which is better, UCSD or SJSU for electrical engineering?

College Search & Selection
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<p>I do not know which university to choose from. I want to choose the one that will give me the best education possible and that will get me a good job as soon as I graduate. SJSU is in the Silicon Valley, and as such, it can give me the possibility for networking. UCSD is supposed to be ranked higher than SJSU, I think. Nonetheless, I heard that most electrical engineers in Silicon Valley come from SJSU. What should I do?</p>

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<p>

You heard wrong.</p>

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<p>Is this wrong? <a href=“http://ee.sjsu.edu/”>http://ee.sjsu.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I think UCSD is a better school in EE. But you are probably right that San Jose may have better intern opportunities in EE, that does not necessarily directly benefit SJSU students. They have to compete jobs with all the other schools like Stanford and UCB.</p>

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<p>SJSU is one of the very good CS/CSE/EE schools, probaby the best one among the CSU’s, and it’s well-recruited by Silicon Valley firms, but top feeders are HarveyMudd and Stanford. UCSD is a top-tier UC so the quality of students is higher and it’s less commuter. SJSU does have a strong EE program but I’m not sure it’s lower than UCSD. As for networking, I’ll leave that to forum posters who live or recruit in that area.</p>

<p>To help you choose…
Are you a transfer?
How much does each cost?
Did you get into SJSU Honors?
Do you plan to live on-campus at either?</p>

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<p>

Estimation</a> is an important quality for scientists and engineers. That’s why companies like google ask interviewees questions like the infamous “piano tuner” problem. See <a href=“Fermi problem - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem&lt;/a&gt; It sounds like you lack proficiency at this vital skill and will pay the price when asked estimation questions.</p>

<p>If “most electrical engineers in Silicon Valley come from SJSU” that would mean that all the universities across the entire country supply less than 1/2 of the EE’s working in Silicon Valley. And yet the preposterousness of this claim even on its surface did not give you any pause. Nor, apparently, did it occur to you to try to estimate how many EEs graduate per year from SJSU (1-300, probably) and reflect on whether this really could be enough to staff half of all the EE jobs in Silicon Valley.</p>

<p>Reading comprehension is important for engineers who need to understand technical documents. Read your link again. It says " the Electrical Engineering Department provides more EE graduates to this region than any other college or university in the nation." In other words if SJSU graduated 4,000 engineers over the last 20 years (200/year * 20 years as a guess) then no other single school provided that many. There are many engineering schools in the country, and rest assured that aggregated together they have accounted for many more engineers working in Silicon Valley than SJSU.</p>