<p>I need to know if Cornell is truly worth the extra $25k per year. I did not get the Regents scholarship at Berkeley so I feel like it will be really impersonal there, while I got Tanner Dean at Cornell. I can afford Cornell but even so, is the huge price difference worth it, when the undergrad biochemistry programs are pretty comparable?</p>
<p>Can you do research even as a freshman at Cornell? I want to be doing research ideally during all 4 years as an undergraduate. Can undergraduates petition to take some graduate level courses? There are a lot of excellent grad courses at Cornell that I would love to take and I will probably have quite a few freed up spots to take electives by my junior/senior year at least, so I’d want to take graduate courses then if possible.</p>
<ul>
<li>It’s possible to get involved in research in spring semester of freshman year but usually most labs have prerequisite classes they want their RAs to have taken.</li>
<li>Yes, you can take graduate level classes, but most have prerequisites or permission of instructor. I’m in a graduate class this semester as a sophomore, people do it semi-often.</li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve heard (and US News confirms) that class sizes are actually larger at Cornell than Berkeley. Is this generally for intro classes only, or is it also true for upper-division classes?</p>
<p>The USNWR site lists Cornell as having having a student-faculty ratio of 11:1. It lists Cal at 17:1. This is a key stat between the two, imo.</p>
<p>Cornell’s classes are not going to be as small as the classes you find at a LAC but they should be smaller than at Berkeley. I was a bio major at Cornell, which is as large as science majors go and I never felt a professor was unapproachable. In fact, many times, they’re begging us to go to office hours.</p>
<p>Will there be many upper-div science courses with >30 students? I don’t really care about big classes for intro courses, etc. But Berkeley’s upper-div classes aren’t huge either.</p>
<p>Why are people so crazy about smaller class sizes? I’ve heard non-intro classes at Cornell are around 20. That’s really not that bad, right?</p>