With decision day right around the corner, I have a dilemma. I have to decide between Cal Poly and UC Berkeley for my major Mechanical Engineering. Berkeley will be a little cheaper (if this “freshman scholarship” on my finance page in my portal is renewable for 4 year does anybody know if it is?), but the decision really comes down to the engineering programs themselves. Cal Poly is very hands on and UCB is almost 90% lecture by some accounts I have read, but I haven’t been able to find any information from actual engineers (hopefully mechanical) that are going to either. I have heard more from the Cal Poly side so I am desperately hoping for some more information about the mechanical engineering program at UCB because the 90% lecture statistic seems somewhat high/intense.
UC Berkeley hands down. It’s better and much more renowned.
Do you have any experience in the program to talk about or is that just based off the prestige of the school?
Most people would pay a LOT more to attend Cal over SLO. If it’s cheaper for you then look no further.
Look through the curriculum of each school and the renown of the professors teaching the classes. UC Berkeley >>>>> SLO in terms of prestige, surrounding area (Bay Area), academics, student life, etc. The only time SLO might be somewhat comparable to Berkeley is when you’re looking for a job in NorCal/SoCal and people are actually aware of Cal Poly’s existence. Even then, the Berkeley grad will be preferred.
If you’re looking to get into finance or any other major, Berkeley takes the cake on that as well. Go to Berkeley. You’ll be missing out on a ton of opportunities if you don’t.
I second @yinuos and @mikuru . I’ve been a student at both schools (took a couple poly classes in high school), and the atmosphere at Berkeley is just so different than cal poly - both more intense academically and seeming to have more interesting engineering-related student organizations. I think you’d be doing yourself a disservice by turning down Berkeley. (I’m not saying you’d regret it, because I think few people end up regretting their college choice. But I am saying that I think Berkeley is a more stimulating environment).
From my perspective as a CS student, that “learn by doing” stuff doesn’t really account for much. We have our hackathons, student tech consulting organizations, events with major tech companies, groups like hackers@berkeley, et cetera. That’s a lot of learning by doing. We also teach a solid set of theoretical foundations, possibly more so than poly. I don’t think the second precludes the first.
I don’t know about how this would apply to Mech E, but that’s my two cents on a somewhat related field.
Any ABET-accredited engineering degree program will include substantial engineering science and engineering design course work. While there may be some differences in the emphasis on engineering science versus engineering design between different schools, the differences are not likely to be as large as reputations may exaggerate them.
Both schools send lots of graduates to industry. UCB does have a significantly larger contingent of students going to graduate school, if that interests you.
Career surveys:
https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2015Majors
https://careers.calpoly.edu/search.php
Frankly, I’m not even sure why the OP posted the question. The answer is obvious. But I may be biased.
At work, I deal with many startups. So just out of curiosity, I searched Google for “startups from UC Berkeley” and for “startups from Cal Poly.” I got “About 481,000 results (0.51 seconds)” for the former and “About 124,000 results (0.36 seconds)” for the latter.
From the results of the searches, I could quickly compile a (incomplete) list of startup companies from UC Berkeley. It was not so easy for Cal Poly.