HS Senior about to start college at UC Berkeley vs. WUSTL vs. Middlebury
I am deciding among Washington University at St. Louis, UC Berkeley (computer science), and Middlebury College, the schools that accepted me. I was waitlisted at CMU, also for computer science.
My plan for now is to elect to join the priority waitlist for CMU, meaning: I will be among the first to be considered on the waitlist, and should I be chosen, I am obligated to go. If I don't make the waitlist, I will head to Cal.
Naturally I know very little of the finance world; from what little I know, I am interested in working as a prop trader or a quant developer--I have a history in math competitions (USAMO) but my high school grades were squat which may explain the lack of acceptances at the conventional targets--and thus I am considering mathematics or computer science or both.
Is my plan sound? Have I been missing out on any Berkeley horror stories? Is CMU SCS not all that it’s cracked up to be? Am I making a mistake by entering into a potentially binding agreement with CMU, over Berkeley? Or, would I be better off at Middlebury or WashU?
UCB's EECS program is very well-respected, and places very well. If I am not mistaken, the engineering/CS rankings go something like... MIT, then Stanford, and then UCB.
I would recommend CS at UCB. If you are wanting to go into finance and do something in CS, it seems like a logical choice to come to UCB. I heard that many quant trading firms, hedge funds, and prop trading firms recruit there because of all the EECS and CS majors there.
If you're going to go with rankings, MIT, Stanford, UCB, and CMU are all up there. I imagine that at that level the difference between rank becomes negligible--especially with the different publications that all have different results, their different methodologies, even the changes in rank over the years.
I heard that with the relatively gigantic undergraduate population and the recent cuts in funding at Berkeley, scheduling required courses, getting sufficient attention in class, and even graduating on time have become uncertainties. That is, these are the concerns my high school counselor brought up. Until recently he has been pretty adamant against sending me to Berkeley. I didn't think them to be quite so serious.
Is there anyone here with firsthand knowledge of Cal, specifically Cal EECS?
Also, because CMU is a smaller private school, and SCS at CMU is even smaller, I was wondering how the networking at CMU SCS--and even CMU in general--compares to that with those majoring in CS at Berkeley.
Shameless bumping
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