<p>BerkeleyAn Undergrads Great Experience.</p>
<p>I have two kids, both boys, one of whom graduated with honors from Cornell in 2002 and the other from Berkeley with honors in 1999. The Cornell grad told me about this web site. In the week or so that Ive been a lurker I have been astonished at the hostility displayed by a few posters toward Berkeley.</p>
<p>These hostile posters fall into a number of categories. One denigrates all aspects of Berkeley, refusing to acknowledge the many measures of its facultys superiority. This critic also seems to enjoy demeaning Berkeley undergrads, generalizing from the bottom quarter--those admitted with lesser grades and test scores to fulfill Berkeleys state mandate to be accessible to a wide range of students. Another, reluctantly concedes the excellence of Berkeleys graduate departments (often without acknowledging just how highly ranked virtually all of them are), but asserts that this has no bearing on undergraduates. He claims, with no evidence, that excellence in research is somehow antithetical to good undergraduate teaching. Finally, other critics cite the U.S. News rankings, evidently oblivious to their bias against public universities as well as their internal inconsistencies. Re private school bias consider the September 23, 1996 letter from Gerhard Caspar, President of Stanford, to the editor of U.S. News. He wrote: Let me offer as prima facie evidence [of the absurdity of the rankings] two great public universities: the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of California-Berkeley. These clearly are among the very best universities in Americaone could make a strong argument for either in the top half-dozen. Yet, in the last three years, the U.S. News formula has assigned them ranks that lead many readers to infer that they are second rate: Michigan 21-24-24, and Berkeley 23-26-27. Re the internal inconsistency of the rankings, for years U.S. News ranked only two undergraduate departments, Business and Engineering, and had Berkeley in the top five in both. (One year first in Business and third in Engineering). At the same time the magazine placed Berkeleys Ph.D. programs at the very top, yet ranked the school as a whole in the 20s in the category National Universities.</p>
<p>With the forgoing digression I will write about my older sons experience at Berkeley in the late 90s. He grew up in Santa Cruz, California surfing once or twice a day year round. He was a good if unfocused high school student. His initial inclination was to go to UC San Diego, a fine school, where surf was available five minutes from class, but as parents we hoped he would attend Berkeley because of our sense that if offered opportunities few places could match (and where he could still surf, though in San Francisco 30 minutes away). </p>
<p>Belying the stereotype for public universities, our son had several small classes as a freshman, honors physics, a freshman philosophy seminar and a math class that was one step beyond calculus. He also had his share of large survey classes. By the end of the year he had no more sense of what he wanted to do than he had in high school.</p>
<p>In the Fall of his sophomore year he took introductory Chemistry. There were several hundred students in the class, what you would find at most major research universities, public or private, including Harvard (though not Chicago or Princeton). The professor was a renowned scientist. He was also an exceptional lecturer who regularly taught beginning Chemistry. His lectures were so outstanding, so inspirational, that they led my son to major in Chemistry.</p>
<p>There are College Insider posters who seem to believe that if you are a great researcher you must not be a good teacher. There is no basis for this and it makes no logical sense. If anything the opposite is often true. Top professors can infuse their lectures with the excitement and possibilities of new science and scholarship and this can be contagious. Berkeley is filled with such professors, many of whom actually seek out undergraduates. Consider Alex Filippenko, one of the top astrophysicists in the world. Filippenko regularly teaches a lower division introductory astronomy class that fulfills a breadth requirement and is therefore taken by many non-majors. He is a wildly popular lecturer. </p>
<p>In his junior year, now majoring in chemistry, my son received class credit for work in a professors lab. He was at the bottom of the totem pole, below post docs, grad students and senior undergrads. However, the professor was accessible to all the students, often discussing chemistry with my son in the lab or over a beer or pizza at off-campus gatherings. In addition to this professors mentoring, my son became close to a number of outstanding grad students. They were invaluable to his education teaching him, from a students perspective, much about what it takes to do independent research in chemistry. One of these grad students, a woman, was of particular help. She was an MIT graduate who had her pick of schools and who chose Berkeley not only because of the quality of the Chemistry Department, but because with its significant group of women professors she perceived it as particularly hospitable to women.</p>
