Ask HN: Yale or Berkeley for undergrad EE/CS?

1 point·sohamsankaran··3 comments

I'm a high school senior planning to study EE, CS or some combination thereof. I recently found out that I got into Yale and Berkeley. How would you compare these two schools? Note: I do intend to go to grad school immediately after completing my bachelor's degree.

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The following are the top four schools in CS in the US, and honestly the world. MIT, Stanford, CMU (Carnegie Mellon), and Berkeley.

YOU SHOULD GO TO YALE.

If you change your mind about what you want to do Yale is a better choice for more or less everything else, and it's not like your undergraduate education will be subpar there. I know a guy here in Shanghai who does more reading about design than most Art or Design students while being a very, very serious business student.

Seriously, if you have not at least worked your way through all of Concrete Mathematics already, and liked it, Yale is a better option.

Berkeley. The weather is a lot nicer, never freezes. It is on the edge of Silicon Valley, and across the bay from SF. It is a very big state school with lots of weirdness.

Seriously, take the "Software as a Service" class at EdX that started two weeks ago. It will give you a taste of Berkeley CS. Dave Patterson is a famous hardware architecture guy.

As a general suggestion, take a course or two from coursera, edX, or udacity to see if you are tough enough for CS.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "tough enough for CS" ? There are definitely difficult disciplines in CS, but few of those will be required courses in an undergraduate curriculum. The best indicator of success in CS (or any other field) is passion. If you are passionate about your field of study then the "toughness" of the program shouldn't be a major factor in your decision making... certainly not if you've already been accepted to Yale and Berkeley.

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