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I don't like the idea of having graduate students grade my papers, however, and possibly pay out-of-state tuition for it.
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<p>From what I have heard, that is not going to change at Harvard or Columbia.</p>
<p>Grad students will grade your papers in some classes at any research university. At Columbia and Harvard, advanced grad students teach some classes. (At Columbia, they teach many, if not most of the core curriculum classes.) That's not necessarily bad, but just to remark on your point about Berkeley.</p>
<p>The only drawback in terms of grad school from Cal is that it may be easier to get recommendations and/or necessary research experience some place smaller. Those opportunities exist at Cal, but you have to be more aggressive about finding them than at an LAC, for example. You also have to be aggressive to seek out the opportunites at Harvard and Columbia from my observation. Neither is a particularly cozy place, though great institutions. </p>
<p>If you are unhappy at Berkeley because of the size and sense of impersonality, that is legitimate. But, in that case, you might want to take a look at some places like Pomona or Reed or Swarthmore, for example, which have excellent grad school placement while being more personal.</p>
<p>Look at the Claremont colleges if your interested in smaller sizes / more prof. attention / more close knitted student community.</p>
<p>"I'm thinking of transferring out of Berkeley to Harvard or Columbia."</p>
<p>Don't quote me on this, but I think you need to have been in college longer than a week before they let you transfer. Could be wrong though.</p>
<p>Look, it is really wrong to think about transferring to another university without thoughtful thinking or without legitimate reasons. At least one should try to live at his/her university for some time (approx. 1 year) before even considering the transfer option. Yet what makes me even more confused is why some people like the OP is so obsessed with transferring to east coast schools. </p>
<p>Yes, Harvard University, Princeton, and Yale are very prestigious institutions and they probably do deserve their global acclaim. Nevertheless, thinking that east coast schools deserve all the prestige would be incorrect. Some Ivy League schools such as University of Pennsylvania (Non-Wharton), Brown University, and Dartmouth University are not even well recognized by the public in the United States and especially in other countries. Moreover, west coast schools, most notably University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and Californian Institute of Technology, are more or less on the same levels with the top Ivy League schools in most academic fields. Rankings (ARWU, US News & World Subject Rankings, THES, and Washington Monthly etc) support this very well-known fact. </p>
<p>It is also very important to remember that west coast schools have a distinct advantage at the Silicon Valley because many global companies such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, and Cisco Systems recruit many Stanford and Berkeley students (They even offer internship opportunities to undergraduate students to work during summer). Also, do not think that banks at Wall Street such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Citibank do not recruit from UC Berkeley or from Stanford because they certainly do. Students from the Haas School of Business have an edge in the world of business as Haas is the second best business school in America (Wharton is ranked the best).</p>
<p>The OP and future college applicants should remember that UC Berkeley is one of the world’s very best universities that has global prestige and reptuation. For those that still have doubts about Berkeley’s prestige and worldwide fame, I strongly recommend doing a solid 1 hour research on the university’s past accomplishments and current status.</p>
<p>Do you what you want to do with your life. If you dont think you will like bureaucratic environment of Cal then leave. Everyone on the board is trying to tell you to do something but they arent the ones in the situation. I know I wouldnt like my school if I had bad experiences with adminstration repeatedly. At the end of the day we are students paying to go to college to receive a good education not paying to learn how to deal with the DMV,Social Security, Post Office,etc. The schools you are considering transferring to are good as well. Goodluck!</p>
<p>MODERATOR NOTE:</p>
<p>This thread is almost 5 years old.</p>
<p>Old threads are great for information, but if you post and bring them back to life, other members are often confused and address the OPs question as if it’s a current concern.</p>
<p>If you want to comment on an old thread, please state clearly that you are reactivating a very old thread so that others know the situation. But better yet, if you really want to say something, start a new thread and avoid any confusion.</p>