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

sakky
Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:02:31 +0000

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.



I agree that Berkeley is a great place for GRADUATE school, especially for one’s PhD. In fact, I have always recommended that people should consider going to Berkeley for their PhD. It’s the undergrad program where the problems lie. After all, like I said, just because somebody is a great researcher doesn’t mean that he’s a good teacher. I’ve encountered numerous brilliant researchers who are terrible teachers. Bad teaching is liable to DIScourage undergrads from pursuing a subject, not encourage them.

Having brilliant researchers around is great for PhD students because what those students need most of all are lots of strong ground-breaking research projects to choose from. However, what undergrads need are good teachers. Some of the best teachers I have had have been some of my high school teachers, and none of them were brilliant researchers. Frankly, I believe some of them would have done a better job teaching certain college classes (especially the intro classes) than many profs do now. For example, I know quite a few people who have frankly said that their high school calculus class was better taught and better run than the Berkeley calculus classes, to the point that they wished that it was their high school math teacher who was teaching them Math 1AB or Math 53.



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.)



Huh? Read what I posted again, and you will note that I said that the Berkeley grad engineering department actually has a LOWER admit rate than Stanford does, which may indicate that the Berkeley grad engineering department is more selective. The point of this is that USNews credits Berkeley’s grad engineering with high selectivity (thus moving them up the rankings). Hence, it seems to me that Berkeley is getting a pretty good deal from USNews, when you look at the graduate rankings.



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).



I am less concerned with Berkeley’s supposedly poor PR than about Berkeley’s actual problems. Why should there be students who have trouble getting the major they want? Why does Berkeley trap some engineering undergrads into majors they don’t want? Why should transfer students be allowed to skip over notorious weeders? Why should Berkeley continue to condone a hardened core of students who don’t go to class and don’t study for weeks at a time and are basically majoring in drinking and partying?

Look at it this way. If Berkeley were able to fix its problems, then Berkeley would have a higher quality educational product. It is always easier to market a product that is of higher quality. For example, Toyota in the 1960’s used to be a laughing stock of poor quality. Then Toyota vastly improved the quality and reliability of its cars. As a result, Toyota has become synonymous with extremely reliable cars, winning the JD Power quality rankings year after year after year, to the point that when consumers think of high reliability in cars, they think of Toyota. If Berkeley could improve the quality of its offering, then Berkeley would have a better story to communicate to the world.