The College Decision

It seems as if everyone is figuring out where to go for college this time of year, and if my College Monster project would ever take off I had imagined the article at this time to be a compendium of personal experiences about how all of us last year's graduates decided on a college. Well, here's still hoping to get some other responses.

Unlike my other articles where I spent time trying to write in a comprehensive and objective way, I decided that it was pretty much impossible to write something like that in this case, so instead you all get my own personal story, specific to my case and therefore probably not helpful at all to any of you, but it's yours to read on the offchance that you might gleam some advice.

I started out my college admissions season applying for six schools, and eventually getting into four of them. I had started out applying to MIT, which had always been my dream school, and somewhere along the line from early childhood to 12th grade, CalTech got thrown in there as a top school as well. So with either of those I was set, although I wasn't confident at all at getting into any of them. I had three UC's as safety schools, figuring I'd get into at least one of them, although I really didn't know anything about any of them. At the last minute, I threw in Stanford as a token "Hey this will be fun if Sean also gets in".

My mistake during this time was not really paying attention to college at all. I had just figured out my hierarchy of colleges: MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, and I probably figured that if I somehow got into Stanford, then MIT/CalTech would've been there too. So in any event, I'd have my list of schools to run down and choose one, and if not any of them, I'd be headed to CCSF and be done with it. All would have been well and I'd have no article to write today.

As it turns out, I got deferred from CalTech and then deferred from MIT, from the early admission round to the regular round, so I'd be finding out about all my colleges in March. First UC Irvine rolled in telling me I had gotten accepted (although I never applied), then San Diego invited me to New Admits' Day although I wouldn't get the actual acceptance letter until several days later. Then I got my rejection letters from MIT and CalTech, at which point it was all UCSD, and then I got the UCLA and Berkeley letters, and I was all set and ready to go to Berkeley (per my pre-decided hierarchy). Then Stanford, fashionable entrance as always, mails there letter several days after everyone else, and now all of a sudden I've got a conundrum on my hands.

Now I should note that perhaps my biggest mistake was really not looking into any of the colleges. I mean sure, you look over at all the rankings and see (Oh! So and so is ranked best program. I've got to go there!), but how does a blanket #1 ranking at one school compare to a blanket #3 ranking at another school? Does that mean the #1 was magnitudes better than the #3? Or was there only a marginal, subjective difference? What kind of criteria did this ranking organization even use? What if enrollment diversity or financial aid was one of the major factors, but you really just want to know about quality of education? Or vice versa?

You could also take a look at the public information that universities offer about their programs. School pamphlets and brochures, but most especially school websites. These can be helpful if you look hard enough, but a lot of the time, and especially on the shallowest of passes, these kinds of resources all spout the same feely-but-non-specific information. For example, Berkeley's Department of Architecture has this to say about the program's focus: "Because of the great diversity of offerings in the College of Environmental Design and in the Department of Architecture in areas such as building environments, practice of design, design methods, structures, construction, history, social and cultural factors in design, and design itself, it is possible to obtain either a very broad and general foundation or to concentrate in one or several areas." I'm sure that just about any other architecture school says the same basic thing on their website.

You might be able to take a look at classes, and what their curriculi specify. The hardest part about this is knowing what classes you're going to be taking (which requires some digging through the website for your major), and even then it may be heard to find information, or even know what that information really means. For example, the description of Math 54 (linear algebra & differential equations) at Berkeley say this: Basic linear algebra; matrix arithmetic and determinants. Vector spaces; inner product as spaces. Eigenvalues and eigenvectors; linear transformations. Homogeneous ordinary differential equations; first-order differential equations with constant coefficients. Fourier series and partial differential equations. Most high school students still being at the Trigonometry or Calculus level, it's impossible to have any idea what eigenstuff is, and most students, not really knowing what their majors will entail, can't have any idea about how or if any of this stuff applies to what they'll be doing or how important any of it really is, making most research into publicly available information useless.

