

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

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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barry-cotter
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.

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RNeff
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.

~~~
mgoforth
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.

