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<p>But that doesn’t answer the question: why does it have to be in Emeryville? While granted, Emeryville is not far away, wouldn’t it be nice if firms were within walking distance from campus? Facebook is literally just a handful of blocks away from Stanford. As is Ideo, Hewlett Packard, Pinterest, Playdom, and WSGR. As another example, take Cambridge MA - basically Berkeley’s East Coast alter-ego. There are also numerous biotech and software firms in Cambridge, many being literally right next to MIT or Harvard. Microsoft New England R&D is right next to the MIT Sloan School, Pfizer is next to Zigo Cafe, both Google Cambridge, Nokia, and Biogen Idec are in the Cambridge Center complex right next to the MIT Whitaker Health Sciences Building, Genzyme is a few blocks away from Eastgate, and Novartis has four locations (for 4 separate Novartis divisions) all scattered near MIT. Why can’t Berkeley do the same? If nothing else, it would greatly ease part-time co-ops and internships. For example, students could gain valuable work experience and networking contacts by arranging to pop in for some part-time work in between classes. </p>
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<p>Indeed, nobody does pretend that, but only because the jobs aren’t there. In contrast, you could spend your entire working life in/around Palo Alto or Cambridge, and many people do exactly that. Heck, I know some people who were born in Cambridge, went to both college and grad school at the universities in Cambridge, then had successful careers working for companies in Cambridge. </p>
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<p>And that’s the defeatist attitude that I must question. Why exactly is that unrealistic? Regional economic clusters shift locales all the time, often times in response to direct intervention by interested parties. The high-technology industry of the Boston/Cambridge was historically not centered around Cambridge at all, which until recently was still a major center of heavy manufacturing. Rather, the high-tech industry was scattered in the Boston suburbs around Route 128. Only recently has high-tech chosen to relocate to within Cambridge: Microsoft’s R&D Office on Mass Ave being established only a few years ago. Heck, even the term ‘Silicon Valley’ is now a misnomer as very little actual silicon semiconductor fabrication and assembly/testing - which is what birthed the region’s name in the first place - is still conducted there, with most new major fab operations having been relocated elsewhere years ago. {Semiconductor design is obviously still conducted there, but the actual fabrication and A&T are conducted elsewhere, and hence if your career path is fabrication engineering, you’re probably not going to find yourself in Silicon Valley, but are rather more likely to be in, say, Portland Oregon or Austin Texas that actually competed to import fabrication operations.} Similarly, while North Carolina perhaps does not strike one as a natural center for high technology, the Raleigh-Durham region has managed to build within the ‘Research Triangle Park’ one of the most impressive concentrations of high-tech R&D in the nation, with the 2nd largest of all of the offices of IBM, along with major offices of GSK, Cisco, Red Hat, EMC, Ericsson, Merck, Microsoft, BASF, and the list goes on. </p>
<p>The upshot is that I’m not clear as to why Berkeley can’t fight for more industry in the same manner that other locales competed for theirs. As the panelists cited, Berkeley has a litany of attractions that far exceed what is available in Silicon Valley, not least of which is far superior public transportation links along with excellent food and culture. {Let’s face it, even most Silicon Valley residents would concede that the region is a cultural wasteland.}</p>
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<p>While I’m not sure that I would go quite that far, I would say that I would certainly prefer to live in the East Bay - and Berkeley specifically - rather than the South Bay. </p>
<p>The problem is that that’s often times sadly not a realistic choice, because the jobs are in the South Bay. So unless you want to endure a hellish commute every day, you basically have to move there, in spite of its cultural emptiness.</p>