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<p>OK. What other suggestions does anyone have to assess whether Brown or Cal can provide a more rigorous or advanced education in Engineering or Computer Science…all students being equally capable…without comparing syllabi or things like that…I am too lazy to do that. Let’s see what others say.</p>
<p>And @arwarw’s post surely gives an idea of the overall special characteristics of the Brown academic experience.</p>
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<p>I just watched that and it’s actually really interesting. Also after talking to a current CS freshman at Brown, I’m leaning towards it now. He put a lot of my apprehensions to rest… I think i’ll probably decide for sure by tomorrow where i’m going.</p>
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<p>This is not really reliable, since different majors at a school may have different strengths of students, and engineering and CS tend to be rigorous, even at low-selectivity schools (low-selectivity schools have a high rate of attrition out of engineering).</p>
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<p>A comparison of syllabi, assignments, projects, and exams is really the only way to compare course content. Obviously, this requires access to such (lots of stuff for Berkeley at <a href=“CAS - Central Authentication Service”>http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html</a> and for Brown at <a href=“Brown CS: Computer Science Courses”>http://cs.brown.edu/courses/</a> ) and assistance from someone with expertise in the area who is willing to do the comparison – not always easy to get. A prospective student may be able to look at the introductory level courses, though.</p>
<p>The introductory level courses appear to map as follows (Berkeley - Brown):
10 - 2 or 8 (for non-majors)
61A - 17*
61B - 18*
61C - 33
70 - 22</p>
<p>*Brown CS 17-18 looks preferable to CS 15-16.</p>
<p>More advanced courses can usually be compared by finding the similar course titles at the other school.</p>
<p>Beyond course content, there is quality of instruction, which can be really difficult to compare reliably for the same student. Who takes the same courses at two different schools? Even if one did, seeing the course the second time is different from seeing it the first time.</p>
<p>Recorded videos of lectures of introductory level courses may give a prospective student some idea, but only for those specific instructors.</p>
<p>Are Brown’s CS courses programming based? Like I know CS 61A is taught with Python, and 61B has huge Java projects…is it similar at Brown or are the classes more theoretical?</p>
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<p>Browse through the ACM’s “Computer Science Curriculum 2013” guidelines. Virtually any strong CS program (at Brown, Berkeley, or anywhere else) will cover much of the content described in that document. Different instructors to different degrees will (or won’t) use programming exercises to help students understand that content. The main goal in those exercises often is to illustrate key concepts, processes and procedures (such as inheritance and polymorphism in object oriented programming), and not necessarily to make you a proficient programmer in whatever language is being used.
<a href=“http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations”>http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations</a></p>
<p>Given the nature of CS content, in my opinion, class size and the quality of student-faculty interaction are not unimportant. Try to self-assess how important that interaction is to YOU. Then, if it is important to you, you need to assess which school is better from that perspective, and what the trade-offs might be in other areas of strength/weakness.</p>
<p>Emma Watson goes to Brown! She only said good things about it, check out an interview or something if you’d like.
Best of Luck choosing! I’m in the same situation.</p>
<p>CS170/180 or 190 for advanced students who place into it are a prized example of classes that change majors at Brown. Many students at my daughters graduation thanked the prof who taught that class for influencing them to declare CS, when accepting their department diploma. I think you learn about 4 languages as you go through the principle concepts of CS. You can read online if you search.</p>
<p>Relevant to what UCB said upstream, I was looking around and found that students declaring CS majors have increased 4 or 5x since my daughters time, so I imagine that would cause some larger classes than used to be as I don’t see how they could manage a lot more sections or professors in such a short time. So CS was the 2nd most declared major after Bio, usually Econ is much larger. Although it is still a small department compared to bigger universities I hope there are jobs for everyone crowding into CS as UCB has mentioned is happening at other unis.</p>
<p>I’d hope Brown’s CS-based major(s) would be programming based. CS is not something that can be learned except by programming.</p>
<p>Emma Watson experienced some difficulty not too far back, but I hope she has gotten over her problems. She huddled with James Franco and asked him for advice. Of course, Franco is some genius for juggling multiple PHD programs. </p>
<p>I think Emma Watson’s graduating this year though (I might be wrong), so I can’t make my decision based on that, haha. I’ve been vacillating between the two colleges every few hours today.</p>
<p>Okayy, another thing I was wondering was that, since Cal has SO many undergrads in EECS/CS, does that mean there’s a lot of competition for jobs and internships? I mean if you go on the career surveys you see a bunch of companies like Google, Microsoft, etc… but I’m wondering if this is misleading. Isn’t it possible that the majority actually don’t get these offers, and only the top 10% or 20% of the class does while the rest are stuck doing nothing productive during the summer? Or am I wrong, and there are actually enough jobs/internships to go around for all/most of the students.</p>
<p>Secondly, I’m trying to gauge the difficulty of this new 3.0 cutoff. Is it tough to get a higher GPA than that? (I know that this may be relative to the student, but to put myself in context, I’m really fluent in Java - including the Android libraries - Python, and a little bit of Matlab. And I have more or less high grades in school now (but I don’t know if that’s a good indicator of whether or not I can get above a 3.0 in Cal).</p>
<p>Thirdly, what is student life like at Cal (especially for CS majors or CS+Math majors). Do they have any free time, and what do students usually do for fun? And is SF frequented a lot? I’ve read that at Brown, CS concentrators have it harder than those of other concentrations, but they definitely have free time, so I just wanted to know if Cal students did too.</p>
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<p>Any decent CS department will include substantial programming assignments and projects in its CS courses (except for the few purely theory courses like Berkeley CS 70 / Brown CS 22). Just look at the course home pages for the various courses (follow the links in a previous post) to see what those assignments and projects are.</p>
<p>If anyone’s curious, I ended up choosing Cal! (definitely the hardest decision of my life)</p>
<p>Congratulations Truust! It’s a great school.</p>
<p>Congrats and now you can look forward to your next 4 years. You will get into SF as much as you want, it is a very easy trip. One you hit the tourist spots you can check out what the locals do. But you will likely find that you are busy in your college community.</p>
<p>For me, you made the right choice. Berkeley’s CS is top-notched, so don’t be surprised if many CS & EECS students chose it over the Ivies. </p>
<p>I agree. I love Brown, but for CS, you made the right choice.</p>