<p>Does anyone have family or friends who have gone to one of these colleges, took some loans and gone to grad school or got a decent job?
I’m trying to convince my parents that it’s worth it!</p>
<p>Mind you the main difference between these schools is size and the fact that one is public and the other 2 are not.</p>
<p>Berkeley’s large size means that in many of your harder classes a significant portion of the students taking that class will be taking that class with only a few other “easy” courses. This is a pretty big trend at Berkeley from what I’ve noticed. What does this mean? It means that you will have to work harder to earn an A because these people have far more time to devote to the class than you will with a normal 16 unit workload.</p>
<p>I don’t think this happens so much at private schools that have more stringent class requirements and have mainly college-aged students (berkeley has a lot of older transfer students and CC transfers that have to work at the same time).</p>
<p>For private schools, classes are often smaller and the schools is more responsive to your needs in general. </p>
<p>The main advantages of Berkeley is its top faculty and its value for in-staters. For out-of-staters dewfinitely go to Berkeley. For in-staters, check if the faculty you would like to work with will be available which will be truer for smaller majors versus large. Also the business program is pretty good. Engineering less so since its do or die and many die.</p>
<p>Err for out-of-staters definitely go to cornell or chicago.</p>
<p>But in-staters should go to Berkeley?</p>
<p>In-staters should balance out the pros and cons …</p>
<p>is it crowded in berkeley? like there’s always a lot of people around everywhere?</p>
<p>but then again, people say that it’s college, mostly you depend upon yourselves.</p>
<p>Sure, but if all colleges were created equal, then people wouldn’t care about going to harvard or princeton would they?</p>
<p>Look at it from a chemical analogy. Doing things requires activation energy. Bureacracy and quality of peers are analogous to starting conditions (lets say amount of steric hindrance in the system, and the amount of catalysts available). The better the bureacracy and the quality of your peers, the less activation energy you need to get a reaction started and accomplishing things you need to be successful. If everyone around you works hard and engages you intellectually, you are more likely to do well because people learn mostly by socialization. If you can switch majors easily you are more likely to do what you love and be more productive at it (or do what you’re good at).</p>
<p>As such, the activation energy at Berkeley seems higher than at most other places, and since you only have so much time to do things, it limits the amount of thigns youare are able to do.</p>
<p>PA, transfers have to stick to fairly strict schedules, and many are threatened that they will be kicked out if they don’t finish in two years (some are allowed to stay for a third, but I’m not sure how this works.)</p>
<p>I think Berkely’s generally strong programs are a nice thing about it. But Cornell and Chicago can offer similar things (although Berkeley is probably more rounded).</p>
<p>Gentlemanandscholar: “How do you know they just don’t want to be an engineer any more? And you’re always talking about how hard it is to transfer out of engineering, so how is it possible that 1/2 the people can transfer out. Either they transfer out or they flunk out, either way one of your theories is wrong.”</p>
<p>Is it hard to transfer IN to engineering? say…civil/environmental engineering?</p>