Help choosing from UC Berkeley, Cornell, and Washington University in St. Louis

College Search & Selection
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Hi everyone. I’m facing quite a bit of dilemma here (albeit a good one) that’s been getting me really stressed out. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been accepted by UCB, Cornell, and WUSTL and can’t really decide which one to commit to. I’m currently a cognitive science major at Berkeley, a Psychology major at Cornell, and a Psychology, Neuroscience and Philosophy major at WUSTL – all of this subject to change, I really am not set on a major, just had to put one down for the app process.

I’ve read up MANY, MANY of these comparison threads between these 3 schools and many of them focus on the premed programs at each of them. Though I’m undecided, I’m very unlikely to go into premed and I do have interests in english, computer science, and psychology/cognitive science.

I’m currently leaning toward Cornell but I’m still so torn about my decision because of all the bad press surrounding it. I’ve just returned from a visit from Cornell, and honestly, I’m a little ambivalent about the whole experience. Don’t get me wrong, from what I saw, I thought Cornell was absolutely fine, cheery even. But the whole time I had all of the bad things I’ve heard about it in the back of my head like the cutthroat competition, the severe weather, the insane difficulty of classes – all these things I couldn’t really “experience” in my visit.

I’m visiting WUSTL later this week and won’t have a good hold on the school until I do, but of what I know it’s supposedly got great student satisfaction. I’m a little apprehensive because everyone praises WUSTL so much that I’m not entirely sure whether or not to believe it - do they really love it or are they just jumping on the band wagon? It’s like the extreme contrast of Cornell, where everyone is bashing it. I also do not want to go into pre-med or business but that seems to be all that WUSTL is praised for.

For the time being, I’ve ruled out Berkeley, but if someone can make a compelling argument for me to reconsider it, I will. I’m from the Bay Area and have lived here my entire life, so going to school so close to home sounds really unappealing to me. No matter where I go, I’d ideally like a change of scenery in terms of weather and culture. I visited Cal, and found it to be quite alright, I don’t think I would mind going there for 4 years (or longer…) but it just feels too “comfortable.” The mix of "diversity"in which Asians have become the majority doesn’t help either. I myself am an Asian American and I’ve been surrounded by this scene of heavy Asian influence all my life. I’ve heard from a friend’s sister that many Asian Americans go through an identity crisis entering Cal and would really like to discover myself some place else.

For all these schools, money really isn’t an issue but I do feel a little guilty spending more of my parents’ money on an private school education when one can be obtained for much cheaper at Cal. Though the academics of all the schools are comparable, I guess what I’m looking at is the undergrad experience as a whole.

Also I know that it’s not good to caught up in prestige but I can’t help but do so… I think one of the reasons I’m so stuck on Cornell is that it does carry that Ivy status (but at the same time I know it gets a lot of hate for being the “worst” Ivy). At the same time, coming from a school in California which has received 20-30 offers of admissions to Cal per class of 500 for the last two years to Berkeley (and 60-70+ in years prior), Berkeley really doesn’t seem that prestigious. In fact when I visited and talked to many of the students there, it sounded like Cal was an Ivy-reject school for them. WUSTL, though it ranks higher than these other two on the US News and Report charts (though I realize I have to take it with a grain of salt), doesn’t carry the same prestige that Cornell or UCB would in my mind and for this reason I’m a little apprehensive about choosing it because I feel it may limit my future career plans.

– I was also wait listed at Medill- Northwestern’s school of journalism. In the chance that I do get off that wait list, should I consider it over these other three schools? I’m in the college of Arts & Sciences/Letters & Sciences for each of the above schools.

Thanks in advance!

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When my D1 was still a (precocious) high school student, she took Calculus III at the local state university. That should have been a relatively hard course for her, in my estimation, with 3D integration.vector calculus, etc. But she was breezing through it with very little effort and getting A’s. So I investigated as to how this could possibly be.

It turned out that the prof. was giving exam problems exactly like homework problems, save for changing a few values. And was even telling the kids which problems those would be.

No wonder she was doing so well, with such little effort!

I finally understood how students of somewhat modest capabilities could ever take and pass such courses.

I could forgive it in a third rate state U, but at a place like Wash U I’d expect better, frankly.

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@monydad I’m a bit confused at how that is related to the OP’s post. As for Calc at WashU, I’ve only taken up to Calc II but it was definitely pretty challenging and not just barely changed exam questions.

As for the OP, PNP at WashU is a fantastic major. Off the top of my head, I know my friends had classes where A) they held an actual human brain the first day of class B) watched an MRI scan at the med school C) did a PNP study abroad in Edinburgh. PNP also allows students to take courses in bio, linguistics, anthro, etc (so you’re getting a very interdisciplinary education) if you want. If you like psychology/neuroscience a lot, the freshman Mind Brain & Behavior program is great.

I would also look at fit. The three schools you listed are all excellent but will feel different. Cornell is very much in a rural-ish college town/small city. WashU is in a suburban area connected to a large metro. Berkeley is much larger than the other two.

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The post my post referred to was above mine when I made my post, but it linked to a blog and so was subsequently deleted. Evidently. That post told “a tale out of school” regarding a math course at Wash U. It was in the context of that now-deleted other post that my post was made, and made sense.

Now it doesn"t.

