@DVmom18
I agree with you. I actually have an undergrad engineering degree from Berkeley and was a PhD engineering student at Northwestern (but dropped out after 2.5 yrs to pursue a different career). It’s interesting how your analysis of two schools coincide with my experience, even after 25+ years later. I loved my Berkeley engineering experience but it’s not for most. It was super competitive and cut throat. My GPA got hit big time as result (I think it was only 3 2), but I was super successful at research and co-authored a few publications as an undergrad. But, I bugged my research professor initially for a whole year before he even let me in his lab. (You have to relentless about it.) I mainly studied to get good grades (and still got only 3.2 at the end), not for the sake of learning because of serious grade deflation at Berkeley. At Northwestern, as a TA, I saw how undergrads work and study together because it was not a cut throat environment because there was no serious grade deflation. Basically, you got at least B if you tried hard (at least in upper division classes I TAed.) I thought it was much more intellectually positive environment for engineering students at NU vs Cal. Bottom line, I encouraged my DS to apply to NU engineering for 2023 class (he got a accepted!), but I prevented him from applying to Cal.