What many students try to get away from either public information or discussions is a sense for the education philosophy of a particular school. As noted before, most schools are pretty vague and non-specific with their public information, so it's hard to tell. A sometimes dangerous trap is to catch onto something someone said and begin taking that as fact. For example, when I was debating between MIT and CalTech for my college choice hierarchy (this was before I would find out that I would get either), I had often heard that CalTech was much more theory-based, and found itself more on the cutting-edge, if more abstract, side of science, while MIT had a much greater focus on real-world practice. Now, this was a nice and clean-cut way to qualify the differences between both colleges, so it sounded nice and I was inclined to believe it. In retrospect, I'm not sure if this is true at all - I have no idea what source I had heard it from, and I surely have no idea what source that source derived this information from. It's also a very general statement and I'd very much doubt that it's a true blanket statement for all programs at either school, or that it really restricts your academic choice (it's ultimately within your power to decide if you want to study/research into a more theoretical or practical line of studies). In all likelihood, some guy probably decided to say "MIT's does more practical stuff, and CalTech does more theoretical stuff" and people started just taking that as fact. Another common example is that almost everyone will say, "Berkeley Engineering is really competitive. Almost anyway will stab you in the back for a grade." A lot of times, especially at the high-school-about-to-head-off-for-college level, where you're soaking up all sorts of information and speculation like a sponge, especially from people who really don't know or have a limited scope of knowledge about a particular college (a freshman student like me, for example!), generalizations like that just tend to sprout from off-the-cuff remarks, and snowball into de facto knowledge.

Even knowing anything about the curriculum being taught tells you very little about the actual quality of education - after a year of experience here at Berkeley I can definitely verify what many other college students have said: the quality of education is highly variable from teacher-to-teacher, and perhaps even moreso, teaching assistant/graduate student instructor to TA/GSI (at Berkeley anyway). With a crap teacher or crap GSI, you'll learn absolutely nothing (or you'll have to do all the learning on your own), and good ones will be able to greatly facilitate your education. Don't make the mistake of thinking of thinking, "Oh, so-and-so is a prestigious university, so at least I know I'm not going to have a completely horrible/incompetent professor there", or also thinking that little-known universities preclude good teachers. How do you know if a place has good teachers or not? All of this information is fairly subjective, although generally I've found that getting advice from older students (especially TA's and GSI's in my classes, on other professors in that department) is a ton of help - they seem to have a lot of experience with professors, especially within their major and can be extremely insightful. However, this tends to have the problem of a small sample size, and for high school students this doesn't really help at all. A bit amusingly, I've found that another great resource that solves both problems is http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/, which is exactly what it sounds like - a compendium of student-written ratings for various professors. Now, there's obvious potential for bias, so keep in mind you'll need to sift through for the more insightful comments rather than taking the actual rating numbers. You can use that site to look up specific professors and read comments, or find all the professors working in a particular department.

For example, if I wanted to check out the comments on professors in Berkeley Bioengineering, I might simply grab a listing of all Biology teachers and take a look:

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/SelectTeacher.jsp?the_dept=All&sid=1072&orderby=TDept&letter=B

Even better, I'd go to the Bioengineering site and take a look at the recommended curriculum, which handily outlines the general coursepath for all four years of your college education.

http://bioeng.berkeley.edu/program/bioemajor.php

After that I might go to the college class search and find the classes I might be taking in the first semester, or even the future:

http://schedule.berkeley.edu/srchfall.html

And then look up the professors teaching those classes.

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Well, it seems as if my subjective personal narrative of my college-choosing experience has veered off into objective analytical commentary once again. Well, in short, I never really did any of the stuff I mentioned above. I was all set on resigning my fate to Berkeley (without any real research, just based on the assumption that "Well, it's more prestigious than UCLA/UCSD right?") when the Stanford admission letter rolled in, and now I was in a bit of a conundrum.

