Hi!
So I was admitted to both UM and UCB for mechanical engineering. For the sake of argument, lets assume I am an out of state student for both schools, financial aid is comparable, and I LOVE both the snow and the beach.
I am tending to lean slightly towards UCB but I have heard horror stories from this form and among students that I talk to who say Berkeley is incredibly academically challenging. I am not afraid of difficult work, but what I don’t want is excessive amounts of work just to make students suffer and learn to deal with stress. What I have been hearing is that at UCB, students are less likely to have an active social life because they need to spend so much time studying, especially engineering students.
I have managed by high school work and stressors fine for the last 4 years, but I am still scared of burnout and don’t want to be devoting 4 years to copious amounts of homework if it isn’t necessary. Again, this is not about laziness it’s about accomplishing the same amount of learning without unnecessarily hard work that is deliberately challenging because some people find that fun, or excessive, “busy work.”
So, my question is this: How do academics compare at the two schools in terms of rigor that distracts from free time? Are the rumors of Berkeley academic zombies true?