<p>I’m pretty sure Berkeley’s EECS department isn’t the only EE/CS department that has a cold, cutthroat, unpersonable culture. I’ve attended three different colleges/universities as a CS major (under & grad student) and found each and every one of them to be extremely unfriendly, the professors cold, aloof, and robotlike, and the competition (both amongst fellow students and students vs profs) to be cutthroat. Also, interest in outside subjects (especially “soft” subjects, including humanities, foreign languages, etc) was frowned upon (considered irrelevant, even detrimental). I graduated from my undergraduate program as one of the top three, but I’m now starting to realize that I have other interests, and I’m not really interested spending the rest of my life talking to computers (which are really, really dumb by the way) and grappling with extremely abstract math.</p>
<p>I heard from a few students at MIT that the EECS department is hard, but a bit more friendly and accepting of irrelevant interests and interdisciplinary research (MIT Media Lab, anyone?).</p>
<p>Maybe I’m just not the right person for EECS. But I definitely have gotten bad vibes from every EE/CS department I’ve been a part of.</p>