Hi,
I’d like to get some honest opinions from Cornell students/alumni about choosing a college.
I have been accepted to my state school with a full ride (covering tuition, books, board, etc), as well as Berkeley (EECS) and Cornell (CS). For Berkeley and Cornell, I would have to pay full tuition/cost. My state school is about as good as the University of Michigan at Computer Science (I do not want to say its name for confidentiality reasons). However, it’s not very good at subjects other than engineering (and is consequentially ranked pretty low overall).
Where do you suggest I go (considering weather, class sizes, success after graduation)? I am mainly trying to decide between Berkeley and Cornell. Berkeley has a great location (near Silicon Valley), but I’m worried about Berkeley’s huge class sizes. On the other hand, Cornell is also pretty big, isolated, and cold. My state school is actually in a pretty good location but I am not sure I would want to go there (lack of prestige, too many people I know, etc).
Money isn’t an issue, but I would like to get some opinions. If you could choose again, would you choose Cornell? I do want to attend graduate school (either Masters or MBA).
Thanks for the suggestions!
Have you visited both schools? They are similar in terms of prestige, but have very different environments. Ithaca may be far from other cities, but with a university population of about 20k, it hardly feels isolated. It is quite cold during much of the year, but also breathtakingly beautiful. I have heard Cal is better for grad school than undergraduate, due to the huge undergrad population. I know people at both schools who are very happy. You just may need to visit and pick the school with the vibe that suits you best.
The choice between Berkeley and Cornell is largely a decision on which school atmosphere you prefer and would also highly suggest visiting both if you haven’t already. I would pick from those two over the state school due to the programs at both are stellar and will help you to really succeed in the field.
As someone who was accepted to cornell (I’m probably going) and lives near UC Berkeley, I have to say that UC Berkeley offers a terrible undergraduate education. I have a lot of friends who go there or have gone there and my friend’s mom is a professor there and overall, they complain about class sizes. My friend was told by her professors not to go to class and to watch the lecture online instead because the class was over-enrolled and there weren’t enough seats in the lecture hall. Also, it’s incredibly difficult to graduate on time because people are unable to enroll in all the courses they need. Berkeley in world renown for its grad school and research, but I’d say skip it for undergraduate. The professor I know there says that she would never recommend going there undergrad because it’s a waste of money.
That being said, student life is awesome and if you do graduate on time, you’re basically guaranteed a job because the tech companies recruit like crazy out of UCB. a lot of internships are even geared specifically towards UCB students.
I can’t really speak for the other schools, but hopefully that gives you an idea about Berkeley
I hope this doesn’t come across as bashing cal, it is a great schoolif you are incredibly self-driven and a go-getter but it’s incredibly easy to get lost in the crowd
The only negative I would say about Cornell is that if your home base is in the west, travel can be difficult and expensive. And if you are bothered by the cold, you may not like it. I would still choose Cornell over Berkeley, but they’re close enough academically that you should pick where you think you can thrive best.
My son has a choice to make for CS as well - Cornell or UIUC or UMD (honors). He seems to be taken in with UMD because the honors program he has chosen allows him to gain specialization in cybersecurity with ready access to NSA and DOD and other private security contracting firms. I am trying to get him to give Cornell a fair shot (he and we as well don’t care about ‘prestige’ factors and such). Can anyone share pointers on what to look for when comparing between schools? We will be visiting Cornell soon.
@takanuva It’s all about the curriculum. If you’re visiting Cornell, I’d highly recommend trying to sit in on a CS lecture or talk to a few students in the CS department. Nicole Roy is still the undergraduate advisor in the CS department last I heard and she’d be a good person to maybe shoot an email and see if she can arrange your son to meet a CS student on campus.
Anyways, back to the curriculum, I think the strength of a program is largely on how it teaches you. Cornell’s CS program is very hands-on (as long as you take the practicum courses like you’re recommended to) and will have him pushing his skills constantly. For a quick list of examples, while at Cornell, I built an operating system, I built a compiler, I built database management system & a mobile peer-to-peer networking app when iPhones were still only a year old and learned how to do NAT punch-through, etc. In each of these, professors and the TAs would give general outlines and ideas of how to accomplish these things, they’d give you access to the tools necessary, but the assignments would still push you further than you were comfortable with and your skills grew because of that.
As an aside, government work with NSA & DoD can be quite lucrative but you should warn your son that starting there will usually means he’ll stay in government contracting in the end. Especially with the current atmosphere in the tech community, working for the NSA can be career limiting.
@OrnicusOrca
Thanks a lot for the info. My son sat in on a Programming Languages course at UMD and then on an Intro to Compilers course. The latter was too advanced for him but he got the hang of lambda calculus in the first one. He has taken a total of 6 CS courses, 4 in his HS, one at CMU and the CS50 at Harvard and has worked with C, C++, Java, Objective C, Python, Clojure & Swift. He has built two iPhone Apps and is working on his own programming language as a project and is working on the compiler now. You are right, hands-on seems to be the best way of learning and he seems to enjoy it a lot. Looking through the course offerings, it seems most of the fun courses are offered Tuesday/Thursday and we are there only on Monday so that’s a bummer. We will email to see if he can meet with a few students to get info first-hand.
You have a great point about getting stuck in government contracting and we will definitely keep that in mind. On a different note, since you are a CS major, do you foresee cybersecurity becoming more mainstream as companies work to prevent wide-scale hacking of consumer data and such?
Thanks again for your detailed reply. We will follow up on what you suggested.