<p>I've gotten into (in NO particular order):</p>
<p>Cornell CAS
WashU
U of Rochester
Northeastern
McGill
Johns Hopkins
UC Berkeley
SUNY Binghamton</p>
<p>I'm from central NY, and my ideal school size would be around 10,000. My parents want me to stay close, but it really doesn't matter too much to me at all.</p>
<p>What do you want to major in?</p>
<p>How do you know about your UC Berkeley decision?</p>
<p>agreed.. i thought they are coming out with their decision on march 27th?</p>
<p>maybe he knows he will get in…</p>
<p>if yes, if you want 10,000? i don’t know Berkeley or Cornell would be on that list…def</p>
<p>You already know about berkeley if you got regents.</p>
<p>OP - what are you majoring in?</p>
<p>What are you looking for in a school as regards to campus life/social scene? Do you want to be in/near a big city or would you rather be in a rural area? How much would prestige/reputation weigh into your decision?</p>
<p>Majoring in Neuroscience and International Relations if possible.</p>
<p>Thinking about joining a sorority; not a major factor. Would like to be in a city, but wouldn’t mind cornell, as there is a ton to do there anyways. </p>
<p>Prestige matters, i want to be proud of my school and want to do post-grad studies, so i want to go somewhere where i can make some connections with profs w/ connections to some good researchers/diplomats/whatever. again, that’s not a huge huge thing.</p>
<p>10,000 would be ideal, but i don’t really mind any of the class sizes; hence me applying to all of them.</p>
<p>I don’t know yet about berkeley or johns hopkins. i’m hoping/assuming for the purposes of decision making.</p>
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<p>Cornell is the closest school on your list for your ideal size of 10,000. Also, something to consider - making your parents happy is also good for you, trust me on this one. Going to Cornell would be like an hour (?) away from your home. Besides, Cornell CAS is very good and its Neuroscience program is outstanding. I heard that JHU has a good International Relations program, but not too many people find JHU’s social atmosphere or campus surroundings ideal match for them, except for premed students. </p>
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<p>Cornell has like second largest Greek system in the U.S. It is the most social school on your list. </p>
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<p>IMO, the two most prestigious schools on your list are Berkeley and Cornell. But, Cornell seems to be a better option for you since it will give you a more personalized education and it has all the other advantages that I mentioned above. Really, I think this is no-brainer for you at all.</p>
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<p>Really, Cornell has many public-like features for a private, and Berkeley has many private-like features for a public. For what it’s worth, class sizes at Berkeley seem to be about the same (actually slightly better):</p>
<p>Cornell:
60% classes under 20
16% classes over 50</p>
<p>Berkeley:
61% classes under 20
14% classes over 50</p>
<p>So I don’t think ‘personalized attention’ is going to be very different at both.</p>
<p>Neuroscience+IR=JHU’s strengths</p>
<p>kyledavid80 - haha, i knew u would try to find a flaw with my words about berkeley. </p>
<p>By personalized education, i not only meant the class sizes, but also the research availiability, career counseling, and academic counseling. Cornell provides undergrads many chances for research and Cornell’s student advising is very easily available to the students. Cornell’s other strength is also very deep depth in student exchange programs. Not to mention, since Cornell is smaller than Berkeley and thus closer to OP’s ideal college size, it would mean that the OP would be given more of an ideal social setting compared to berkeley. Also, another thing to note is that berkeley’s intro classes are undeniably larger than Cornell’s.</p>
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<p>If you were to total Berkeley’s research expenditures + UCSF’s research expenditures (med school research skews numbers, so this would make it more comparable) + LBNL research, it’d come to about $1.8 billion/year in research.</p>
<p>It’s very easy to get in on research.</p>
<p>[Undergraduate</a> Research @ Berkeley](<a href=“http://research.berkeley.edu/]Undergraduate”>http://research.berkeley.edu/)</p>
<p>Just looking at that, you can see that it’s not difficult.</p>
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<p>To be honest, I don’t see how Cornell is going to be an advantage here. They each seem to be on par.</p>
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<p>A large class is a large class. Does it really matter whether there are 300 students in an intro class instead of 200? You’re not going to notice a difference, especially since many of those don’t bother showing up to lecture.</p>
<p>A note: at both Berkeley and Cornell, all large courses are supplemented with small discussions. So, even then, personalized attention is very attainable at both.</p>
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<p>I think it is more like 700-800 vs. 250-300. A disadvantage of having a larger intro class is that the grading curve tends to be a bit tougher, since the university seeks to weed out students. This is esp. true for a public like Cal. As a public school, Cal probably weeds out people harder than a private like Cornell, since it wants to fit in more Cali residents that are qualified. </p>
