<p>Berkeley is definitely more well know globally and it is a research powerhouse…but for prestige in engineering, it’s not MIT, Caltech or Stanford…I think people are confusing “well know” with “prestige”. Well, i would say that a Berkeley PHD in engineering is quite prestigious, but since we are talking about undergraduate education here. Harvey Mudd is very very highly regarded in the engineering community and its median salary and experienced median salary are both among the top 10 in the nation. I think it will give you better opportunity at job placement. </p>
<p>Seriously, who cares if random people don’t know how good Harvey Mudd is. I’ve seen people in IT who never heard of Wharton. And people in manufacturing who have no idea about Caltech. All that matters is people who hires you know it.</p>
<p>Graduates from the Class of 2009 were hired by a wide range of companies and organizations, including the following:</p>
<p>AC Propulsion
Auritec
Axolotl Corp.
Bank of America
Blue Origin
Boeing
Booz Allen Hamilton
Creative Electron
Dreamhost
Electro Scientific Industries
Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation
Intalgent
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Laserfiche
LinkedIn
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Microsoft
Nevada Automotive Test Center
OnLive
Peace Corps.
Ragon Institute
Raytheon
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
ViaSat, Inc.</p>
<p>Some casual observations without knowing much about HMC and its graduate placements:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>With a few exceptions, most of the companies on the list are not typical household names. Are there many global companies coming to campus for recruiting?</p></li>
<li><p>Mudders seem to favor certain industry segments and skills … and the west coast.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Is it common for Mudders to go for graduate school right away?</p>
<p>is that we’re talking about undergrad teaching here. A better analogy might be chess. If you want to be the best chess player, having Kasparov as a teacher may not necessarily be the best way to get you there. Some unkown grand master or a distinguished but weaker international grandmaster than Kasparov might be the person to seek out.</p>
<p>I don’t have any direct educational experiences at Berkeley, but don’t the grad students over there get the lion’s share of the stellar faculty’s attention? This might be more true of Berkeley than other research universities such as Rice where the graduate students at UCB are, from my guess, relatively more talented than its undergrads.</p>
<p>When your graduating class is only 180 students, it’s easy to claim 30% go on to graduate school. The absolute number is trivial and prestige it is not.<br>
Can someone provide an anecdote a Mudd grad is preferred over a Berkeley grad for an engineering position? I highly doubt it.<br>
In the engineering world, Berkeley is way more prestigious. Sorry, most people have not heard of Harvey Mudd in the Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>Prestige as a whole, Cal >>>>>>>>> HMC. Prestige for undergrad engineering, nation wide Cal > HMC. For engineering in California I can see grads from the two schools being treated as equals, but I can’t imagine an average HMC grad being seen as better than an average Cal grad. You might get a slightly better undergraduate education at HMC, but it’s nothing significant enough to justify going to a LAC if you want the big state school experience or if Cal is cheaper tuition wise.</p>
<p>Venkat… the ave. HMC undergrad is 1485 SAT. The average Cal undergrad is 1335 ->1375 adjusted for Superscoring. The average Cal undergrad engineering ???. I have a feeling it would be something like 1410, 1420. </p>
<p>I’m with you if you say the top 25% or so of the undergrad engineers from Cal will be equal to the Average undergrad engineer from Mudd… simply a question of clockspeed in the cpu.</p>
<p>SAT scores aren’t everything, and they are pretty correlated with parental income. Cal is a state school. HMC is a private school. Private schools cost more. Also, doesn’t HMC have some special scholarships for students with above a 750 in each SAT section or something like that?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say HMC graduating engineer is stronger than a Cal graduating engineer. Cal is notorious for weeding out weaker students through intro courses. While the entering engineering class at HMC might be a little stronger, the exiting engineering classes probably aren’t too different in terms of intelligence. Also, employers don’t judge schools based on SAT scores of entering classes. They judge them based on the alums who graduated.</p>
Please, everyone read this post. Anyone who does serious research on American universities know which ones are truly well-regarded and are the best fit for them.
No one’s going to provide such an anecdote since no one is just going to come out and make a statement like that. However, the graduate school and professional placement numbers are quite telling. I guarantee you that all of the engineering circles in California have heard of HMC. You are just outright lying.</p>
<p>
An HMC education provides much better mathematical and technical skills than a UCB education. I feel like the difference is actually greater for an HMC finished product and an UCB exiting student.</p>
How about a director of engineering at a mid size processor com?
How about a senior design eng. at a com making FPGA?
One is Stanford grad, one is Cal grad. Both have not heard of Harvey Mudd. Both are in a position to hire. A Cal resume will get a second look. Mudd grad can’t come in and design the next memory controller. Their education is too general for Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>I just took a look at Mudd’s career site for where their grads of the past few years went. Then I took a lot at the list of Silicon Valley companies in the Fortune 1000. Well over half of those companies had employed Mudd graduates.</p>
Could you post that link? Who are some of these Fortune 1000 companies (I presume you meant companies HQ’ed in Silicon Valley)?</p>
<p>The one you posted is for 2008 grads only; and the list of companies is not impressive at all. Only two are based in Sillion Valley - Google and Sun Micro (why would you want to work for Sun Micro now?).</p>
<p>The brochure does show why Mudders are limited in job opportunities right after graduation -</p>
<p>Out of 93 Mudd grads finding employment after graduation:</p>
<p>“Method of Locationg Employment:
Career Fair 34
On-campus interview 7
Participation in an internship 5
Faculty 2
Alumni 5
…”</p>
<p>It shows that:
not that many companies come to campus for recruiting
<p>A HMC education is much more technical and real-world than one at UCB, which is mostly theoretical. They are both great schools but if one is immensely passionate about engineering, Mudd is the clear choice.</p>
<p>Silicon Valley Companies (ones represented in bold): Adobe Systems Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Agilent Technologies Apple Inc. Applied Materials
Business Objects Cisco Systems
eBay Google Hewlett-Packard Intel
Intuit
Juniper Networks
LSI Logic National Semiconductor
NetApp
Nvidia Oracle Corporation
SanDisk Sun Microsystems
Symantec Yahoo!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Er… For #1… Did you miss the Career fair? The Harvey Mudd career fair, when companies come to Mudd to recruit and take resumes and so on? How is that NOT coming to campus for recruiting, and that’s how most found jobs! I find it strange you ignored the greatest value that represented most highly the school’s ability to attract companies. Go to Harvey Mudd’s career site on that link and read up a bit about their career fairs, eh?</p>
<p>Both design MIPS CPU on FPGA, but Berkeley does out-of-order instruction issue, reg renaming, virtual mem, out of order mem access all of which are in the x86 architecture.
Mudd just connects the dots.
If you think UCB is more theoretical, you got a lot to learn.</p>
<p>From your Berkeley link: “Instead of a large FPGA-based design project, students will complete a series of lab assignments using a variety of computer architectures… and leaves more time to study more advanced topics in computer architecture, and in particular, the move to multicore parallel processing. Many of the topics we will cover were previously only offered in the CS252 graduate course.”</p>
<p>Also comparing the rigor of two colleges by comparing two single courses based on details off their websites seems a little desperate. Both Mudd and Berkeley are excellent but completely different institutions. Everyone should stop being so insecure and not worry about which one is better, has better job placement, or provides a better education.</p>