<p>My S is deciding between UCLA and Berkeley. He has always dreamed of Berkeley for his PhD (it's top in his field). They told him in the dept that if he goes there for undergrad they wouldn't take him for grad (cross-pollination and all that). So, should that weigh on his decision now for undergrad? As he says, he doesn't want to bet on the future. He may not even get into Berkeley for grad. What do u think? Thanks!</p>
<p>He should go to the school he wants to go to now. By the time he’s ready to apply to grad school he will have changed a great deal and so will his desire to go to grad school or to a particular grad school. I can’t imagine who the “they” is who told him this but unless it was the Director of Graduate Studies and the application review board of the future, what they said is of no consequence.</p>
<p>Some of the more competitive grad programs at Berkeley have acceptance rates lower than 1%. Deciding not to attend a school because he may wish to apply to its grad program five plus years down the road is foolish. By the way, what does your son know about phDs? There’s a very good chance that he may decide on a totally different route by the time senior year of college rolls around. </p>
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<p>Is the student a chemical engineering major? If so, Berkeley’s chemical engineering department says on its web site that it subscribes to the idea that students should do BS and PhD study at different universities.</p>
<p><a href=“http://cheme.berkeley.edu/grad_info/faq.php”>http://cheme.berkeley.edu/grad_info/faq.php</a></p>
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<p>Regarding a question on the UCLA forum, I’m not sure how interest in sports or wearing shorts and flip-flops is either nerdy or non-nerdy.</p>
<p>I don’t know, ucb, schools say lots of things on their websites. The thinking is not uncommon in academia, it’s true, that students are better served by having different undergrad and graduate unis, but I was unaware of a school that states such a policy. But I guess if you’re UCB’s chemE department you’re not hurting for qualified PhD applicants. Usually where one sees this enforced is in hiring of faculty. Schools often will not hire faculty who have graduated from their PhD programs because of reproducing their department weaknesses in their progeny. Or they will only hire the truly exceptional homegrown PhD after he or she has written a book or two. We often won’t take grad students from our u/g pool, but I’ve never seen that written down. It’s a common law practice we’ve violated every once in a while to good effect for the dept and the student. Some students just belong in one’s department.</p>
<p>Thanks all. He’s been committed to the same field – with the PhD – since he was 5 years old. It could change, and might, but it hasn’t yet.
@ucbaalumnus I don’t mean to say they are nerdy or not. Hard to describe my kid, but no sports, shorts, beaches, etc is part of his makeup. He actually expressed a concern that he would have to wear shorts at UCLA b/c that would be the culture!</p>
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<p>Do you mean to say that, if a department is weak in subarea X and wants to hire a faculty member in subarea X, it is more likely to find the best candidates who wrote PhD theses in subarea X, who are unlikely to have done so in the same department?</p>
<p>I was preparing a reply until I decided that this was the most ridiculous concept I’ve heard on cc yet.</p>
<p>I understand the reasoning to be that they want grad students from different departments with different perspectives, training etc. it’s reasonable, I guess.</p>
<p>My brother graduated as EECS from Cal. He wanted to get a masters in EE from Cal but Cal tends to not accept their EECS students unless they are exceptional. My bro ended up getting his masters at UCSD, which is also a good school.</p>
<p>This is true for PHD’s, too. Not set in stone, but the undergrad would have to be absolutely exceptional in order to stay in the same dept for grad school.
However, your son does sound exceptional (not because you’re his mother, but because of his laser focus on a discipline in which he’s excelled since the age of 5.) So, who knows, he may be the exception. And when grad school comes around, he may be more interested in Stanford or Harvard. 
He should email the Head of Dept at UCB to ask an honest opinion on the matter.</p>
<p>Thanks @MYOS1634. Just got home from long talk with a senior prof in the dept. He repeated that they prefer their students to do grad elsewhere or go away for a masters and come back for PhD. But what was really interesting – and clinched my son’s decision to attend Cal – was that he said that UCLA’s dept was so weak that he would not have sufficiently good training and would be unlikely to get into a Cal for grad school.</p>
<p>Well, LOR’s from profs are VERY , VERY important for admission to PhD programs. And in academia, profs DO know a lot about their colleagues at the other UC’s. So If recent UCLA graduates in your S’ program of interest have NOT impressed the grad school admission office at UCB, then he is wise to go to UCB for UG .
But be aware, the senior prof was serious when he was telling you the Depts position- Profs very often want to teach new students in grad school, and not teach the same students that they had over the previous 4 years. </p>
<p>Yes, if UCLA’s undergrad program in the major has not historically produced good PhD students to the point that PhD programs tend to be unwilling to admit UCLA undergrads, then it makes sense to go to a stronger school in the major for pre-PhD undergrad.</p>
<p>However, he may want to be more open to going to other good schools for PhD study, assuming that he does well in undergrad, due to the faculty preference for undergrad and PhD study at different schools.</p>
<p>^^^that’s killer, and really hard to believe! I’m not saying the prof is lying, but I am wondering why in the world they would suspect a student’s qualification JUST because he graduated from a perfectly good university. Thank God the English Dept at Cal doesn’t behave the same way, or Stanford, or the school I finally attended, or I never would have gone to grad school.</p>
<p>@ucb: I’m not sure I understand your question, but let me try to make what I said more clear. In my thirty years in English, and I’ve heard of this in departments in other fields, it has been common law practice for employers to avoid hiring students who have received their PhDs from the employer’s graduate program. The thinking is that, not only do your own students benefit from going somewhere else for their graduate educations, but the Department itself benefits when it brings in faculty members from outside its graduate program. Every program has weaknesses, blind spots, areas of the field in which they do not excel at a particular moment in time. To hire a PhD who came thru the program would not be good for the students she teaches because she would replicate the weaknesses of the dept at that moment and pass it on to the students. For instance, my dept does not have real strength in poetry analysis; we’re strong in other genres like fiction and particularly drama. We used to be strong in poetry, but those professors died or retired and this is the moment in which we find ourselves. I have students in my classes who cannot read poetry who are in their third years, and they struggle to write about it in part because their professors are teaching to the professors’ strengths. The students are not going to get a lot of help with learning to write about poetry if they’re only reading a sprinkling of poetry in their survey classes because at the upper level courses the faculty are mostly teaching in the genres in which they are experts. If there’s only one expert in poetry and the student doesn’t take her or that professor is studying abroad then that grad student will absorb the weakness of our department. To in turn hire that graduate would do nothing to strengthen the department where it has this hole. Is that any clearer, ucb?</p>