From what I’ve seen, SJSU is more hands-on and is great for finding internships, especially since it’s located in the heart of Silicon Valley. However, UC Davis has research opportunities which I’m also interested in. Which school offers a more comprehensive engineering program (as well as electrical engineering specifically)?
What kind of research are you interested in EE?
Not sure yet, maybe embedded systems.
I heard the term research for undergraduate throw out a lot by a lot of CCers, but unless you have a deep desire to to dig in an area, it should not be a prime concern. For example, my daughter is a Regents a UCSD, one of the things UCSD promised her is undergraduate research. She did that the first quarter but has since told me essentially, she was a dumb college freshman, had no idea what research to do. She has since stopped doing research for now, I mean she won’t focus on it, until she gets to junior or senior. Maybe never, so I suggest you not to focus on it and just pick the school base on fit. Plus I assume you are a transfer student, you might need to catch up and trying to finish in time, research might delay graduation.
FYI, my one of my husband was in a research environment at one of his job, he had almost 45 patents, but we didn’t want to push her into research.
–Don’t pick UC Davis for electrical engineering. As mentioned, SJSU will better prepare you for industry and getting jobs whereas a manager from Intel rather pick even Sacramento State over Davis for an EE job because the Sac State student is trained to do the job whereas the Davis student has some catching up to do.
You’re really splitting hairs here based on gross generalities… the real world is not this cut and dried.
Both schools are in fact very good, and are seen by the vast majority of employers as equals, for all intents and purposes. You will get a fine education at either school.
The OP should choose the one that offers the better all-around fit.