There were a lot of people with strong opinions, mostly towards Stanford for the obvious (but in retrospective, naive and foolhardy) basis of prestigiousness. Well it's Stanford. Everyone wants to go to Stanford. Stanford is famous. The Google Guys came out of Stanford. Who the heck comes out of Berkeley? And admittedly, my personal feelings leaned that way as well. At my school at least, everybody went to Berkeley. Each year we'd send a dozen or so kids to the school. But when was the last time we saw a kid go to one of the elite private schools? In my mind, I also tried to imagine myself as a prospective employer, and I could definitely imagine a sort of exclusive aura on the guy with Stanford on his resumé, while I thought of the guy from Berkeley as more of a common ore. In retrospect, all of that talk about prestigiousness was just extremely superficial junk that parents and maybe even teachers, who are all years removed from college (and in my case, immigrant parents and teachers who never actually experienced the college system here but simply heard of places the legendary placecs like Stanford and MIT.) believed heavily. Once you're actually in college and settle in, all of the auras of different schools that you regarded as a high school student sort of fade away - the belief that Stanford is a more "prestigious" school or that the other UC's are "less prestigious" doesn't really register anymore, and projecting myself again as a prospective employer, I found it very difficult now to see how a student's particular college is a really relevant factor.

With that "prestigiousness" myth dispelled (hopefully - unfortunately for many high school students it's both the worst and most common reason they decide on a college), I'll move on to the four major reasons I did decide on Berkeley over Stanford. They're not meant to be a comprehensive list of reasons you should consider, and they certainly weren't all good reasons (in fact, retrospectively none of them were), but they were my initial reasons, and thus the only ones I can authoritatively write about from personal experience.

Friends going to Berkeley, none going to Stanford
Support-structure philosophy
Cost
Failure insecurities

I hate to say this was the defining reason I came here, because it wasn't, but at the end of the day, I think the dealmaker for Berkeley and the dealbreaker for Stanford was that at Berkeley, I'd have a significant contingent of friends who would be going there with me - friends I very much wanted to keep and share the same college experience with. While a lot of people might view this as a cop-out from forging ahead and blazing my own trail with a brand-new network at Stanford, and clinging onto some security blanket of high-school friends at Berkeley, I saw it a lot differently. To me, Stanford, while it seemed much more fun and alluring, felt a lot like abandoning all the old friends I had for greener pastures, and both then and now I desperately wanted to hold my existing social web together, not really for fear of making new friends or having no friends, but because for me that web was darn-near the most treasured thing I had to own. With college it's inevitable that people had to split apart, and since one can't obviously go everywhere, I made do with what allowed me to keep close to as many people as possible - still close enough to home to keep with all the people going to community college, situated en-route to Davis, and most of all going to college with the small group of people who were going to Berkeley. I think my view was shaped in large part by my high school experience - I left for my high school with more or less one close friend, while nearly the entire rest of the class went over to other major high school in our district. For the most part, contact and friendships with all those people who went away died off with the distance and different schools, but at the same time my friendship with the one friend who had come to this high school with me is to this day one of the closest friendships I have, and one that I honestly couldn't imagine a life without. All the others who went to a different school? There's not so much a sting or pang anymore, as there are simply moments of melancholy and regret that I couldn't - or didn't - keep those relationships alive. In high school I went on to find friendships that developed into even closer or more integral parts of my life than my friendships in middleschool, and it was the last thing I wanted to let go.

