<p>ok enough! there are like 3 threads already about why berkeley sucks but there are also a lot of great things so we should talk about it too! see the glass half full instead of half empty for once...I ll start. great liberal atmosphere, cheap but top education, near san francisco....I could go on but I yield the floor to you guys....any other suggestions?</p>
<p>If you are gay you are in the closest thing to a nation of your own here.</p>
<p>Not only do you hate minorities, you hate gays too. ;-)</p>
<p>I kid.</p>
<p>UCLAri, are you currently a senior in japan? or ...are you a student at ucla who is from japan? just sort of wondering... anyway, good idea for a thread. reading all those berkeley sucks threads was pretty depressing, since berkeley is one of my top choices</p>
<p>4 words: MARSHAWN LYNCH, JUSTIN FORSETT.</p>
<p>Here's what one person wrote:</p>
<p>
[quote]
*"The experience that firmly placed me on a course toward a professional career in science was the four years I spent as an undergraduate at Berkeley. I entered in the fall of 1968 as an electrical engineer, my parents having prevailed upon me to take the economic facts of life seriously. I had applied to more elite schools but had not gotten in, presumably because my grades were not high enough, and also because I was what we now call an "angular" student, i.e. the opposite of well-rounded. My parents were not that disappointed, for they had themselves attended Berkeley, as eventually did my brother and two sisters. Berkeley was as different from the quiet country town of my youth as one could possibly imagine. It was full of coffee shops, politics, book stores, theater, ethnic restaurants, stray dogs, junkies, street musicians, and fascinating people from every conceivable walk of life. As time passed I became more and more intoxicated with all this freedom and more and more convinced that the university was where my future lay. Here was the place ideas mattered, where everybody was eccentric, where originality was not only accepted but had actual market value. It was easy to get lost in the crowd at Berkeley, particularly in the great lecture courses, but this did not bother me because I had no intention of getting lost in the crowd, and anyway considered it a small price to pay for the freedom to think as I saw fit.</p>
<p>At Berkeley I had my first encounter with real professional scientists, and I remember the Berkeley faculty as being particularly visionary and inspirational. In the physics department in particular there was a palpable sense of history going back to Heisenberg, Pauli, and Einstein. I later came to understand that Berkeley has always been a special place in American physics and that many of the greatest physicists in the world, perhaps even most of them, can trace their roots back to Berkeley in some way. It was this faculty that defined for me what physics was and should be, and thereby helped me make up my mind to pursue physics as a career. I came home in the middle of my sophomore year and announced, much to the horror of my parents, that I was switching to physics from engineering. After some discussion they gave in, as well-meaning parents tend to do in this situation, and I remember my father musing afterward that it would probably come out all right because these things usually did. Meanwhile at school I was experiencing such wonderful things as the surprise appearance of Charles Townes, winner of the Nobel Prize for invention of the maser, in one of my large lecture courses to explain simply and accurately how lasers work and how they came to be invented. I took quantum mechanics from Owen Chamberlain, who had won the Nobel Prize several years before for the discovery of the antiproton, and who was happy to discuss all sorts of unrelated things such as whether fusion would ever work and whether one should go East to graduate school. I learned electrodynamics from J. D. Jackson's wonderful book and had many occasions to ask him questions about the subject. I took introductory solid state physics from Charles Kittel, the acknowledged father of the field in which I was eventually to work. I took Goeffrey Chew's advanced quantum mechanics course and learned more about the S matrix than he probably intended. I also had many useful exchanges with Ray Sachs, who helped me learn differential geometry and general relativity on my own and guided me to a thesis. My work with Ray began with the question of whether a charged particle dropped in a gravitational field should radiate light, since the relativity principle said it was actually not accelerating. The correct answer is yes because the electromagnetic field knows about the curvature tensor, and this line of thought led us to a calculation of the cross-section for scattering gravitational radiation off of a charged particle, the roles of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields in this case being exactly reversed. It was a wonderful time in my life. On commencement day we were addressed by Emilio Segre, sharer of the Nobel Prize for the antiproton discovery and author of a book on nuclear physics that is a delight to read to this day. He took the long view, told us all not to worry too much, and recounted how he and his fellow students in Rome had regularly scanned the obituaries in hopes that a job would become available soon. Many years later when I returned to Berkeley to talk about fractional quantization it was Professor Segre who rushed up after the lecture to ask if the particles we had identified in the fractional quantum hall effect might have something to do with quarks. It was his life's work to ask questions like that, and this was the reason I had found him and his colleagues so inspiring."*</p>
<p>Written by Robert Laughlin
Bachelors Degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1972; PhD from MIT in 1979
Nobel prize in physics in 1998
President of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology in Daejeon, South Korea
[/quote]
</p>
<p>freddy,</p>
<p>Read my profile.</p>
<p>(I'm a UCLA grad living in Japan.)</p>
<p>There are a plethora of good reasons:</p>
<p>-A 307 foot phallic symbol with a clock
-A frequent number of naked protests
-The referee/Berkeley alumni/angry man who blows his whistle at people and repeats the same expletive-filled diatribe
-Abundance of squirrels
-Lots of grass
-People's Park
-Obligatory exercise program via walking up giant hills
-T3 internet connection
