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I must agree with some of the above sentiments. I would strongly advise against engineering and say that the finance fields would be more lucrative. Any worthwhile member of the financial industry is strong enough in math to be an Engineer, but they make more money, and lets be honest - that is important. I am a real life engineer with a real life engineering degree, and I must advocate that if you can go to Cal, Harvard, or Princeton, that you should NOT study engineering. It is the lowest rate of return on your educational investment.
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<p>Well, let me calibrate this statement slightly. I think finance students actually work fairly hard. Granted, probably not as hard as the engineering students do, but still, a lot harder than the students of certain other majors out there. There really are some majors in which you can do very very little - literally not show up to class and not do any work for weeks at a time and still graduate. I suspect that finance students still work harder than the average student at most schools.</p>
<p>Secondly, not everybody, even finance students, will actually get a finance job. Finance hiring tends to be highly arbitrary - where even the students with the best GPA's may not get an offer. A lot of it has to do with social skills, schmoozing, and general "feel", and if you don't have that ability, you're probably not going to get hired no matter how well you do academically. In contrast, in engineering, hiring is far more clearcut. If you have top performance, you're going to get hired by somebody. Not necessarily by a great firm, but you're going to get hired by somebody. Heck, even if you don't do that well, you're probably still going to get hired by somebody. It may be a mediocre engineering company and it may take you awhile to find the job but at least you'll get hired. </p>
<p>The point is, engineering is a * safe * major. At every school - Harvard, MIT, etc. - there are plenty of students who want finance jobs who don't get them. So at least with an engineering degree, you have a backup career. </p>
<p>However, I think it should be pointed out that the 'quality' of your engineering school doesn't really seem to matter much in terms of hiring. The truth of the matter is, students who graduate from elite engineering schools, frankly, don't make that much more than students coming out of lower-ranked engineering schools, once you factor out geographic cost-of-living differences. </p>
<p>For example, compare the engineering salaries for students coming out of Berkeley and San Jose State. These schools are pretty close to each out (about an hour away) so the comparison washes away geographic differences. Notice how, with the exception of EECS and CS, Berkeley engineers don't make THAT much more of an average salary compared to SJState engineers. {And keep in mind that the Berkeley CS figures are skewed upwards because CS is an impacted major that you have to apply to get into, which means that the major basically cuts off the tail end of students who presumably would have lowered the salary figures if they had been allowed into the major, whereas SJSU allows anybody into the major}. The upshot is that the market doesn't strongly reward engineers for going to better schools. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.careercenter.sjsu.edu/download/SalarySurvey2005to2006.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.careercenter.sjsu.edu/download/SalarySurvey2005to2006.pdf</a>
<a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2006Majors.stm#salary%5B/url%5D">http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2006Majors.stm#salary</a></p>
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If you have a strong desire to be an engineer - go to Cal. If not, still go to cal, but study Finance or business or something of the sort. Plus, Berkeley is a nice town.
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<p>Well, I would say that you don't want to be an engineer, then like I said before, you should almost certainly choose Harvard. </p>
<p>But even if you do want to be an engineer, I think you might still choose Harvard (or maybe Princeton). Again, like I said, while Berkeey is clearly a better engineering school than either of the other 2, the market doesn't really seem to reward you for that fact. So I think you have to be quite sure that you really like engineering for its own sake in order to choose Berkeley.</p>