UC Davis vs Berkeley for Undergrad?

[sourdoughllama]

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Where are you getting these popular opinion rankings? Never heard of it that way. It has always been stanford/Berkeley then USC/UCLA, which are the colleges for rich kids that couldn't make it into cal or Stanford, so they go to the college that takes them for their parent's money.

Google, or as mcloaf pointed out, most people are aware of these rankings. Stanford and cal are not the same level, sorry and ucla is not for rich kids and not a cal reject school just like usc isn't a cal reject school. Cal, ucla, and usc all usually have Stanford rejects, I will give you that one. You confuse sports rivalries with academic prestige. Don't call me out by giving a ridiculous list

 

[solitarius]

In California, it's Stanford undergrad and then everyone else.

Cal and UCLA are arguably equally prestigious. But for undergrad premed, I doubt it makes a difference which UC you go to. All of them are filled with enough gunners to fill out the A's given in any pre-req class. What makes better sense is to go to any UC and pick a non-science major. An ex-girlfriend from h.s. went to Davis, majored in classics and got into UCSF dental. Bam!

 

[sourdoughllama]

In California, it's Stanford undergrad and then everyone else.

Cal and UCLA are arguably equally prestigious. But for undergrad premed, I doubt it makes a difference which UC you go to. All of them are filled with enough gunners to fill out the A's given in any pre-req class. What makes better sense is to go to any UC and pick a non-science major. An ex-girlfriend from h.s. went to Davis, majored in classics and got into UCSF dental. Bam!

Stanford is leagues above all the UCs (where MIT and Harvard are at), and I wasn't talking about privates. Some of you are offended at the order I wrote out, but as some have pointed out, that is the way most people see these rankings. I actually don't personally care about these rankings since they all do a good job at getting you where you want to go.

 

[solitarius]

This whole thread is absolutely ridiculous.

With the cost of higher education being what it is, you go to any reasonable school that is the most affordable to you. I did my schooling a low-ranked state school. Got five interview invites, including one Top 20.

Please don't base your decision solely on U.S. News and World Report. If money weren't an object, does anyone care that Princeton is ranked higher than Harvard by USNWR? Would most high school students go to Brown and Dartmouth over U. Chicago despite the latter being ranked higher by USNWR?

My take on the Cali schools:
Stanford - Go here if you get in. If med school doesn't work out, there's always Silicon Valley as a backup career. This is a no-brainer. While Stanford alums are not Harvard alums, they are Stanford alums nonetheless.

UC - If you go here, pick the school where at the gut level you feel you can most succeed. Pick a non-science major. Lighten the overall courseload for semesters where you take no more than two pre-reqs with labs.

Cal State - I'd go here myself. The caveat being you have to get top grades and crush the MCAT.

CalTech - I would never go here as a pre-med for the same reason why it's self-defeating to go to a place like MIT or Reed College. Go here if you want to do engineering or get a Ph.D.. Extra points if you like to hang out with smart social outcasts who rarely bathe.

 

[AlbinoHawk DO]

Google, or as mcloaf pointed out, most people are aware of these rankings. Stanford and cal are not the same level, sorry and ucla is not for rich kids and not a cal reject school just like usc isn't a cal reject school. Cal, ucla, and usc all usually have Stanford rejects, I will give you that one. You confuse sports rivalries with academic prestige. Don't call me out by giving a ridiculous list

lol so wrong. You can call it school rivalry, but the truth is that UCLA and USC are seen, academically, as parallel schools below Cal and Stanford. The only times Cal is "not on the same level" as Stanford is when people go by US News because they rank privates over public schools. Here we're talking about public perception, and actually, if we go by rankings, many respectable lists put Cal above or equal to Stanford.

Stanford is leagues above all the UCs (where MIT and Harvard are at), and I wasn't talking about privates. Some of you are offended at the order I wrote out, but as some have pointed out, that is the way most people see these rankings. I actually don't personally care about these rankings since they all do a good job at getting you where you want to go.

I don't know why you think people are offended. You're just the only one that's wrong.

 

[solitarius]

^ ok, but we're talking about the effect of going to Cal vs. Stanford on your future prospects. That is, the perception of Cal vs. Stanford among people who really matter to your future prospects. People like MD Ad Comms, other grad school admissions people, employers.

Not saying talented people don't go to Cal, but the only place Cal and Stanford are on equal footing is at the start of the Big Game.

Full Disclosure: Either Cal or Stanford is way better than my school.

 

[alpharez]

A big problem, I've found, is that at the point where community college students transition to the University they often have a difficult time. It's sad that some community colleges aren't as rigorous as the University, but that's just the way that it is. With the open door policy of UCD's TAG, this makes things even harder for some students, because they're admitted after only a year of coursework in liberal arts at a community college, and this does not prepare them for science majors.