-Orange chicken on Thursdays</p>
<p>Well, that's my list.</p>
<p>I don't see how an article about someone who graduated over 30 years ago is still relevant to today's Berkeley.</p>
<p>irrelevant or relevant..</p>
<p>Calbears rock!</p>
<p>Where's gentleman scholar? He should be like all over this thread.</p>
<p>Good point with the squirrels. I can't agree about the nake protesters- they aren't frequent enough for my tastes. (sarcasm, I actually am indifferent)</p>
<p>Here's some stuff:</p>
<p>The generally strong departments across the board, making for a wide range of academic offerings.</p>
<p>Great professors (as it's all I've experienced). This applies primarily to the humanities, but even there, you you just have to ask around and find out who most people recommend and most avoid, shop a class or two, ect. Did you know how easy it is to get a professorship at Berkeley? All you need is a major contribution to your field of study. Easy, right? Just talk to your professor about it. They're generally interesting people. Before/after class, or during office hours (as it sometimes doesn't relate to what's going on in class).</p>
<p>The amazing speakers and performers that come to campus.</p>
<p>The Bay Area and all that comes with it (San Francisco and all within it)</p>
<p>The food in the city of Berkeley.</p>
<p>Sweet libraries (music library, book libraries, movie library, periodicals library, other I've yet to find), </p>
<p>There are many great musuems on campus, from art to plants to fossils and more, all free to students (I'm pretty sure).</p>
<p>Graduate Student Instructors. Now, I've gotten lucky here, but all of mine have been amazing. It's harder to find out about these before classes from asking people, but it seems like generally, grad students are smart, imteresting people. Sadly, although this probably isn't the rule universally, it probably is at least somewhat within the humanities. </p>
<p>The campus. It just looks cool. </p>
<p>It's easy to find something intersting to fulfill the various requirements (although slighlty hard for bio . . . I dislike bio).</p>
<p>Academic celeberties (or, other people's professors who are famous). Try it out. Why not talk to them?</p>
<p>The weather- generally mild. Although it rains significantly more than say southern california, significantly more than almost never is still about almost never</p>
<p>Apathetic, people who went to other schools even 30 years ago post about their experience on other school's threads. While their views may be older, they're probably somewhat worthwhile at the very least.</p>
<p>I think DRab has definitely hit the main points of why I decided to attend Cal. </p>
<p>I would add that I have really enjoyed the sporting events here:</p>
<p>The free football tickets for freshman were great to have during fall semester, you just get some friends together (calling them to wake them up before noon on a Saturday at times...) and walk up to Memorial Stadium. </p>
<p>I also bought men's basketball season tickets on a whim, which turned out to be a great buy! Plus, it's fun to go to free events such as our Champion Men's Rugby games, gymnastics meets, women's basketball games etc.</p>
<p>Your student ID gets you a 50% discount to Zellerbach Performances, which I definitely wish I took more advantage of. </p>
<p>The Freshman/Sophomore Seminar program is amazing. I have had such great experiences through my seminar courses that I could not even begin to explain them here.</p>
<p>I think two other factors that many people consider are location from So Cal, far enough but not to far, from Nor Cal, close enough but not too close) and relative cost (compared to most private schools).</p>
<p>Many people come here in part because of the strength of the name "Berkeley."</p>
<p>Did I mention the food in Berkeley? Gourmet ghetto of the California? The world?</p>
<p>Although I didn't particularly come here for the people, I've found many interesting ones. </p>
<p>The music/book stores are great.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Did you know how easy it is to get a professorship at Berkeley? All you need is a major contribution to your field of study. Easy, right?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is easy?! :p</p>
<p>I've seen several posts about squirrels, but no verification to support it. Tsk, tsk. Perhaps this ranking would help? Berkeley seems to rank rather high, although Stanford is not far behind. </p>
<p>But read the section on squirrels! It clearly says, "The absolute best place I've found for a squirrel session."</p>
<p>Berkeley suirrels get 5 squirrel heads, Stanford's a mere 4+. Also, the poster doesn't know much about Stanford's mascot (the color cardinal, not a tree).</p>
<p>"Stanford is upgraded to a "4+" rating, but Cal (Berkeley) is still number one!"</p>
<p>Another impressionable rating system :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I heard Berkely is infested with biased liberals. </p>
<p>If you listen to Michael Savage at least occasionally, then you know why it's such a terriable place.</p>
<p>Nearly every elite college is "infested with biased liberals." I actually think Berkeley is more politically balanced than schools like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, which are all nearly 90% self described liberals. Its been said a hundred times, but the largest group on campus is the Berkeley College Republicans. That said, I'd say the 75-80 percent of the students and faculty are liberal.</p>
<p>this is supposed to be a positive thread about BerkelEy...</p>
<p>watching the sun set behind the Golden Gate Bridge after hiking to the Big C is pretty awesome. </p>
<p>on the studious side, the libraries are rather impressive, both the buildings themselves and the collections they hold. If anyone has been in the reading rooms of Widener Library they would feel right at home in Doe Library. Bancroft Library Archives houses extensive collections including the Mark Twain Papers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti/City Lights collection (which contains many of Allen Ginsberg's personal letters), and Tebtunis Papyri. Moffit Library has films available for viewing (for class assignments, etc.) at screening stations in the basement...on a whim my roommate and I walked in and watched Moulin Rouge. =) </p>
<p>oh, and my phone background is a very fat and happy squirrel, a pic I took while eatting at the GBC the other day. =)</p>