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<p>Not an expert on this subject. I, however, read somewhere that big publics like Cal (not necessarily just Cal) tends to have a stiffer competition for same spots of research opportunities as the privates. </p>
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<p>Both schools aren’t that spectacular when it comes to the class size issues, compared to LACs. However, what you are saying is that regardless of the class size, anyone is able to attain as personal education as someone who goes to LAC. This would destroy the purpose and the strongest aspect of any LAC. I believe that there is a difference between TA discussions and small lectures, in educational quality as well as learning experience for students.</p>
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<p>Really, I don’t see any that are that big. Even chem 1A is broken up. And if there really are 700-800 person classes, they are very few and far in between.</p>
<p>Lastly, I highly doubt that 300 is Cornell’s largest class.</p>
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<p>What? It’s an intro class. Very basic material. The weeder courses tend to be in the lower-div courses that aren’t intro.</p>
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<p>Cornell is known for its weeding out.</p>
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<p>That’s the assumption – public = harder to get in on it. Similar assumptions are: public = all the classes are huge, public = all the students are stupid, and public = crappy job opportunities after graduation. None of these are true, especially not for schools like Berkeley.</p>
<p>Berkeley has thousands of research projects going on at any moment. It’s not difficult to get in at least one of them.</p>
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<p>The main difference is that you will get nothing but small classes–or if there are larger classes, they’re very, very few. In addition, LAC students will have a lot of interaction with professors, they won’t have discussion sessions led by grad students (there are no grad students, usually), they will often be able to interact with their professors in their residential living, the professors aren’t much into research but rather teaching, etc. There are noticeable differences.</p>
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<p>How? The TAs are usually the ones who lead the discussions in the large courses, which usually teach basic material. Even if it is upper-div, it’s usually basic upper-div work. TAs often do a fine job teaching. Hell, sometimes TAs are better teachers than the professors. (Notice that this is an argument in favor not just of Berkeley, but of Cornell and of any other university that uses TAs for its discussion sections.)</p>
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<p>Only to non-Cornell students that aren’t very knowledeable about this school. Cornell’s avg. gpa hovers around 3.3-3.4 and its retention rate is in the high 90s, which is on par with other so called grade inflated schools like H or P. Besides, there is a difference between weeding out and being rigorous. </p>
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<p>Many fail intro, believe it or not. The content of the course, even if it may not be that difficult, is many times irrelevant to the overall avg. grade for the course. The curve is what dictates the grades given out, not the content of the course. This is why so many students get ticked off to receive sub-par grades in ‘easy’ intro courses, while they are capable of doing better in ‘harder’ div courses.</p>
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<p>These are for sure other strengths of LACs. But, I am willing to argue that all these traits of LACs would be meaningless if LACs had suddenly over 20,000 students enrolled and have intro courses that have 700-800 students. Really, the biggest and most noticeable strength of LAC structure is that its class is small in addition to having the instructors that are more of teachers, not researchers. After all, LACs are known to provide more personal education to the undergrads. Even if LACs have teachers who don’t research, etc. all this wouldn’t be so effective in providing students ‘personal education’ if the classes were flowing with huge numbers of student body. </p>
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<p>Well, it wouldn’t be fair to generalize TAs for being better teachers than Profs. If your argument is centered around the fact that profs are busy doing research and not teaching - consider the very fact that TAs are students themselves. This means several things: 1. Their teaching experience is limited, since it is likely that TAs haven’t been TAing for long time. 2. TAs are busy as heck, as they are busy grading and doing their own studies. So, what makes them better than profs in their ability to give more personal attention to the students? 3. The fact is that students pay the same tuition for either TAs or Profs to teach, and I am willing to bet that most students would prefer to be taught by more experienced, more knowlegeable, and more intelligent profs than inexperienced TAs. Not to mention, most of the discussion classes are redudant in the nature of content and really boring and don’t serve that well to students’ learning anyway. Most students just go to the dicussion in order to avoid losing points, really.(if you’re already a college student/alum, you would know this.)</p>
