5 more hours to decide! CAL or DAVIS!

cenire
Tue, 11 May 2010 18:18:24 +0000

sigh Why does everyone always think Cal is stressful? All these stories always get blown out of proportion. Life at Cal is not stressful unless you have terrible study habits and no self-control.

People generally say that grad schools don’t care where you went for undergrad. While that’s often true, it definitely does not hold for many cases. Many departments at top grad schools are heavily biased toward undergrad schools that excel in that department as well. For instance, I was at Stanford’s Comp Sci Ph.D. Admit Day (I’m not the admit, though, hehe), there were only a few schools represented: Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, CMU, and Cornell. There were only a couple of people not from those schools. What do those schools have in common? They all have excellent undergrad CS programs.

But perhaps its correlation, not causation. Maybe students who choose to go to academically rigorous schools are more motivated and will perform well enough to go to a top grad school. Perhaps they have more access to resources and better renowned faculty to get letters of rec from (these recs, after all, are immensely important for grad school admissions, especially for doctorate programs).

One last thing: it’s ridiculous to say that there is no difference between a Cal and a Davis degree, because there is a HUGE difference. People looking to enter the job market after graduation are especially likely to experience the bias that many employers have for “better” students from “better” schools. Of course, this varies a bit from field to field, but it’s generally true.