UCB EECS or UCSD Bioengineering?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>(Copied/Pasted from "College Admissions" Thread ^__^)</p>

<p>Yes, by now, I'm pretty sure most folks have percieved me as being a horribly confused, cynical, and jaded loser. </p>

<p>Which I am. But that's besides the point.</p>

<p>I don't know which college to send my SIR to as of this moment. I was really very impressed with UCSD's Bioengineering, it seems to be an EXCELLENT program, ranked 2nd in the nation, behind only JHU itself. The BS--MS program is great, the med school options are open, the field is up and coming, jobs are opening up.. blah blah blah the future is now type stuff.</p>

<p>Then there's UCB's EECS, which is also super impressive, ranked 3rd in the nation, stamp of Berkeley's prestige on it, etc. But, the fact remains that its not too easy to get into Berkeley's graduate school afterwords... and that both the students and my dad (who is also a UCB engineering graduate) confirm that there seem to be a growing lack of jobs (which the faculty is only too happy to ignore).</p>

<p>Please offer advice. But don't give me some type of ******** about "do what your heart desires" or any thing like that. I want to know what are my future options in each field, what are the chances of going to a decent graduate school, etc. For reference, I'll post my stats:</p>

<p>GPA: 4.34 W, 3.86 UW, 4.14 UC
ACT: 32 (1410-1450 SAT I)
SAT IIs: 770 Writing, 760 Bio, 690 Math iic
EC's: Club leaders, Varsity Wrestling, Section Leader Jazz/Marching Band/Wind Ensemble, blah blah I could go on forever on elaborating on these.
Other stuff: I'm not a very smart guy, nor do I work hard. I just abuse the system for my own benefits.</p>

<p>Please advise this drifting starchild.</p>

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<p>I had the same decision to make as you did and I picked EECS. I picked it primarily because I'm more interested in EECS than I am in bioengineering. As much as you asked for us not to reply with "go with what your heart desires," etc. that's exactly what I'm going to tell you. EECS and bioengineering are different apart enough that you should probably have some idea as to what you'd like to do. If you honestly have no preference for either, you should choose cal because you'll have many more options and paths that cal excels at than you would have at UCSD.</p>

<p>They're both excellent programs and you can probably find people in both of them that did extraordinarily well as well as those who failed out. I can't really tell you much about UCSD, but, to make this post somewhat useful for you, here's a good link for cal's EECS that shows job & graduate school prospects if you haven't seen it already:
<a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/EECS.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/EECS.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>I have the impression that most "good" bioengineering jobs (i.e., those that involve working not as a technician but actually as an engineer/researcher) go to people who with degrees in a traditional engineering field--EE or ChemE--or people who have a Ph.D in bioengineering/chemistry/molecular biology/etc. UCSD's bioengineering program might be famous enough to get you an engineering job out of college, though.</p>