Brown or Duke. CAL can be cut throat competitive, too large, and it’s not a great area around campus.
@Nomorelurker I definitely agree with your latter two points, but I’ve been given very contradictory information for your first point about Cal, which is currently my biggest deterrent from going to Cal. Some people say Cal, especially Cal CS is very collaborative (which CS is generally), while only pre-med and business are cutthroat. Do you have any experience with this?
UCB CS 61A and 61B course home pages do state that they are not graded on a curve, presumably to discourage cutthroatism that may be more likely in curve-graded courses full of pre-med or pre-business students.
But you still face some uncertainty with the 3.3 GPA requirement to get into L&S CS.
@Burrito12, CS is very competitive to get into at CAL, as you know. It is human nature to retain some of that competitiveness, but you can always find students who want to collaborate.
"The sweet spot here is GaTech. It’s half the size of Cal and twice the size of Duke, with the same CS resources and opportunities as Cal. It’s also cheaper than all of these and has twice the number of CS faculty.
University of California - Berkeley 54 … no extra claims"
What’s the source of this. Berkeley claims 130 professors in EECS which has both EE and CS professors, in addition I just went the to the CS only faculty page and counted at least 80. Of course they have a number of Turing award winners in addition to other accomplishments.
The CS faculty at Berkeley is as distinguished as it gets, only Stanford and MIT are in its class, that’s it. If you want to tell the OP to select Duke or Brown that’s fine, but do not base it on the faculty.
“Some people say Cal, especially Cal CS is very collaborative (which CS is generally), while only pre-med and business are cutthroat. Do you have any experience with this?”
This is generally true, I know many kids who are in engineering and/or CS at UCB and they are more collaborative than competitive. EECS, the toughest major to gain admission is direct admit out of HS so the students there are not cut -throat, and you’ll be taking classes with students in EECS.
Any other thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
Bump, sorry just panicking haha.
What did you decide?
I decided to go for Brown! Thanks for your help!
Congratulations! My daughter loved her four years there, especially the CS department.
@Burrito12, You made a great choice.
enjoy!