<p>What's your main reason for choosing the Berkeley campus!?</p>
<p>I chose UC Berkeley because of their fantastic engineering program. My neighbor is currently a senior at UC Berkeley, and he told me about the campus and the academics. When I visited the school and attended the engineering school tour, I knew that UC Berkeley was a school that I wanted to study at. Now all I am doing is waiting for March to arrive so that I can find out whether I got accepted or not.</p>
<p>Well, I haven’t really set my mind on Berkeley, but it’s one of my options because I really like their EECS program. Great campus too (although I do like UCLA’s campus/location more). I think it’s too early to start deciding on where I want to go. Don’t want to set my mind on someplace and then end up getting rejected. Nevertheless, Berkeley is awesome and if you do get in, it’ll be great. If you don’t, it’ll still be pretty great. </p>
<p>Oh, and California <3</p>
<p>@silas6070, I took the first engineering tour in 2011 and I’m currently a freshman in the College of Engineering. Good luck!</p>
<p>@calirepublic96 I totally agree with you that you shouldn’t bank on going somewhere, just in case you get rejected. One of my good friends with a >2300 SAT assumed he was going to Berkeley and got rejected – it was devastating for him. Nevertheless, it’s good to be excited about the schools you’ve applied to and I think it’s a good idea to start ranking, or at least listing pros and cons, about where you want to go. Do focused research on the specific programs to which you applied at each school. Look into sports/clubs that you might want to pursue your first semester. That way you’re more prepared to make a decision by May 1, which will come very fast!</p>
<p>There’s obviously more to Berkeley then just academic excellence. You choose it for its social liberalism (some might call it socialism), its anti-war and pro-peace stance during Vietnam War and subsequent wars and perhaps for its “dope culture”. You also choose Berkeley because it has produced great people in all fields and you hope to follow in their footsteps. One more reason could be that it prefers Californians during the admission process over the rest, so forth and so on.</p>
<p>kathleentown has no idea what she’s talking about. You don’t choose a school because of its political stance (moreover, Berkeley is far removed from its radical protest days.) You don’t choose a school just because such and such people went there. You don’t choose a school because it favors people in one state, not just because that’s a stupid policy, but because it’s one that doesn’t even goddamn exist! Berkeley favors OOS students in order to scam them of three times more money than Californian ones. </p>
<p>You don’t choose Berkeley because it’s perfect - you choose it because it has the semblance of being a “top” school while being easy to get into. There is a very large bifurcation between Berkeley’s graduate and undergraduate programs, and the success of the former provides some spill-over prestige for the latter. </p>
<p>Of course, you might also be an engineer.</p>
<p>^You started out right and then mucked it up with the second paragraph. The graduate school is top notch, but the undergrad program is also considered one of the top in the nation (academically speaking), do try to look into it a little more. Of course, prestige is no reason to choose a school, you choose a school because it’s a good fit for you personally. </p>
<p>Also, pretty sure some would argue that Berkeley is not “easy to get into”.</p>
<p>@Dina - I don’t agree. The undergraduate program at Berkeley, while worthy of putting it into the “top universities” subforum of CC (along with the likes of Emory and UVa!), is not particularly outstanding by any means. More importantly, I’m confident that the average quality of students at Berkeley is inferior to that of those at the likes of HPYSM. Berkeley surely is easier to get into than those schools; I know quite a few mediocre (relatively, of course) people who have been accepted into Berkeley (perhaps this is the significant OOS bias at work), while none of the top students I know have chosen Berkeley over other schools.</p>
<p>Regardless of the people you know (which of course depends on what program you’re in here, I’ve yet to meet an MCB or Engineering-anything student I’d call below average), Cal is a top school…this doesn’t mean it’s better than HPYSM, it’s not, but the qualifier for being a top school isn’t being better than all the Ivies. On the same note, it’s “easier” to get into than those schools (being a public school and all) but you can’t just call it easy to get into because there are plenty of above average students who don’t get in. </p>
<p>Also, take it from someone whose sibling goes to Harvard, many of their undergrad kids, while certainly smart are not much different from the students I’ve seen here (and some have more money than brains).</p>