I think I might just go to UChicago. It’s the highest-ranked and has the most reputation overall. Going to UC Berkeley, I will have more opportunities for tech at undergrad, but in the stress of declaring my major and fulfilling the EECS requirements, I doubt I’ll have much time. Also, while technology people respect UC Berkeley more, I’ve heard it’s a more meritocratic field, where they don’t really care about where you went to college. So Berkeley might open more opportunities in tech during undergrad, but it probably won’t make a difference post-college. From my understanding, UChicago will open more doors in finance directly out of undergrad. At UC Berkeley, while it would open doors to FAANG, it would make it harder to open the door into finance, while at UChicago, I wouldn’t lose access to the tech door but I would have more doors open in other areas like finance which care much more about prestige/eliteness/ranking than the tech field.
This is still just where my thinking is at and I haven’t decided, so please critique!
At some point you have to make a decision. Go buy a UChicago sweatshirt and move on with your life.
if you just wanted to go to finance you should have just applied for a finance degree. Also prestige and rankings between chicago and berkeley doesnt matter tbh.
Look I know kids change their minds daily on things like this, so if finance and rankings are now more important, then UChicago is the better option. I don’t think they have undergrad majors in finance or business, you may have to do econ.
Note that it’s not EECS which is direct admit (meaning you’re in) but CS which you do have to fulfill the min gpa for those CS courses. If you’re already stressing of getting into Berkeley CS, then I think your instincts are telling you to attend UChicago, which is where you should go. What you don’t want is to attend Berkeley and then when something goes wrong, as things do in college, start thinking you made the wrong choice.