[gcd]

I'm about to graduate from Berkeley, a so-called 'top' school. Besides the name of the degree, I can't think of anything that was particular top-notch about my education here. Class sizes were big and are only getting bigger. The intro CS class had a few hundred when I took it. Now? It can have up to 1100 students. I would say I've only had 4 good or great professors (enthusiastic, interesting, smart but also good at teaching) my whole time here - one in CS, one in EE, the other two in humanities. Everyone else ranged from useless or unbearable to okay. Many were simply too smart, so to speak. In other classes, the lecture powerpoints did most of the work for them.

In fact, most of my learning took place while taking notes independently on lecture notes / slides (rarely the textbook, although sometimes they were okay), sometimes watching lectures from other schools, and then trying to apply the knowledge to projects and practicing for exams. Discussion sections were only occasionally useful, generally for the more difficult classes where I actually needed an empathetic person who recently took the course to explain things to I.

For the most part, though, I feel like I taught myself most of what I learned here - I would have done fine if lectures didn't exist. Mind you, this only applies to the CS program. I took only the required EE courses.

The great thing about the institution is definitely the research. My graphics professor, for example, does a ton of awesome work both academically and professionally. Working with him would have been a great opportunity to get into that industry.

Otherwise, I don't see why I couldn't have just done my education by myself. The only problem would be motivation to slug through the difficult / boring but important stuff. My databases class got quite boring at points such that, if I were teaching myself, I may have just skipped over a good chunk of the class material. I'm imagining that if I just had a person to get on my case and me on them, it would be almost as effective as the concept of a GPA.

[grayclhn]

That's too bad. Two of the best classes I've taken in my life were at Berkeley -- econ 141 (econometrics, about 80 students) and math 195 (undergraduate stochastic differential equations, about 5-10 students, 3 I think taking for a grade. If I'm off on the course number, sorry.) This was over a decade ago, though. Two thoughts,

1: you've been screwed by the California budget over the last 5-10 years.

2: I don't know what the most advanced classes were in your field, but Berkeley (and other top top schools) offers classes that are unimaginable at other universities. An undergraduate SDE class really is "unimaginable" most places, and learning the material from a textbook would be impossible -- it's too difficult and appropriate textbooks don't exist. The "textbook" is usually the instructor's notes from the last time they taught the class.

Anyway, I have enormous fondness for Berkeley and the three classes I took there got me into grad school and kicked off my career (I took these classes after graduating from college --- Tufts, which is a great liberal arts-oriented school with generally small classes and personal attention, but it ain't got undergraduate SDE --- and moving to the bay area), so I'm kind of saddened to read your experience.

edit: typos

[electronvolt]

> I don't know what the most advanced classes were in your field, but Berkeley (and other top top schools) teach classes that are unimaginable at other universities. An undergraduate SDE class really is "unimaginable" most places, and learning the material from a textbook would be impossible -- it's too difficult and appropriate textbooks don't exist. The "textbook" is usually the instructor's notes from the last time they taught the class.

Not a Berkeley alum, but I went to UVa; which is considered a similar tier (if I remember right, the top 3 public schools in the US, at least by News+World rankings, are usually a toss up between Berkeley, UVa, and UCLA).

I think this is definitely true, and in basically every field a top school is strong in. The upper level courses, even at the undergraduate level (especially the ones people are not required to take. If it's a required course, /someone/ has to teach it, and they might not be that into it, particularly if they aren't teaching faculty. If it's an elective, they're teaching it because they think the subject is awesome.) are usually being taught by people who have made it their entire life's work to study that field, and at that level of University are often some of the best people in that field. That kind of perspective, depth of knowledge, and passion don't necessarily translate well to teaching (I can think of some math professors that I had...), but it often does, and even if it doesn't those professors are usually /amazing/ resources outside of class if you want to know more about (subject of choice), what the current problems in that field are, what's considered important or valuable, etc.

I'd hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think that if you didn't manage to take as many advanced courses (particularly graduate ones. Good undergrads at institutions like that can almost always handle the graduate courses they offer after they have the sufficient background) with as many top people in a field (or fields) as possible, you wasted an opportunity if you were at a school like that.

(Full disclosure: I come from a family of liberal arts professors at UVa, whose social circle largely consisted of other liberal arts professors at UVa. I might be a little biased on the matter... but those people /know their field incredibly well/. All of the ones I've met, both outside and in school, are both very, very smart and many of them spend the majority of their time thinking about one field or area of study.)

