who do well on the Putnam, but the trend suggests that the best do. Chicago does participate in the Putnam every year, and it isn’t unreasonable to assume those who take the honors math course participate in it.</p>
<p>It’s just like, for high school students, the best math students, who are given the opportunity, take the AMC/AIME/USAMO/MOP/TST and do well. There are some kids who don’t know about it who are spectacular at math, but that’s probably like 1-2 people per year (no data source) who are at that caliber of math. You’re basically suggesting that someone who is good at math who is GIVEN the opportunity to take the Putnam while taking Chicago’s honors analysis program will not do so, which is very unlikely. Chicago also fails at getting the top math students even in the United States. Let’s look at a couple of examples from 2011:
Evan O Dorney: Harvard
Bowei Liu: Princeton (I know he isn’t class of 2011 but nbd)
Brian Zhang: Harvard
Albert Gu: CMU
…(etc) point is zero of these math beasts matriculate to Chicago or Berkeley for that matter (hmm I wonder why?).</p>
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<p>Agreed.</p>
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<p>Perhaps you misread my post. I was merely stating that the top students of China have no respect for Berkeley, but the middle-upper-tier do (the Tsinghua/Beijing rejects). Keep in mind my cousin was in the IPhO camp, not the IMO camp, and thus had no desire to take such a math course (nor did his acquaintances). I also explicitly stated that the middle-upper-tier is the crowd with respect for Cal, so I see no conflict in argument.</p>
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<p>Again, I do not disagree, but I’m just saying the top [international high school] students, at least in China, have never heard of Berkeley or would even consider it for their undergraduate career. From my experience in China, Berkeley (undergraduate) is viewed as the ‘safety’ school’/rich kids school that you would only go to as a last resort…like if they had to choose between going to some local college and Berkeley, they’d go to Berkeley. If they had the choice between Beijing and Berkeley, they’d choose Beijing in an instant. I’m assuming you’ve never met any of these students before, which is why you make these arguments. If you suggested Berkeley like I did, you would be laughed at.</p>
<p>I’ll take your word for it as I don’t know personally, and leave you two to discuss that point. One thing I thought to add though is that when it’s less strenuous to obtain a good GPA, assuming it’s an important factor at all, it tends to generally be easier for the student to use his/her time doing other things that would resume boost. </p>
<p>Certainly one doesn’t need a 3.8 in EECS to be employable, although it does seem having a good GPA as opposed to a mediocre one will help quite a bit (and for quite a few people, the difference between those two is a lot of work).</p>
<p>Actually, where GPA is the most useful is for admission to America’s two great ‘professional guilds’: law and medicine. A high GPA, coupled with a sufficiently high standardized test score, is generally sufficient to gain admission to med-school or a top-ranked law school and from there, a clear pathway to a lucrative career. Nor do law and med-school adcoms care much about the difficulty of your major. In their eyes, a 3.8 GPA in some creampuff major is far preferable to a 3.0 in engineering, as many engineering students have realized to their great dismay. </p>
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<p>Actually, I believe you have defined ‘industry’ in a manner quite different from mine. To wit: most top students at Harvard or Stanford who head for the workforce are not going to traditional industry, rather they’re going to consulting and investment banking. Before the crash, nearly half of all Harvard seniors entering the workforce took jobs in consulting or banking, and that’s the figure for all such Harvard seniors. The figure is clearly far higher for the top-performing seniors. {Let’s face it, if you have straight C’s at Harvard, you’re not going to get a job in consulting or banking.} </p>
<p>Consulting and banking firms are not only notoriously GPA-driven, but also care little about your specific major, which is why a Harvard/Stanford humanities student can become a Wall Street investment banker. While they do somewhat care about relevant experience through prior summer internships, those internships are themselves open to any major. What those firms care about -first and foremost- is the brand-name of your school, because that is what they are selling to clients. You can have straight A+'s in economics/finance courses with extensive finance experience from a no-name school…yet Goldman would still rather hire the art major with the Harvard brand. </p>
