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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DS is having a difficult in committing between UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. He is accepted to EECS major in UCB and general engineering in JHU. He is set on pursuing a CS career. More interest in going to big techs and promising start ups than academia. We visited both and both are acceptable with usual pros and cons. The difficult for him is to know how it is like to study in these schools. He likes to have a collaborative exploration with smart and focused students. He does not mind challenging courses and projects but would like to close working relationships with other students not just pure competition. For UCB, he is concerned that there would be too fierce competition, and the environment is just sink or swim because of the class size. For JHU, the concern is that there would be not many dedicated CS major students, and most are from former pre-med students.

We are looking through various forums and have some general ideas, but it will be great to hear perspectives from parents of students in these two schools to know which one might be a better fit for my DS. The advice we got from adults in STEM areas are almost entirely go to UCB because of the location and strong reputation. However, his friends mostly like JHU much more. It seems like that the cold practical calculation is UCB for sure but qualitative quality of life may be better with JHU. We are really conflicted and welcome any advices.
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Congrats on the acceptances. UCB CS is an especially tough admit. Your analysis looks pretty much spot on. I would normally say JHU vs UCB for virtually anything but CS is different.

You are correct about the environment at UCB. It will be highly competitive, the courses will be huge and grading will be very hard because it is curved.

Intro to CS will have 12oo kids, be taught in a ballroom and your kid will be encouraged to not attend but rather watch it streamed online. Classes will be huge for at least the first two years and almost always large. But your son will be in the heart of it all with some of the smartest CS kids anywhere. If he is up to the challenge of the environment UCB is probably the better choice.

In my group at a FAANG I have UCB, CIT, MIT, Waterloo. But I also have UCSC, NC State, UCF, Missouri S&T, RIT, and several SJSU. Your kid can make it from everywhere but being in the heart of it all really helps.

YOu would neve hear it on DCUM but SJSU (and Santa Clara) are the ultimate sleeper schools for CS. You can go any where and get any internship with some networking because of their numbers in the valley.[/quote]

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