[gcd]

> The upper level courses, even at the undergraduate level ... are usually being taught by people who have made it their entire life's work to study that field, and at that level of University are often some of the best people in that field. That kind of perspective, depth of knowledge, and passion don't necessarily translate well to teaching (I can think of some math professors that I had...), but it often does

I personally don't see why 'often does' would be the case, at least in technical fields. I'm also thinking about graduate student instructors (GSIs), the ones who taught discussions. Few were genuinely good at teaching the material either - I always had to 'shop around' to find the few who were capable of explaining the material properly. All of them were very smart, but I think that it was often a drawback because they often seemed unable to empathize with not quickly developing an understanding of the material. Others simply weren't interested in teaching or at least didn't seem interested. There were, though, a couple that were both brilliant and seemed to genuinely think and care about teaching. This paralleled my experience with professors.

I was actually talking with my girlfriend about this because she thought she had a lot of good / great professors during her time at Cal. However, she was also in the social science realm. I have two very rough hypotheses to try and explain this difference:

One, I think that it might have something to do with the fact that most of my professors were originally from countries other than the US. Accents were never a problem, but I would guess that when it came to explaining more difficult concepts, there may have been some gaps in communication.

Two, more importantly, I think that the research done in computer science attracts a different kind of person than research in the social sciences. My girlfriend noted that much of the research that her professors were doing necessarily involved a lot of human interaction that extended beyond the academic sphere. On the other hand, I'm guessing that CS research is a lot more insulated, which may result in worse communication skills.

> even if it doesn't those professors are usually /amazing/ resources outside of class if you want to know more about (subject of choice), what the current problems in that field are, what's considered important or valuable, etc.

Again, this isn't helpful when it comes to actually learning the course material. If you want to do research, this is great. But I'm talking exclusively about the undergraduate educational experience.

> I'd hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think that if you didn't manage to take as many advanced courses (particularly graduate ones. Good undergrads at institutions like that can almost always handle the graduate courses they offer after they have the sufficient background) with as many top people in a field (or fields) as possible, you wasted an opportunity if you were at a school like that.

I took 6 upper division CS undergraduate courses + 1 graduate CS course. Most graduate classes were only for graduate students or, if anything, took only A+ / 4.0GPA undergrads, at least in the few fields I was interested in.

[grayclhn]

GSIs don't really compare here.

>Again, this isn't helpful when it comes to actually learning the course material. If you want to do research, this is great. But I'm talking exclusively about the undergraduate educational experience.

Sure, but my original point was that the unique thing that Berkeley and other tippity-top schools offer are those quasi research-oriented classes. For "database security," you can learn the material well lots of places, and for some people a less prestigious university might be a much better environment. And, for sure, depending on the year or the subject, for a class like that you might get an adjunct lecturer who doesn't know the material well, an adjunct lecturer who knows the material phenomenally well and works in the field, a tenure-track/tenured professor who doesn't give a shit, or a tenure-track/tenured professor who does cutting-edge research in the area and cares a lot about teaching. It's a crapshoot.

But going to Berkeley gives you access to classes like "Qubits, Quantum Mechanics, and Computers" [1] that are offered almost nowhere else. Those classes can be extraordinarily hard, but extremely rewarding.

[1]: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs191/sp12/ (not my field, so this is my guess at a representative example. For Berkeley, I think anything in the 19* range fits the bill.)

[gcd]

> GSIs don't really compare here.

The best teaching I found in my upper division experience was from GSIs. So yes, they do, especially since they're the ones that will become professors some day.

> But going to Berkeley gives you access to classes like "Qubits, Quantum Mechanics, and Computers" [1] that are offered almost nowhere else. Those classes can be extraordinarily hard, but extremely rewarding.

But there's a big problem here as well: such courses, that are only offered every once and a while, fill up extraordinarily quickly, which goes back to the issue of lack of funds and too large class sizes. Getting into any preferred upper division course is difficult now. It especially didn't help that I was always behind fellow students in my grade when it came to class registration times because I did not have very much AP credit coming in (my high school didn't teach to APs at all). This meant even some students a year or two below me got registration before me.

Another thing: if you wish to inspire students to take the difficult but rewarding classes that you're speaking about, having a mostly mediocre undergraduate experience does not help at all. If most of my upper division courses were, in my experience, taught poorly, why would I want to take even more difficult quasi-graduate courses, where poor teaching would be more impactful?

In the end, I did choose Berkeley over Carnegie Mellon and other schools. I feel a tiny bit of regret in having done so, only because I feel like a smaller prestigious private school would have offered a better undergraduate experience than Berkeley without sacrificing the awesome opportunities that you're talking about. Then again, there are many things about my experience here that I don't regret at all.