Wellesley vs UC Berkeley for Computer Science

ucbalumnus
Sun, 23 Apr 2017 06:06:23 +0000

50 people from your high school is not many out of thousands of new frosh at Berkeley.

The 3.3 GPA (in the three prerequisite CS courses) is the main concern at Berkeley. If you do not get into the L&S CS major, you could take some upper division CS courses as out-of-major electives, but getting into them may be difficult because priority is given to L&S CS and EECS majors (and L&S CS has the 3.3 GPA entry requirement to limit the number of students to stay within instructional capacity, indicating that CS instructional capacity is currently filled to the limit).

How much does Wellesley cost, and how much debt would it mean?

Wellesley does offer a good selection of CS courses, but some of them appear to be offered less frequently (e.g. once every two years, so you may have only one chance to take such a course). See http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs/Curriculum/dependencies.html .

If you want to take the patent exam from a non-ABET-accredited CS major, be sure to include the course work listed in https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/OED_GRB.pdf section III.B.iv (note the requirement of 8 semester hour units of physics or chemistry, in addition to 32 more semester hour units of science or engineering including computer science as described in III.B.x).

No specific major is needed for pre-law purposes (if that is why you want to have a second major in English).