I feel I must chime in because I am from the Sacramento community college system myself and completed my undergrad at UC Davis.

First of all, what science majors are you referring to at UCD? For most of the Bio majors, you have to complete many of the premed pre-req sciences before even being able to TAG.

I would argue they do prepare you for upper-div sciences because the rigor is the same. In some cases even harder. For example, I took organic at one of the colleges and had to bust my ass off just to get an A. I learned a substantial amount more then my counterparts at UCD. I know because I had to finish the ochem series at Davis and it was a cakewalk for me because I got a solid foundation at the CC.

NEVER ONCE did I feel like I wasn't prepared for my upper div sciences at UCD. They were hard but doable. And it wasn't because I was lacking knowledge from my lower-div sciences at the CC.

This is already so off topic, but yeah... Don't know what's even being argued anymore.

 

[JediOchoa]

Stanford > Cal-for undergrad
Cal >Stanford- medical school

 

[sourdoughllama]

lol so wrong. You can call it school rivalry, but the truth is that UCLA and USC are seen, academically, as parallel schools below Cal and Stanford. The only times Cal is "not on the same level" as Stanford is when people go by US News because they rank privates over public schools. Here we're talking about public perception, and actually, if we go by rankings, many respectable lists put Cal above or equal to Stanford.


I don't know why you think people are offended. You're just the only one that's wrong.

I don't know what your problem is, but you're just insulting me without any backing. As pointed out by @mcloaf and @milkandcereal these are accurate rankings that the public usually adheres by. I'm not sure why you are taking this so personally or being so unprofessional. Did you attend any of the schools you're so vehemently protecting?

 

[sourdoughllama]

^ ok, but we're talking about the effect of going to Cal vs. Stanford on your future prospects. That is, the perception of Cal vs. Stanford among people who really matter to your future prospects. People like MD Ad Comms, other grad school admissions people, employers.

Not saying talented people don't go to Cal, but the only place Cal and Stanford are on equal footing is at the start of the Big Game.

Full Disclosure: Either Cal or Stanford is way better than my school.

.

 

[AlbinoHawk DO]

I don't know what your problem is, but you're just insulting me without any backing. As pointed out by @mcloaf and @milkandcereal these are accurate rankings that the public usually adheres by. I'm not sure why you are taking this so personally or being so unprofessional. Did you attend any of the schools you're so vehemently protecting?

Disagreeing with you and thinking you're wrong is far from insulting you.

 

[AlbinoHawk DO]

^ ok, but we're talking about the effect of going to Cal vs. Stanford on your future prospects. That is, the perception of Cal vs. Stanford among people who really matter to your future prospects. People like MD Ad Comms, other grad school admissions people, employers.

Not saying talented people don't go to Cal, but the only place Cal and Stanford are on equal footing is at the start of the Big Game.

Full Disclosure: Either Cal or Stanford is way better than my school.

You seriously have no idea about Cal do you? Tell me how many elements from the periodic table were discovered at Cal vs. Stanford? Fact is in the world of academia they are equal.

 

[sourdoughllama]

Disagreeing with you and thinking you're wrong is far from insulting you.

.

 

[AlbinoHawk DO]

You didn't answer my question: did you or did you not attend any of the schools mentioned above? I attended UCLA and that was disclosed earlier in this thread. I am not delirious in thinking that the public sees UCLA and Cal as equals. UCLA will always be a close 2nd and that's the truth. In the same manner, the UC rankings I had earlier are the public perception of UC rankings and Stanford is not usually seen as an equal of Cal save for sports. If you can back your claims up with some sources or facts instead of "you're wrong" then we can discuss further.

For your enjoyment:
http://collegeapps.about.com/od/choosingacollege/tp/university-of-california.htm
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-california-general/1085038-uc-tiers-or-rankings.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com...-general/1390707-usnews-2013-uc-rankings.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com...ranking-by-how-hard-it-is-to-be-accepted.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/uc-transfers/743629-uc-ranking.html
http://www.4icu.org/us/California.htm

Feel free to peruse any of these public forums and you'll find that I am pretty spot on

And like it or not US News rankings almost always correlate to prestige rankings. In the United States (where these colleges are located, therefore the only rankings that matter for this discussion), Stanford is top 5 and Cal is top 20 at best

No, I did not attend either school as a student. I did research some time at Berkeley after undergrad before moving on to UCSF. I don't care at all which school is above what. I'm simply talking about general perception. How old are you? I'm 30 and most of my friends in the range. Maybe it's a generational thing and for the younger crowd they (ucb and la) are equal.

