<p>So, I don’t have the patience to read through everything. Can someone just give me the general consensus in response to the question?</p>
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<p>…really?</p>
<p>Dude, just read the first two pages. This is CC; we are <em>guaranteed</em> to have veered off topic after that. If you want an executive summary, hire an executive assistant!</p>
<p>Okay, so I guess MOST people are saying no…</p>
<p>there is a different layer of “engineering prestige” that average joes dont know about. it does not match up very well with the typical ideas of what the best schools are. harvard engineering is prob not the best place to go to if you want to do NASA JPL. however, Purdue or UMich have “engineering prestige”</p>
<p>Not to mention there are many schools that are prestigious in their respected regions that are probably not known to many outside that region. I go to an engineering school very well known in the midwest but probably not so much out of that.</p>
<p>what school is that?</p>
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<p>Well, to be fair, what I was talking about holds probably only for engineering and a few other majors (i.e. physics). I freely admit that Berkeley has plenty of creampuff majors, where you can do very little work at all and have no idea what is going on, and still pass, often times with a top grade. </p>
<p>For example, I know one guy who took a class that shall remain unnamed for which he not only never showed up, he never even bothered to do any of the reading. 90% of the class grading was based on 2 papers based on the reading, with 10% based on class participation. Instead of actually doing the reading, all he did was just go to Amazon and read the customer reviews of the books and then just reformulated them in his own words. He ended up with an A- in the class, and the only reason he didn’t get an A was because he got a 0 for class participation because, like I said, he never went to class. </p>
<p>I’ll always remember him laughing, saying that not only did he probably spend less total time working for that class for the entire semester, including lectures (which he never went to), than he spent in just a single lab section for a single one of his other (technical) classes… he even got a better grade! That actually gets to another one of my beefs with Berkeley: exactly why are certain classes graded so much harder than others? {Although, to be fair, I have noticed this disparity of grading in other schools.}</p>
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<p>Well, if this is really true, then this is quite the sad testament. I mean, really, how much administrative cost does it take to swap 2 student accounts? Heck, if this is such a problem, why not just charge the students for that cost? I can hardly believe that such a swap would cost a few hundred bucks each, but even if it did, I am sure that those students would have gladly paid it. That’s a heck of a lot better than being stuck in a major you don’t really want, or in the case of student Y, eventually resulting in not even being able to graduate at all. For student Y, that’s not even a close call. Heck, if I was student Y, I would pay thousands. That’s better than flunking out entirely.</p>
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<p>The Milwaukee School of Engineering =)</p>
<p>Small school, focuses mainly on undergraduate engineering programs. Well known in this area of the country and even companies across the country have taken some interest. For example, Nvidia recruits EE/CompE’s frequently here and is part of our advisory committee. </p>
<p>But my point was that if you’re looking to work in a particular part of the country you are sometimes better off going to a school in that area rather than a more “prestigious” school.</p>
<p>sakky, he was an EE/CS major. BTW, I also worked with one that graduated valedictorian from UCB EE/CS department.</p>
<p>I’m biased, but I would say that UCB has an outstanding reputation for just about any technical degree. Frankly, it has an outstanding reputation for most non-technical degrees as well. I’m sure the particulars and institutional vagaries of being at such a large institution make the Berkeley experience more troubling then it ought to be. At the end of the day, though, if you get a degree from Berkeley it will be worth it… even if you pay out of state tuition.</p>
<p>Full disclosure: although I have no degrees from UCB, I am very fond of the place, in part, because I used to work at the national lab there. I have taught Berkeley students, Stanford students, UPenn and Umich students and I definitely prefer the Berkeley students on a purely subjective basis. </p>
<p>To the poster who notes that it’s impossible to get a job at JPL with a PhD in applied science from Harvard: where does that come from? Harvard has a relatively small applied science graduate program, but I can assure you that nobody (including JPL) thumbs their nose at it. That’s no slight on any other engineering school, it’s just to say that my experience does not mesh with your post at all. If you were talking about only ugrad programs… I’m not sure why you’re talking about JPL. They hardly ever hire bachelor’s level people for full-time positions, unless they have 60 years of experience or something. When you add that level of experience to any bachelor’s degree, it certainly doesn’t matter where you went to school.</p>
<p>^^^regardless, you know the essence is true. harvard is not the place to get an undergrad engineering degree if you want to do actual engineering. there are better programs out there.</p>