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<p>I’m not so sure about that - those elite overseas employers seem to be very familiar with American grading practices. Part of the reason is that those elite overseas employers are themselves divisions of elite US firms. For example, the McKinsey Shanghai, McKinsey Beijing, and McKinsey Hong Kong offices are heavily populated by people with degrees from elite Western schools (Ivies, Stanford, Ox-bridge, etc.). In fact, it seems to be a highly common pathway that a Chinese national who wants to be hired to a McKinsey China office first needs to leave China to obtain an elite Western degree. The same seems to be true of elite non-US investment banks. UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, HSBC and the like all heavily recruit from elite US colleges to populate their European analyst pool. I can think of numerous Ivy/Stanford graduates who were hired into finance jobs into Europe (mostly London). </p>
<p>Granted, this discussion has been highly consulting/finance-centric, which does not seem to be the types of industries that you were discussing. But the reason why they are relevant is because - whether we like it or not - consulting and finance are the premiere industries that tend to attract the top students from the brand-name colleges. Indeed, they’ve been doing so for years, which has led numerous observers to decry the brain-drain from other industries.</p>
<p>I was shocked—and upset—when the majority of my students became investment bankers or management consultants after they graduated. Hardly any became engineers. Why would they, when they had huge student loans, and Goldman Sachs was offering them twice as much as engineering companies did?</p>
<p>But be that as it may, the fact is, that’s not going to change. As long as elite Western universities offer entree to consulting and finance employers that are seen as prestigious and lucrative, then students around the world are going to rightfully view those universities as gateways to those employers. </p>
<p>So I reiterate my former quote, the ingenuity of the Harvard/Stanford package is that it bundles a world-class brand and alumni network access along with a ‘GPA-enhanced’ transcript and ample free time with which to devote to extracurricular activities that places you in prime position to compete for the top employers or professional schools(e.g. law/business/med schools). Those top employers would be those the elite consulting and banking firms that college students prefer so strongly. </p>
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<p>I’m afraid I have to strongly disagree, at least with respect to China (albeit perhaps less so with Korea). The overwhelming attraction of the US vs. China is that China is still a poor and politically repressive country. The average Chinese worker makes a small fraction of what the average American worker does, and even the average college-educated Chinese worker makes significantly less than his American counterpart. Americans (and foreigners with work permits) are also free to have as many children as they want without government sanction, and are also free to legally move throughout the US whenever they want - a far cry from the rigid Chinese hukou system. They may also worship religion freely, to make political statements, and to read to their heart’s content about, say, the ‘events’ of June 4 1989. {Heck, I can think of some Chinese nationals who knew practically nothing about those events until they came to the US.} </p>
<p>Granted, I can certainly agree that if you’re politically well-connected within China, you will do far better by returning to China than staying in the US. Xi Jinping’s daughter certainly will return to China after she graduates from Harvard. And certainly China also offers tremendous entrepreneurial opportunities which has recently attracted numerous Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans back to China. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the fact remains that a US work permit would represent a life-changing upgrade in their economic and political status. Europeans feel little such attraction because they already enjoy high living standards and extensive political freedoms at home. But as my Chinese friends have told me, the reason that the US is great is that in the US, even a poor person can own a car. Even a poor person with no political connections can read and discuss political controversies without fear of arrest.</p>
<p>I definitely agree Putnam fellows are some amazing mathematicians, but when you’re talking math research and top math PhDs, it’s not the same game. Good performance on the Putnam requires serious preparation I’d imagine, just like the IMO. I’m sure quite a few people with extremely high math talent would just rather do something else. Ever met professors at a school like Berkeley who don’t have a huge IMO track record?</p>
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<p>Maybe, but if there was misreading, it was mutual. I don’t doubt that top internationals’ first choices of undergraduate schools might be the schools you pointed out. They do possess a certain name recognition that CalTech and U. Chicago do not, although these schools tend to be great at feeding students to top PhD programs (in fact, a student making a top tier program may not even be close to the top student).</p>
<p>What I am suggesting is that there is some discrepancy; if you suggest top internationals routinely apply to Berkeley’s graduate schools, yet your friend never even heard of the school, am I not right in wondering what on earth? Everything points to Berkeley having academic name recognition. I don’t think we can say that someone could have heard “Berkeley, that school with the amazing grad schools” and then go “Berkeley the undergraduate school? Huh?!” The only reason I see for Berkeley’s undergraduate not being the most attractive choice is that its allegiance to Californians prevents it from recruiting talent, because it steadily acquires the reputation for a safe school for students who couldn’t make, say, Harvard or Stanford.</p>