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<p>Berkeley’s average GPA is something like a 3.2 and its retention rate is in the high 90s. Berkeley is rigorous, but where you apply ‘weeding’ isn’t very true.</p>
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<p>I don’t think we can make such a generalization over all the large classes at Berkeley, or even at Cornell.</p>
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<p>I hope you realize that this is an argument against both Berkeley and Cornell, and any other large research university.</p>
<p>At any rate, LACs are not even on the OP’s list, so this all is irrelevant.</p>
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<p>I wasn’t. I said “sometimes.” That’s the exact opposite of a generalization.</p>
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<p>Yes, their teaching experience is limited, but again, the material is basic enough that they can explain it. Sometimes, the TA is better at explaining these basic concepts than a professor.</p>
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<p>Where there are more persons, there are more office hours. TAs will have office hours as the professors do. Not to mention that, after class, you can more likely talk to the TA, whereas you wouldn’t be able to do so with the professor if there are 300 other people leaving and there are thus more people who would like to talk to him (hence office hours).</p>
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<p>Who cares what they prefer? Very often a TA is just as knowledgeable about the material at hand. Why? Because the material isn’t as advanced!</p>
<p>And I’m willing to bet that students would actually prefer TAs in some cases, as many professors don’t like having to teach in-depth very basic material. So asking questions to draw from those “more experienced, more knowledgeable, and more intelligent profs” would just cause annoyance. Of course, this is a generalization.</p>
<p>Either way, both Cornell and Berkeley make heavy use of TAs for their discussion sessions. Not to mention that both of these have top grad programs that are very selective, so these grad students are usually the best of the best.</p>
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<p>But it gives the students a chance to interact with a real person (instead of the book) and try to absorb the material. You can blame the universities for giving their undergrads more opportunities.</p>
<p>CORNELL… that was an easy choice</p>
<p>Ok but, even if we agree that Cornell and Berkeley are about equal this guy lives in NY. I see an obvious choice here…</p>
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<p>You said ‘sometimes’, but you also said that it doesn’t matter if students are taught by TAs or profs. In addition, you also mentioned that TAs often do a good job of teaching. This should mean that your view on the TAs’ teaching is that they are at least as good, if not better, than the qualitiy of profs’ teaching. But, in reality, most profs teach much more effectively compared to TAs. This is really no comparison, at all. </p>
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<p>I don’t think you can make a generalization that all intro courses either at berk or cornell are ‘easy’, either. As an example, more students get Cs in intro Econ and intro Math courses compared to the advanced courses. Why? Bc they make it hard by harsh grading, harsh tests, harsh curve, all regardless of the fact that the content in the textbooks aren’t really that hard. </p>
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<p>The reason I mentioned LACs, as you probably know, was to point out a flaw with your logic that it doesn’t matter if the classes are small or large in students’ personal educational experience. As I argued, class sizes do matter, often favoring small classes for students who desire to receive personalized education.</p>
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<p>Again, profs would be even better than TAs in explaining these ‘basic’ concepts to students due to their experiences in teaching, expertise in the field, etc., given that they teach in intimate, small lectures much like the discussion sections. Not to mention, I have come across several TAs that aren’t very capable of teaching effectively at all. Some TAs, esp. the new grad students, are sometimes even rusty about the course material and weren’t so sure of the correct answers on the assignments. The quality, in general, is different. </p>
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<p>I don’t see why you are tyring to argue this. Again, the point is that we were comparing the difference in qualities between small lecture courses taught by profs and discussion sections taught by TAs. Anyone would be able to access profs, just like they can access TAs, if profs taught in small lecture courses. </p>
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<p>Discussion meetings, in reality, don’t usually teach much new materials anyway and many students just feel obliged to attend, only to keep their grades up. Students have plenty of chances to interact with real person and obsorb the material other than discussion sections. Besides, why would students need that much of interaction if the content was so easy, at intro? The problem lies not in the content of the material, but intro courses’ difficulties lie in harsh tests, harsh curve, and grading.</p>
<p>CORNELL. </p>
<p>represent.</p>