“I think if another GaTech undergrad conducted research with a famous professor there, they would be weighted similarly.”
Well Berkeley has more famous professors in EE an CS than Ga Tech. Who are the famous Ga Tech professors in EECS that you mention? Here are the Turing award winners by university:
UCB - 22 from graduates, and professors
Stanford - 20
MIT - 19
Harvard - 13
CMU - 12
I’m not saying you’re going to work with a famous professor at Berkeley but you have much higher chance of finding one there than at Ga Tech.
So working with a Berkeley professor would not be weighed the same as working with a Georgia Tech professor, at least int he fields of engineering, math and computer science, actually in any field - economics, international relations etc.
“Also, I don’t know where this idea that Berkeley is cutthroat comes from. All the people I know who went there seem pretty normal, and I can’t imagine any of them trying to drag down their fellow students in order to get a better grade.”
Pre-med is maybe one as ucbalumnus points out, also you have to apply to the CS program in the college of arts and sciences after your first year I think and that is based on GPA so maybe that could be cutthroat. But EECS is direct admit so there wouldn’t be competition to get in there. The other reason is that Berkeley is not known for grade inflation (but I don’t think GT is either), meaning that certain percent of the class will get As as well as Fs, and the average will be a C. In other schools most of the class gets As or Bs, and if they don’t, can take the class as pass/no-credit so the grade doesn’t show up on the transcript.
“I’m not saying you’re going to work with a famous professor at Berkeley but you have much higher chance of finding one there than at Ga Tech.”
Well UC Berkeley has produced 23 Turing award winner. But I encourage you to go check that list again - NONE OF THESE 23 PEOPLE are currently working at UC Berkeley. Which would mean I can’t research with them if I go there. Now if you want to comment on this huge number of Turing award winners from UC Berkeley, I would attribute that to their Graduate program.
If I am not wrong, Fields Medals are given to Mathematicians - which is pretty much irrelevant for me because I am interested in applications (AI, Robotics, HCI) or Computer Science. If it were theoretical CS, I guess it would have been slightly relevant.
Now if you think that Turing award winners are the only ones who are “famous”, well then even UC Berkeley doesn’t have any famous professors.
Mathematicians can have big impacts in AI research and some other areas of CS with practical applications. I wouldn’t write that off as irrelevant entirely.
Yes, that is correct - but the work they do is largely theoretical (algorithms). Yes, that work is also very important but is not something I am very interested in doing. I want to work with hardware and use it to create novel applications. I am pretty sure mathematicians don’t work with hardware.
Regardless, this is off topic. I really want to work with CS/ECE professors rather than Mathematicians.
It sounds like you don’t want CS at all then. Algorithms are far from theoretical alone - they power a great deal of CS and modern technology. You won’t be able to work in AI without algorithms. Working on the hardware will only be tangentially linked in the end. I’d forget all this focus on CS strength and instead compare the strength of EE programs.
It is probably not a good idea to think of Georgia Tech as being significantly smaller than Berkeley. It has half the number of undergrads, but nearly twice the number of engineers, about 20% fewer CS undergrads, more than 2.5 times the number of full time CS masters, a huge part time CS Masters program and about the same sized CS Phd programs. Both these schools have CS enrollments that are bigger than most LACs and Intro CS classes bigger than some LACs. Access to CS professors is not going to be the strong point at either school.
In terms of research, CS has many sub disciplines. Based on this statement:
Here a ranking of research output, based on your areas of interest. Both schools are quite active in your areas of interest. The difference between Georgia Tech and Berkeley is arguably with the margin of error of the ranking methodology. Note that the ranking correlates strongly with size. There are many smaller departments with high research activity per faculty member further down the list that would probably offer more personal attention. The ratio of Faculty to Count is another interesting metric. I would recommend using the linked reference more as a data base than a ranking and explore the underlying data by clicking on the little pie chart and the arrow associated with the school of interest and then come up with your own relative ranking.