How did that all turn out? Only a year removed from high school, I don't know if I can really give a definitive answer, but from my own subjective experience and attempted objective observation of others, it doesn't seem as if going off to college with all your friends really makes any sort of difference - knowing a dozen students while your daily interaction might bring you in contact with any of the 30,000 students here doesn't significantly help or inhibit your ability to socialize and form new networks in any way - many of the people I knew last year have truly blossomed into an entirely new network of friends and contacts, more or less that trailblazing, starting from scratch social experience that they said I'd find at Stanford. On the other hand, there are others who didn't plunge head-first into the social scene, at least not as quickly, and are a bit more isolated in their freshman year of college than they were in their senior year of high school, but not necessarily their freshman year of high school. From observation and retrospect, I think the various social lives that resulted came about from the personality and goals of the individual, rather than having anything to do with whether or not anyone else from high school came along to college. For me, personally, the kind of network I imagined - the close-knit high school group that might simply grow to include the new contacts and networks that were made - never really materialized. Some friends stick around, but at the same time there are many who are just as eager to shed the inhibitions of their high school bonds and start a brand new life from scratch, and I tend to think most everyone, at least to an extent, is inclined towards the latter. For almost everyone, college is about finding a path. In high school you're fed assembly-style through the same pre-packaged education, but it's in college that you find your independence and niche, and choose the path towards the career and even person you want to be. At least a little bit of that involves some experimentation and exploration, and while it doesn't necessarily demand a complete abandonment of the old life, at least a part of that life is shifted to a lower priority, at least in the present, in order to permit for the true independence that allows it to happen. So a year after I had envisioned a college life including the same high school cast, I find a lot of them, including some who were at one point the closest and most integral relationships, off pursuing their own lives. After a long while fighting it, I think I'm starting to come to the same conclusion that perhaps everyone else had already prepared themselves for before we had even gotten to last year's graduation - that with the move to college, and the makeup of individuals with different interests and classes and majors that find even more familiar and relatable niches in a broad and diverse student body, a distancing and breakdown of your former relationships is inevitable to some extent, and you can't really depend on the assumption that anyone is going to be able to stick around with you forever.

The second reason I went with my choice of Berkeley over Stanford was the support system structure. During my college decisions process, I had made an overnight stay at Stanford, and had made a somewhat less informative day-tour of Berkeley. The most drastic difference I had perceived between the two schools was the support structure. In my stay and the various informational activities at Stanford, one of the emphases was the vast support structure available at Stanford - there were academic centers and tutors and numerous other resources available to help students out, and in addition to that the entire community seemed.... well, like a community. In my brief stay at the dorms, everyone there seemed immensely close-knit, far more than any I've experienced or witnessed here at Berkeley. In short, Stanford was the one that seemed a lot like a natural progression from high school. Berkeley, on the other hand, was subject to the biased comments I had received offhand and the limited day-tour I got; Berkeley was the place where you were thrown to the wolves and had to find a way to fend, learn, and organize for yourself, because you sure weren't going to receive any help from your compatriots in the Engineering department. While that perception was indeed drastic and exaggerated, in my experience so far the 'fend for yourself' aspect has very much applied - while in high school, everything from homework assignments and lectures were spoon-fed to you, here at Berkeley much of your education and success is up to your own initiative - 500-person lectures will blast by if you're not able to keep up with what's going on, and it's really up to you to take the initiative to put in the extra mile in classes or during office hours, start or join your own student organizations, or even make new friends. It's very unlike the high school experience, where teachers can tailor classes to meet the needs of a 30-student classroom, and where teachers will spell out each homework assignments and take you to task individually if you haven't been keeping up. Most of all, it's very unlike the high school atmosphere where a small school and classes with the same people day-in-and-day-out, year-after-year, more or less force social relationships and professional partnerships to develop. Berkeley has been anything but that experience, but on the contrary I very much believed then and still somewhat believe now that Stanford would have been something much more akin to the high school experience. While not a bad thing, and while I very much wanted to hold onto my existing social web from high school, I ultimately thought that the Berkeley corporate culture if you will, forcing students to develop independence, fit the kind of life I wanted to start pursuing more, and better fit the kind of culture that I believe the professional workplace demands - self-driven individuals capable of working independently. And so this reason was my overriding 'official' and justified reason I ended up with Berkeley over Stanford. I'll tell you in another five years whether or not this works out.