As for your rankings, you are going by US News. There are many other polling organizations that rank Stanford and Cal equal or Cal above.

 

[sourdoughllama]

No, I did not attend either school as a student. I did research some time at Berkeley after undergrad before moving on to UCSF. I don't care at all which school is above what. I'm simply talking about general perception. How old are you? I'm 30 and most of my friends in the range. Maybe it's a generational thing and for the younger crowd they (ucb and la) are equal.

Edit: Your rankings and current college students are different. Agree to disagree since it's all opinion

 

[solitarius]

You seriously have no idea about Cal do you? Tell me how many elements from the periodic table were discovered at Cal vs. Stanford? Fact is in the world of academia they are equal.

All your [bolded] assertions prove is that Cal has some top-rated PhD programs, high levels of research funding, lots of distinguished faculty, and many Nobel Laureates. This is probably one valid way to look at a school's prestige. No one here is arguing whether getting a PhD or post-doc from a top-rated department at Cal is desirable because no one really cares.

We're talking about prestige in terms of the direct payback a student can receive in the form of job offers and graduate school admissions. Reality is that Stanford is on the same level as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; hence, everyone on SDN always clarifies whether they're from an 'HYPS' school (i.e., top-tier college). Stanford alums routinely go onto the same Wall Street, consulting, government policy gig, law schools, PhD programs, business schools, and medical schools that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alums do. And the one thing Stanford does have over HYP is its pervasive presence and alumni network in Silicon Valley.

But back to medical school, since that's the focus of this board. Stanford students have a solid shot at getting into Harvard Medical School or Johns Hopkins if they do well, and I'd be willing to bet a bunch of their students place into Top 10 medical schools in good numbers each and every year. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Cal: https://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/MedStats.stm

 

[MDforMee]

I feel I must chime in because I am from the Sacramento community college system myself and completed my undergrad at UC Davis....

I'm glad that you bring it up. Some Sacramento community colleges are more rigorous than others, and some classes at less rigorous schools can be harder than the same class at more rigorous schools; things like this depend on the professor, department, and so on. For instance, I sat in on chemistry for health science majors at Sacramento City College this week, and they spent most of the class period reviewing the s, p, d, f designations and orbitals. It was really slow paced and tuned down for health science majors. I went to Sierra College that same day and talked to the tutor there for a nearly identical chemistry for health sciences course, and as it turns out, they're learning more material than the other kids. This "extra" material may not be harder to begin with, but they are learning more of it... things like alpha and beta sugars, etc, on top of general chem principles; these kids also get assignments, have to do projects, and so on.

Also, I'm glad that you felt prepared and did well at UCD. Congratulations. I too thought that my organic chem was harder than some UCs. They even gave us the national ACS exam at the end of our class, where I scored in the 97th percentile, and they didn't even teach to the test, per se. I'm not bragging, I'm just saying that this is a type of standardization. I've heard that UCLA's and UCB's organic chem is rigorous, however. I had organic at Sierra College.

Really, though, it's not that the community college system here is all that bad, it's that students enter it directly from high school where they oftentimes weren't successful in matriculating to a UC/other university (as freshman), and don't have the basic study skills to succeed as the pace picks up. A lot of the time, the liberal arts prereqs are rubber stamped for A's if you have half a brain... what these kids need to find out is that they have to study their assess off if they're going to beat the curves in harder University level science classes, and I focus on this transition through tutoring and advising. My niche is pretty specific. It's like my PI told me, yesterday, she almost failed her first graduate school course because she'd winged it going through a small liberal arts college back east. Well, California these days is a lot different.

Every day on my way home past the vet med part of UCD I see little kids doing math homework, even during vacations. Their parents are the international students that are in the labs on that part of campus. Think about that one for a minute.

What makes better sense is to go to any UC and pick a non-science major. An ex-girlfriend from h.s. went to Davis, majored in classics and got into UCSF dental. Bam!

Thanks for proving my point.

You know, there's a lot to be said for taking on challenges in life. Hard majors, hard schools, et cetera will prepare you for your CAREER, not just getting your foot in the door for your EDUCATION.

When the USMLE and eventual practice comes, people that took the hard road are going to be the ones laughing last.

 

[radcat]

Wow this is an intense thread. I was a pre-med at UC Berkeley and it was the most AMAZING experience! I would not have traded it for Davis just because I "was worried" about the academic rigor. It doesn't quite work like that - I felt inspired by all my peers and truthfully, it was not as exaggeratedly hard as people say.

I think y'all need to chill out about which school is "harder" or "more prestigious." At the end of the day, college is what you make out of it. Besides, you're all pre-med to begin with, so I hope you realize that the path to medicine is a challenge.

Personally, the major concern should be would OP have more fun at Berkeley or Davis?