<p>It depends on what job you’re going into.</p>
<p>For high finance and consulting, school absolutely matters. The only students from the UC system at my summer internship are from UC Berkeley. No UCLA, no UCSD, etc. The rest are a mix of Ivies, Stanford, MIT, etc. I had a friend who actually flew up to Berkeley from UC San Diego so he could drop his resume at a Goldman Sachs info-session, because investment banks don’t even look at their resumes. (He didn’t get the internship.) Obviously, this is anecdotal. But if you do a quick Linkedin search, you’ll see pretty quickly that this is the rule: in business, name matters. It’s a lot easier to get to a top company from Berkeley than it is from other schools. AFTER your first couple jobs, nobody cares about your school. But that first job at Bain leads to a second at LEK, which leads to Harvard Business School…you get the idea. It’s a snowball effect.</p>
<p>In medicine, your undergraduate school doesn’t mean quite as much. Berkeley provides great research opportunities that many other schools lack, but if you can get the research opportunities at Davis or where-ever, then graduate schools won’t really care. It’s all about the test scores, the GPA, and the research/volunteering. Law is similar. Great grades, great essays, great LSAT, and you can go to Podunk U and still go to a top 5 law school.</p>
<p>I have no idea how engineering recruiting works. But I know that Berkeley EECS/CS majors are completely spoiled with opportunities at a billion amazing tech companies. I’m jealous. Go into CS. It’s a gold-rush. No idea if this is the case at other schools.</p>