I’m still deciding which school is better for engineering, if you could, please stop by, give me some opinion and help this indicisive kid out (which is me). Thanks!!!
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Whether one is better or worse depends on what you want out of your experience. They are different.
Cal Poly has a lab with nearly every class. Even graduate classes like advanced vibrations that are typically lectures only at most schools, have labs. They have more than 80 distinct labs in the college of engineering alone. That’s where the “Learn by Doing” comes from. The class sizes are small, and nearly all of their instructors for lectures, discussions and labs, have terminal degrees. They don’t use TAs for instruction. That’s not to say that every instructor is good. There are bad instructors at every institution. There’s a reason though that they don’t have TAs…they don’t do much research. Graduate students get paid by being TAs and RAs. Cal Poly is an undergraduate-centric institution.
Cal Poly is in a beautiful location, but it is isolated. It tends to resonate with students who are outdoorsy. Students who are disappointed tend to be from big cities and complain of a lack of “things to do.”
UCSB is a research institution. The classes, especially early on, are bigger and TAs are used extensively in labs and discussions. The tradeoff is there is a lot more research if you think you might be interested in that.
Santa Barbara is also pretty, but closer to the city, with all its strengths (culture, food, nightlife) and weaknesses (traffic, crime).
I have a clear bias. My son is a senior at Cal Poly because their strengths were very well aligned with what he was looking for. He didn’t apply to any of the UCs.
You might also appreciate the perspective of @NLinsanity. He is a Cal Poly alum, now a graduate student at Columbia. He was very involved in engineering competitions, and has a good perspective on the quality of the teams the other schools produced. It’s not a perfect metric, because not everyone is involved in competition. In fact, most aren’t. It is though another data point.
BTW, what type of engineering?
Congrats on two solid options!
Your other threads say you were admitted to UCSB as pre-chem, not engineering.
You have a bigger decision that CP vs UCSB. It’s “Do I want to do Chemistry or Computer Engineering?”
Don’t count on being able to switch your major into Engineering at UCSB. If you really want to be an engineer, go to Cal Poly where you were accepted for that.