I was admitted to UC Berkeley for CS in the College of Letters of Science (not the engineering school) and admitted to McCormick at Northwestern. It’d be awesome if anyone had any input to help me choose! I know answers may be a little bias because this is the NU thread, but I plan on posing the same question in the Berkeley thread. Thanks!
I know Berkeley is known as a world class institution for CS (would it matter that I’d get a BA rather than a BS?). I was also selected to be a Murphy Scholar at NU.
If what you really care about is learning CS and acquiring as much knowledge as possible in the field of CS in your four years, then go to Berkeley.
Cal would be more competitive.
Also, can you get in to L&S CS directly or do you have to petition for the major after getting at least a 3.0 in 7 pre-req courses?
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/csugrad/index.shtml
Murphy Scholar is a good deal; especially if you want to go to grad school.
What are costs?
Berkeley has a better pure CS program. It is more highly regarded and it is in a better location.
It’s also more competitive, though. My CS classes here aren’t (they’re very cooperative), and I like Northwestern’s curriculum requirements better (though I haven’t researched Cal’s).
But the Murphy Scholar program seems to be very prestigious and a good deal, especially for grad school, as PurpleTitan said. I would almost even choose Northwestern on the basis of that alone. You would get to do almost whatever you want in terms of curriculum.
Consider financial aid, for sure, as well.
To expound more, Cal has top-notch CS faculty but also a huge CS undergrad population. If this was a choice of which grad school, I think Cal would be an easy choice, but as an undergrad, you’re definitely going to get more faculty attention as a Murphy Scholar than at Cal, which (like all giant state schools) is more sink-or-swim, where many of the CS classes will be huge lecture classes, and you’re one of more than a thousand undergrad CS majors (in fact, I think it’s around 2 thousand now at Cal and might even be close to 3 thousand; I’m almost certain that Cal has the largest undergraduate CS population of any school in the US, and #2 isn’t very close).
Still, with all that, if your goal is to work as a software developer in the Bay Area after graduation, I’d say Cal has the edge there (though it’s not at all difficult for an NU CS grad to go out there and find work; I did so myself back in the day). Furthermore, along with probably being a better place if you are considering grad school, IMO, NU would have the edge when it comes to consulting/finance/business opportunities for CS majors, so you should consider that as well.
In the end, though, you can’t really go wrong as you have 2 excellent options.
Thanks for the advice! I live about 15 minutes away from Berkeley and did a summer program at NU, so I know both campuses sort of well and they both feel like home. Hopefully the right choice will become clear after Cal Day and Wildcat Day!