<p>You should visit one or both schools, or at least contact the professor(s) or other grad students you will be working with. In graduate school, your professor and colleagues matter much more than rankings.</p>
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Then you should go to Stanford. Just make sure that you actually want to go to Stanford and aren’t just going because of what other people think. A lot of people go to Harvard for that reason and it turns out to be a terrible fit for them and they’re miserable, their only solace being their pending degree.</p>
<p>I found it interesting that everybody on the Stanford forum said you should go to Cornell because of the neglible reputation difference and significant financial difference, but Stanford is almost as good as it gets in terms of engineering. </p>
<p>But if the only reasons you’d go to Cornell would be money and proximity to your girlfriend, with no real appeal to the university itself, probably better to do Stanford in my opinion. Debo111 has a very good point above.</p>