<p>Otherwise, Berkeley does not seem to suffer from the problem of CalTech or U. Chicago, that is, of having low name recognition in the international community, as you yourself mention with the upper/middle tier. So it seems some of sakky’s suggestions could be reasonable, although very much dependent on modifying admissions policies to slowly start recruiting top talent.</p>
<p>To be very clear, I’m not sure we’re disagreeing at all either.</p>
<p>EDIT: in fact to add, I noticed you added Yale as a distant other choice for the top students you spoke of, yet never even mentioned CalTech or Chicago.</p>
<p>At least among many American acquaintances, someone attending Yale for math undergrad unless in love with the school, without really considering say CalTech or Chicago, would sound a bit strange. Aside, of course, from the fact that Yale fits into the acronym HYPSM…</p>
<p>Imagine calculating a table of the ratios of university brand-name prestige divided by research productivity. UChicago would then surely rank as near the bottom, along with state schools such as Wisconsin or Minnesota that are actually research powerhouses but, frankly, are bereft of prestige. I have encountered countless otherwise-well-educated people who think that UChicago is nothing more than a nondescript metro school, similar to the University of San Francisco or CCNY.</p>
<p>That’s true, it has incredibly low name recognition even among Americans, not just international students. </p>
<p>I guess my overarching point, to be clear Foraminifera, is that there being 3 clear schools singled out which a top math or physics student might consider clearly suggests to me that there’s a bit more to this whole story, namely that those schools do something to grab the students you said that does not have very much to do with strength of department/academics they offer.</p>
<p>(Replying to the first post)
This is so very true. Many of my friends and family members in Asia do not know any other schools in the US except Harvard, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. A lot of them have actually never heard of MIT and Princeton. It’s kind of strange.</p>
<p>There must be a way to simplify this discussion.
All the universities mentioned are VERY GOOD universities. Berkeley is a very good university. “Even” the undergraduate school is very good.
Berkeley stands alone among public universities in international reputation. But there are other very good universities in the public sector.
It has not been easy even for good students who are smart to get into Berkeley. It’s getting harder all the time.
Is it Harvard? Is it Stanford? Is It the University of Splendid Monkeys? Is it substantive to think about great universities in this way?
When choosing among very good universities think about the location, the financial burden, the faculty, and if this is important to you- the weather and a few incidentals. Rankings, when speaking of top FIFTY even, should be way down. We have many very good universities in this country. The world clearly knows it.</p>
<p>Wow. An interesting and thought-provoking thread full of great discussion! :D</p>
<p>Just for what it’s worth…</p>
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<p>I dunno…I’ve taken classes at Heidelberg in Germany, and I found the classes super easy, and most everyone I talked to had heard of Berkeley and was impressed. Totally anecdotal, yes, but just thought I’d share. I don’t think Berkeley is entirely unheard of in Europe. And honestly, a lot of my friends who have also studied abroad in Europe have commented on how easy classes were compared to Cal.</p>
<p>But again, just from my own experiences. :P</p>
<p>^Silvern, if you liked this thread, there are TONS of other threads just like this one in this Berkeley forum. You can probably find them by searching key words like “prestige” “why don’t people think Berkeley is good”, etc. I think the forum gets threads like these once or twice a month on average, especially during the fall and spring.</p>
<p>Also Sakky, this is none of my business but what year and major are you? I’m really curious since I see your posts everywhere and they are generally very long and use lots of logical=>common sense type arguments, although I don’t necessarily always agree with your path of logic ALL the time, it’s entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking to read your responses.</p>
<p>One thing Berkeley has, and will always have, it its own place on the Periodic Table of Elements. Reagardless of which country you study science in… :)</p>
<p>caiacs,
Post #55 “Did Oxford and Cambridge fall off the face of the Earth recently?”</p>
<p>You mention ^ two wonderful universities.
When it comes to INTERNATIONAL reputation, Mathematics and sciences rule. Disciplines that are anchored in the English language have less relevance for Internationals. Berkeley is strong in mathematics, ‘the international language.’</p>
<p>But again- all these schools are very good, and getting to be a student in any of them should make you proud.</p>