<p>edit: sometimes you just need to look at the point behind the post. in what i wrote above, i did not just mean harvard, i meant other ivies and such that tend to be seen as the best in everything. sometimes they are good engineering schools, and sometimes they are not. i used JPL as a prestigious type of engineering work. i could have picked anything.</p>
<p>“harvard is not the place to get an undergrad engineering degree if you want to do actual engineering. there are better programs out there”</p>
<p>What’s this based on, really? Do you have any experience with Harvard engineering ugrads? Have you ever met one?</p>
<p>“in what i wrote above, i did not just mean harvard, i meant other ivies and such that tend to be seen as the best in everything. sometimes they are good engineering schools, and sometimes they are not.”</p>
<p>I think most ivy grads would probably name MIT and Caltech as the best engineering schools in the world. I don’t know who you’re talking about, frankly. I suspect you don’t either.</p>
<p>“i used JPL as a prestigious type of engineering work. i could have picked anything.”</p>
<p>Why don’t you try picking a place you actually know a little about? That would be a good start.</p>
<p>This is kind of off topic but one of my professors recently told us how he used to work with a Harvard graduate and it took that engineer about 3 times longer to complete a design than other engineers. Your conversation just reminded me of that story is all =P</p>
<p>That’s not really off topic, actually. I’m not sure it means much, but it seems to be on topic.</p>
<p>To JoeJoe05, How do you like Milwaukee? Are you from the north? How do you handle the cold?</p>
<p>Yep lived in Wisconsin all my life. I actually grew up in a small city north of Milwaukee and moved here when I went to college. I like the city a lot, there’s always something to do! </p>
<p>You get used to the cold! We actually just had a big snowstorm and I’ve probably repeated this many times now but I hate snow! But I guess it makes you appreciate summer that much more.</p>
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<p>Yeah, if you get a degree from Berkeley. But that’s a big ‘if’. </p>
<p>That gets to my central characterization of Berkeley. Berkeley is indeed a great school for those students who do well. But what about those students who don’t do well? What happens to them? </p>
<p>Maybe this isn’t the place for me to say this, and I should instead be discussing this on the Berkeley section of CC (and I have), but basically, I think that Berkeley should admit fewer people, and in particular, should stop admitting those people who are going to do poorly. Why admit somebody who is just going to flunk out anyway? However, if Berkeley can’t stop doing admitting these people, then the next best solution would be to allow these people to leave Berkeley (or at least leave engineering) with a clean slate. For example, if somebody tries ChemE, does poorly, and then decides to switch to another major, then who cares what his ChemE grades are? He’s not going to major in it anyway. Let him walk away with a clean transcript. Yet, as it stands, it is (sadly) better to not even try a difficult class at all than to try it and get a bad grade.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that, while surely the top students at Berkeley do very well, there is a large ‘underclass’ of students, i.e. the bottom 25%, who are not being well served at all. Many of them won’t even graduate at all, and even those that do will live a very painful existence. That their GPA’s are basically sundered not only eliminates any shot for them to get into a decent grad school, but also excludes them from the many good jobs that have GPA cutoffs.</p>
<p>MY POINT is that IVIES are not the best places to get ENGINEERING DEGREES. stop taking my words apart. i dont think i can say it anymore plainly than that. there are many public and private universities that have better engineering programs than ivies; therefore, there is a different area of prestige for engineering. its like a venn diagram. some overlap the two areas of prestige, and some do not.</p>
<p>i used harvard as an example of an ivy. no, i dont know any harvard engineers. i could have said yale or princeton or brown, etc. i chose JPL because its a well-known thing.</p>
<p>i dont think that my being a hs senior and not having first hand experience with the issue discredits my point. you can look at rankings and trends in where colleges recruit. UMich or GaTech or UIUC will PROBABLY (there are always some exceptions) give you a better foundation and opportunity pool in the engineering world.</p>
<p>^^^But what about Princeton and Cornell? Both those ivies are highly ranked for engineering.</p>
<p>When you stop talking about business and i-Banks, I don’t think engineering is really prestige-driven. In aerospace, at least, it is almost oxymoronic to talk about “prestigious” bachelors degrees…if you even get hired, you are at the bottom of the pile and will get the most menial assignments as a freshly minted undergrad with no advanced degree…it doesn’t matter what school you attended. If you get hired with just a BS, you likely be deemed educationally deficient and put into a career development path that will require you to get a masters…or more. And once you have an advanced degree, your research and publications will become the focus rather than the name of the school you attended.</p>