<p>Given the stature of Berkeleys Chemistry Department it seems that everybody who is anybody in the world of Chemistry comes through the Department at one time or another offering a lecture or seminar. Berkeleys faculty of course does the same. My son attended many of these and some of his best learning came from them.</p>
<p>My son had a great upper division experience. He took a broad and difficult array of classes. Some were large. But others were seminars and in those he got to know the professors. In one small class, taught by a young woman budding superstar who won every award available to a young scientist, the professor approached my son in a campus common area with a cup of coffee and proceeded to shoot the breeze with him for half an hour. </p>
<p>At the same time my son received his bachelors degree in May, 1999, a top grad student in the department received his Ph.D. This grad student accepted an offer to teach at Harvard without going through the customary step of the post-doc. He knew my son had done well and recruited him to go East in his new lab.</p>
<p>I do not believe my son could have received a better education and better preparation for grad school at any other institution, public, private, Ivy, big or small. He went on to do exceptionally well as a grad student at Harvard, receiving several fellowships on the way to his June, 2004 Ph.D. One of these was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. His receipt of the NSF award led me to look at these fellowships more closely in the years 2000-2002. There are many measures of the excellence of Berkeleys facultyincluding the number of McArthur Fellows, Nobel Prize, National Medal of Science, Guggenheim Fellowship and National Science Foundation Young Investigators Award winners, and National Academy of Science and National Academy of Engineering members. However NSF winners are grad students. The NSF Fellowships are awarded to graduating seniors or first year grad students mostly in the traditional sciences and engineering, with a few in the social sciences. About 1000 were granted each year from 2000-2002. They are portable in the sense that a winner can take the fellowship to any school of his or her choosing. During these years four schools dominated the places where NSF winners chose to attend, together enrolling about 1/3 of the winners. These four were MIT, Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard. The numbers are astounding. For example in 2002 MIT had 112, Berkeley 93, Stanford 78 and Harvard 72. No other school even reached 30. I kid you not. Cornell was next with 27. Close to Cornell were Princeton with 23 and the University of Washington with 22. (Some othersGeorgia Tech-19, Cal Tech-17, The University of Wisconsin-17, The University of Illinois-17, Chicago-15, Yale-12, Duke and Rice-11, Northwestern-8, Columbia-7 and Penn-4. Other University of California campuses did relatively well. Davis had 19, the medical center at UC San Francisco-17, UCLA-14, Santa Barbara-13 and San Diego-11.) As to the schools that produced the most undergrads who received NSF awards, Harvard had 42, MIT 35, Berkeley 34, Stanford 25, Cornell 23, Michigan 20, Texas-Austin 19, Illinois and Princeton 18 and Cal Tech 17. Everybody else followed.</p>
<p>If some of you have gotten this far and wonder why my younger son went to Cornell, that too has a Berkeley dimension and it provides yet another example of a great researcher open to all students. Briefly, from the time my younger son was little he was fascinated with herpetology, which developed into a desire to study evolutionary biology. When he was a freshman in high school he wrote to the countrys leading academic herpetologist, then a professor at Berkeley. This professor invited my son and me to his lab on a Saturday morning (Berkeley is 75 miles from our home) where he proceeded to spend two hours talking to my 14 year old boy and taking him through Berkeleys vertebrate zoology collections. My son stayed in touch with this professor and when he left Berkeley for Cornell my son followed him (and had him as his advisor). By the way, Cornell is fantastic in biology.</p>
<p>Berkeley may not be for everybody. But for bright focused undergrads it offers extraordinary opportunities. It also happens to be in a great place. My older son loved the restaurants, clubs, and goings on in Berkeley and neighboring San Francisco.</p>