I have been accepted to all 3 of these schools and intend to major in computer science. At UCSD, I was admitted directly to the major; at Berkeley, accepted into L&S, and Rice is cool because choosing majors is flexible there. I know each school has strong programs in CS, but Rice isn’t typically ranked as high due to it focusing more on the undergrad experience and being slightly less well known. Will I have the same opportunities with a CS degree from Rice as I will with a degree from Berkeley or UCSD?
I have gone to small private schools all my life, so Rice would make more sense in this aspect. At the same time, I do think it would be good for me to go to a bigger school in order to become “tougher” and have to seek out my own opportunities.
I also feel confident that I could meet the 3.3 GPA requirement to declare the CS Major at Berkeley because I’ll be able to pass out of some of the lower division math courses and I’ve heard that it’s best to space out the 3 pre-requisites into 3 semesters.
Are any of the school’s environments so much better than the others that I can’t miss out? I have visited Rice and I liked the campus and the residential college system. I have not visited either of the UCs.
Well obviously, Berkeley is so close to Silicon Valley, so there’s bound to be opportunity there. At the same time, I really do believe that Houston and San Antonio are going to grow in terms of opportunity as well. And Rice, being arguably the most prestigious university in Texas is bound to be recruited by employers for energetic college graduates.
All 3 are good schools. But for CS in particular what you do and how much practical skills you learn will be more beneficial either to get a job or plan to pursue masters/Ph.D. Also it depends on what is your aid/scholarship package you got from each of these 3 schools. If you are in -state either for Texas or CA and how far you want to venture out from home.
If there is no difference in cost between UCB and UCSD, it is better to choose UCB since it enables you to get various intern opportunities being in technology capitol.
I think with high quality choices like these it is important to go where you would feel most comfortable. Is there any way you could visit UCSD and Berkeley? I think anyone planning to go to Berkeley should visit it first to make sure you are not put off by the surroundings. Some people say “no way!” and others feel fine there. My son was accepted at UCLA and Berkeley but went with UCSD because he got Regents, which gave him priority registration and research starting as a freshman. It has been good there, but I don’t know if it would have been good without these perks. From his experience applying to internships online and interviewing via Skype, I think job opportunities hinge on how well a candidate can solve programming problems that are posed during the interview. I suspect that the college you attend plays a role in getting an interview, but programming skills get you the job. I saw two threads that might be helpful under CC top Universities/Rice University: “Rice vs Brown for Computer Science” and “Rice- computer science?”
I’m a junior CS major at Rice. I can’t speak to the quality of the other programs except to say I’ve heard good things (at least as far as job placement goes). Here’s what I do feel comfortable saying:
First, I have to kind of disagree with @Todd87. Not in letter, just in spirit a little. I’m sure Rice doesn’t churn out as many papers as the other two because it’s a smaller school, but it’s also a solid research university for CS. It’s hard to generalize because CS is a broad field, but Rice has historically been influential in Compilers research, for example. There are professors doing research in security, distributed systems, bioinformatics, machine learning/data science, programming languages, parallelism, etc, and a lot of them will consider you for undergrad research if you show initiative and talent in their classes. I’m not arguing that Rice has a “better” program than Berkeley in any particular way, though. I dunno how easy it is to do undergrad research there.
I think the curriculum is really good and challenging, and there’s no shortage of CS classes to take. To quote myself from another thread: “I think Rice really punches above its weight when it comes to job placement for CS. Some big companies (Apple is the one that comes to mind) don’t recruit at Rice at all, but others (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and more) do a lot of recruiting and I know a lot of people going to work at those places. Plus some cool places operating in Houston or Austin (TwoSigma, HomeAway, and more) love Rice students, and that’s not getting into any cool startups. The career fair is basically the CS career fair at this point.” The fact that the residential college system mixes all ages and allows you to make close upperclassmen friends means that referrals are easy to come by (I’m going to Palantir, a really selective tech company, this summer partially as the result of a referral).
The thing I want you to come away with is that you’ll do great if you go to Rice. So, if you think Rice would be the best fit for you, then you don’t need to worry about stifling your ability to do well after college. Feel free to ask follow up questions!