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It’s very common in math classes for professors to give exam problems that are very similar to the homework problems. In fact, kind of the point of the homework problems are to prepare the students for the exams, so if the exams are radically different from the homework it kind of makes the homework…moot. I’ve TAed a statistics class before where this was the tactic - the exam problems were structured very much like the homework problems with different values, and the problems in the review packet were more of the same (in fact, some of the questions in the review packet were exam questions with different numbers).

The idea is that if students are doing well on the homework, taking their time and practicing, then they should find the exams easy. The implication of telling the students which question types are going to be on the exam is that those students are going to dissect these questions, take them apart, practice other questions like them…and hence they should learn the material we want them to learn. A class doesn’t have to be insanely difficult to be educational, and “students of modest capabilities” (whatever that means) should be able to take the classes and pass them if they are willing to put in the effort.

I agree that this is about fit. I will say, briefly, that a straight psychology major is quite different from a cognitive science major (or PNP at WUSTL, which is kind of similar to a cognitive science major). They have different foci; the professors will be researching different things, and concerned with different concepts. So if it’s important to you to have an interdisciplinary blend of the concepts, then the cog sci or PNP programs at Berkeley and WUSTL might be better for you.

As for prestige, all three of these schools are very prestigious. You live in the Bay Area so Berkeley may have lost its luster to you, but do realize that 30 out of 500 is just 6%. Also realize that the undergraduate selectivity of a university doesn’t necessarily determine its prestige - there are other factors that contribute to that (like public/private status and how well-known the college is). UC Berkeley is one of the most prestigious universities on the planet. Wash U, too, is an elite university. The Ivy League is just an athletic conference: obviously, one of very good schools, but the quality and rigor of the schools determined the league, not the other way around. (They wanted to compete with other universities who didn’t sacrifice academic standards to recruit athletes.) It also doesn’t mean that there aren’t equally good/prestigious schools outside the league.

Also, do you want the smaller, almost LAC-ish feel of Wash U, the medium-sized university feel of Cornell, or to go to a huge public university with tons of school spirit and activities like Berkeley? You already said you want to leave the Bay Area, but do you want to leave it for a rural college town like Ithaca or the suburbs of a major U.S. city?

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Big question: net price and amount of debt involved at each school?

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“It’s very common in math classes for professors to give exam problems that are very similar to the homework problems. …”

Really you should have those discussions with that teller of “a tale out of school”.
Though my own education more resembled what he was expecting out of his students.

“students of modest capabilities” (whatever that means)"
I meant students who are not particularly good at math. And no, I really don’t feel like defining and quantifying to your satisfaction exactly what “not particularly good at math” means.

But for purposes of this thread you are talking to the wrong guy.
The right guy’s post was deleted.

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“…the suburbs of a major U.S. city?”

Have you ever been to St. Louis? I have. But only about six times. So maybe I’m wrong.

But from what I saw, to corrupt the words of Lloyd Bentsen, “I’ve known major US Cities. St Louis is NOT a major US city”.

Like the place I lived for ten years, a few hours away from it, it’s more like a large, spread-out, characterless suburb.(Sorry St. Louis). One has to drive to get most places in it. The inner city was neutered by people fleeing to the suburbs, long ago, more than most cities. So most of the wealth is in the suburbs, spread out. Where one can find generic strip mall after strip mall. They have a nice science museum for kids, and the zoo is a nice walk through. But college students are not ten.

They do have a nice Little Italy section, It is really small though. College students probably can’t afford to eat where I ate there though.

Now if you were talking about Berkeley that’'s different. Berkeley IS in the suburbs (I guess you’d call it) of a MAJOR US city. San Francisco may be the best city I’ve ever been to, IMO.

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I taught math at Wash. U. for many years. The students are very bright, but the administration wants “retention” and “no problems”. Here is a summary of what happened when I taught differential equations at a level similar to MIT.

The chair of the math dep’t told me that he wanted me to make the class the normal “cookbook” course, telling me to teach students only the steps to work problems like those that will be on the test. He said to do this so that he wouldn’t have “problems”.

An Engineering Assoc. Dean (and Dean of Student Academic Integrity) was concerned about students doing poorly on an exam. I wrote him that almost all of the ones who had done poorly had cheated on the homework. He wrote back: don’t “discourage” them, “retention” is important.

Though the Math Chair kept refusing to show me the “complaints” he was “dealing with”, I finally managed to get a copy of them. Here is what I saw.

An Engineering student tutor “complained” that he “…cannot do…most [MIT} problems …and [he] received an A [in the standard “cookbook” version of the course]…”

An outraged father wrote the Deans that his “understanding” was that the average on a test was 47, and that I didn’t even curve! It was actually 67 – several points lower than the other three tests, and about 40% of the class made A’s, no one below a C. The Deans responded to the parent by asking for his son to report on whether I had “improved”. The student’s “report” made it clear that he did not even recognize that homework problems were on the test – some word for word!

The Chair of the Math Department told me that Math had just “wrested” a course from Engineering, and they weren’t going to let Engineering “wrest” this course from Math. Clearly, there was a competition to see who could meet the “wants” of a few students to the detriment of all students. The course was worth a lot to the winner’s budget. (A Dean had told a previous Chair that he wanted “no complaints”, even if that meant a reduction in standards. That is apparently how the winner is determined.)

I give this example because I was there, not because Wash. U. is the only school behaving this way. There are schools that are ok, though, but you have to beware of those that aren’t.

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I’m back. Look below for a new post. I was a new user and didn’t realize that I couldn’t list my site, so the previous comment was delete.

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