How hard is it to get into UCSF med school from Berkeley?

CalX
Sun, 04 Jun 2006 02:48:45 +0000

Berkeley making statements to the effect of “Lots of our alumni go on to receive Nobel Prizes”



No, that is definitely not the way Berkeley’s Nobel premium is presented. It’s definitely more about the fact that your profs are Nobel Prizes than about your chances of getting a Nobel Prize because you chose to attend Berkeley.

As well, you don’t see the larger subtext here, if Berkeley has more Nobels who go there as grad students or as faculty, it’s in good part due to the intellectual environment that the school fosters. Berkeley is a global intellectual pole. That’s much more of a spontaneous cultural manifestation than administrative PR excellence. Other schools have more money yet they have a hard time prying top Berkeley faculty away.

It’s ridiculous to state that applicants to Berkeley graduate engineering dept don’t bother applying to Stanford because they don’t think Stanford would accept them. Stanford graduate engineering rep isn’t better than Berkeley’s. A lot of Berkeley engineers look down at Stanford as too “softcore” a school (not the same dynamics with MIT, which is respected.)

Berkeley UG has poor PR. They need to do what Haas has done, use practical measure that can improve many of their USNWR metrics, but they don’t. Some of the problem is arrogance, the admin looks down on that kind of marketing and feels it shouldn’t do anything because “it is Berkeley”. Schools with smaller names try harder in terms of selling/packaging themselves to HS students (see USC).