How Competitive are students at UC Berkeley engineering?

Are students more collaborative and work together? Or are they extremely competitive?

From what I heard from my D, a senior in EECS…

The students are collaborative and are willing to help each other.

The environment, however, is extremely competitive. It’s not because the students backstab each other, but because each of them is smart and hard-working. Getting an A in an EE/CS class requires a lot of effort.

I heard from my friends who are at Cal EECS now that, everybody works VERY hard. They stay up until 1am every day, putting in 60 hours outside of classes studying, and still getting B’s pretty often.

Yeah we work hard and there are often times that we don’t get the grade that we want for like you said above.
Sabotaging isn’t an issue when we’re too busy taking care of our own butt.
I think making study buddies for each class is greatly beneficial to motivate each other to do well in classes. Most people are shy and try to solo their way through, but the sooner the better to get into a habit of introducing yourself and making study partner(s).