UCB v. UCLA

[ste11ie]

<p>UCB v. UCLA
the SIR is due this friday may1 and i still cannot decide where i want to go!!
i'm currently undecided on my major.
please help me decide which is the better choice!</p>

<p>my questions:
-i live in the bay area, so it's really convenient when coming back home to cal! should this be a deciding factor?
-i always had the idea that cal is a more prestigious/recognized school than UCLA.. is that true to some extent? and will being a berkeley graduate have more benefits than being a UCLA graduate, whether or not i go to grad school?
-i didn't really like the campus environment when i went to berkeley.. whereas i loved the UCLA campus and location. should i base my decision on my first impression??
-i've heard so much about the competitive atmosphere at UCB which frankly scares me. Cal students, what do you think about this?? and are the UCLA students just as competitve?</p>

<p>please help!!! thank you!!</p>

[Batman17]

<p>1) competition should never scare you…you’re gonna be competing all throughout you’re life until/unless you make it big. and even then, you’re gonna be competing with other top dogs. =)
2) the old convenience vs. get away from home. this is up to you. going home has its perks, but so does getting the feel for a place like UCLA (a pretty cool place, albeit a little on the expensive side…cal community seems to have rising prices too now so eh…I come from SoCal btw)
3) You’re lucky that you got to visit both campuses. I never got a chance to visit Berk and so I had to make a blind decision to come here on the VERY LAST DAY haha. I was about to go to LA after flipping a coin 7 times. Choose where you think you’ll be happiest.
If you don’t like Berkeley campus, then you don’t. It’s not an opinion someone should convince you otherwise. Though LH is right in that first impressions can be deceiving, unless you really took the time in each campus when you visited.
4) Addressing competition again, you might have realized that LA goes by the quarter system, meaning you have to be studying somewhat hard anyway</p>

<p>And lastly, if you end up at LA/Cal and think what it would be like at Cal/LA, don’t worry I have similar thoughts on occasion. haha</p>

<p>Get some. =p</p>

[Fasttrack]

<p>I’m going to quote myself from a previous thread …

Both are great and amazingly good schools. I went to UCLA and Cal, and I had great time at both. I won’t go in depth about comparing these two (we have a lot of threads about UCLA vs. Cal - search them on this or UCLA’s forum), but here’s my review.</p>

<p>For Berkeley … Over the years I been here, I met some extraordinary people, professors, opportunities, and challenges. The history behind Berkeley is what amaze me the most. I learned a lot of things here at Cal that I never thought I would learn before. I learned more things here than I learned anywhere else. But the downside to this is that it requires hard work. Over-impacted classes, icy professors, cut-throat competitiveness, and occasional sense of social confinement are also some of Berkeley’s problems. The courses are very challenging and I never studied harder in my life. Berkeley is one of the toughest and most competitive schools in the country, but if you can get pass that, then I can guarantee you that you will learn a lot from the best there is.</p>

<p>Now UCLA … I had a lot of fun here while still being challenged academically. In a sense, UCLA prepared me for Berkeley. But at UCLA, I had the best experiences I ever had in my life and I would trade it for nothing else. Throughout the years, UCLA helped me to become a stronger person (mentally, physically, and socially). You will never get tired or bored of UCLA or its surrounding areas, LA is so lively - much more than Berkeley or San Francisco. Since going to college I’ve learned what it means to “have fun”. </p>

<p>So to sum it up, I learned more at Cal than at UCLA, but I had better college experiences at UCLA than Cal. Right now I’m already bored at Cal with nothing to do but study, study, and study. At UCLA, I used to study a couple of hours and then go hit the beach or the desert or an amusement park with friends (I even met some celebrities and took pictures with them!). But my advice to you is that don’t pick a school solely on reputation and prestige. A lot of my friends at Berkeley right now are having hard time keeping up, and they basically have no social lives. I managed because UCLA trained me to become so competitive. At UCLA I had a 3.9 GPA, and now at Cal I barely have a 2.8 (and I usually study 90% of the time. FYI - my major in UCLA was CS&E, and my major at Cal is EECS). Choose a place where you can imagine yourself spending your next four years enjoying, a place that not only meet your academic needs but also your overall personal well-being.

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