Rank…Institution…Count… Faculty
1 ► Carnegie Mellon University ◕…96.8…85
2 ► University of Washington ◕…44.3…38
3 ► Massachusetts Institute of Tech ◕…28.7…26
4 ► Georgia Institute of Technology ◕…27.4…39
5 ► University of California - Berkeley ◕…24.2…30
6 ► Cornell University ◕…21.8…31
7 ► Stanford University ◕…20.2…24
8 ► Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champ ◕…19.6…28
8 ► University of Michigan ◕…19.6…25
10 ► University of Minnesota ◕…18.1…17
By algorithms, I meant optimizing resource-intensive tasks like Sorting, Searching, Combinatorics, Cryptography etc. You would probably not find a mathematician working on algorithms which optimize AI-related applications such as Image recognition, stereo vision etc (things that I want to work on).
You can check here the type of research done in mathematics at UC Berkeley: https://math.berkeley.edu/research/areas
They don’t really go into any AI/ML concepts. I also looked at all their faculty - their research doesn’t get into AI/ML at all.
Even if you’re going to create AI-based applications, you’re going to need to know a lot of math, esp how algorithms, machine, human and deep learning are all connected. I’m a little familiar with this space and I’m telling you that Berkeley is better for this, much better. When I was applying EECS was not that popular a major, but computer engineering was, and that was my major, which is basically EE with a focus on digital and software rather than analog and electro-magnetism. Even if it’s graduate school focused, the cutting edge stuff that happens in this field at Berkeley is matched only at MIT, CMU, ,Stanford, which you also applied to.
I think the @ of part time CS students in the GA Tech masters program is skewed by the online program they offer. Would suspect many if not most of those are participating in the online masters program.
@theloniusmonk I am not saying UC Berkeley is not good at research. They might be better at that than GaTech (again more funding). But that doesn’t make it a better undergrad university. And Remember, although the research opportunities at UC Berkeley are abundant, the huge number of students willing to participate make it very competitive to get one, especially with famous professors and big/innovative projects effectively reducing the chances of young students landing one. I have been talking to students at GaTech and they said that most professors there are very receptive towards young freshman for research.
Yes I am going to need to know a lot of Math (and I am excited to learn that) but that doesn’t mean I will have to do research with a Mathematician.
@jym626 No, as I said before I just want to make the best decision possible. I do not want to regret later. Here is a “pro/con” list I have created. Maybe you can contribute:
You seem to have a good handle on the academic pros/cons, so are there any “gotta haves” or “deal breakers” to consider? Will you still be “basing “ out of TX (will there be family there) ? It’s probably easy to get there (DFW? HOU?) from Atl or SFO/OAK so that’s probably a non-issue.
If you are sure you are going to go to grad school, the ability to get jobs (separate from internships/co-ops) right afterward is probably a lesser issue, as is the cost of living ( though Atlanta wins big time over Berkeley on that one). Are you comfortable sharing what your home country is?
If you’re truly interested in AI (to include research opportunities), get ready to love you some math, as that’s what it will take for you to contribute to interesting projects (in class or research). Just showing up is not enough anymore. The students that get research opportunities (especially early on) have strong math chops (linear algebra, probability, statistics) .
“No, as I said before I just want to make the best decision possible.”
You do seem set on GT, which is fine, I will just add one more thing, if you decide that engineering or CS isn’t for you after a year, and you want to go into business or econ or international relations, you’re much better off exploring other disciplines at Berkeley. GT is by definition a stem-focused school, the breadth won’t be there.
UCB EECS has an honors program (including a senior honors thesis) that you apply to after completing at least 35 credit units in college with a 3.7 or higher GPA: https://eecs.berkeley.edu/resources/undergrads/honors
You may want to look at what the required and optional courses are for your major and general education requirements at each school to see which is the better academic fit for you in terms of what is emphasized within CS and how you would like the general education options.