The next issue is one that every student, no matter their situation, will have to consider, and for my parents I think it was probably the biggest factor. While everyone else at my school was rooting for Stanford (being the most prestigious), my dad had made the valid point that the reason Stanford was being unanimously pushed without reservation was because none of them were actually paying the bill. In truth, cost aside I think my parents wanted me to go to Stanford as well, but cost, especially when you've also got two-college bound siblings in the coming years, tends to take precedent over your own personal feelings and inclinations. While I'm sure my parents wouldn't have objected if I had chosen Stanford based on cost alone, and while I'm sure that almost all parents would find a way to support their child with where ever they decided to go, from a responsibility standpoint I found it too difficult to ask my parents to foot the huge bill that a private college needed - the near-$50,000 per year that Stanford would have cost was enough to cover both myself and my sister to go to college, or even both my siblings if they were to end up at the lower-cost CSUs. The counterargument for this was that I would make up the extra tuition in no time - the higher income I'd make as a Stanford graduate would far outweigh the tuition premium I would be paying, and in addition at Stanford there was a greater potential to meet the kind of world-class geniuses, or get involved with the next up-and-coming projects or research or start-ups, and really hit it big, something that would be much harder at a place like Berkeley. (all the old adages about "it's not what you know, but who" and "seizing opportunities" applied here). When you get past the speculation and take a look at the actual numbers, however, the first argument doesn't really pan out - the difference in starting salaries is usually something less than 10% - let's say the difference between a Berkeley CS graduate and Stanford CS graduate was 70,000 vs 77,000, a 7,000 or 10% difference. A full six years at Berkeley (four years bachelor and two year's master) would end up costing around $150,000, assuming no major tuition changes, while a full six years at Stanford would have cost around $300,000. At even a $10,000 difference in salary, it'd take 15 years to make up that difference - a long ways off and even more to the point, not fast enough to help my parents repay the cost of my education, or help my siblings pay their way through theirs. The second argument I'll talk about in the next paragraph, but the chances of that are small, despite the few highly publicized cases; the actual average college graduate tends to make, well, somewhere around the median, which as I've just shown doesn't make a lot of financial sense, at least in my situation.

I'd like to caution everyone else on purely making this a financial decision, even though this is what I somewhat did. Regarding the cost, I turned my analysis into a purely cost-benefit rationale, and at the end Berkeley came out ahead in this regard (as almost any California public school will). But there are innumerable other factors that can't be quantified - the kind of social life you want, the kind of independence you want to gain, the geographical location you want to spend the next for years of your life, or even how much you value the actual education you get, rather than simply its ability to find you a job in the workforce. For myself, my own personality issues and sense of responsibility prevented me from ever being able to consider those aspects - college to me is first and foremost an educational institution, and while you make what auxiliary education and personal development and experience as you can, I don't think I could have ever asked my parents to spend more to allow me to indulge in those strictly 'luxury' aspects of college if the level of education itself couldn't justify it, and in any case I don't think it could have ever been fair if I were allowed to indulge myself with 50k a year at Stanford while my siblings were left to make do with whatever their more conservative UC or CSU educations could afford them.

Last of all, the reason for not-Stanford stemmed from a thought I knew was in the back of my mind the whole time, yet one which I never readily admitted to myself until after the decision had been all set and done. Throughout my consideration of Stanford, and a sort of accumulation of all the other pros and cons that came along, was my perception of raised expectations if I were to go to Stanford, and as a result a morbid fear that I would fail there. This is perhaps my most irrational of reasons, but one that I haven't ever been able to shake off, even now. Things were all fine and dandy when it was simply a personal decision. In a world of complete isolation, I didn't owe anything to anybody. I would be taking out a college loan myself, that I'd have to pay back. In the meantime I could stay and study as long as I wanted, and decide to study whatever I wanted, and not have to be responsible for anything except forcing myself to endure the various drawbacks of a life with a low-paying job. Unfortunately, I don't live in an isolated world, and as soon as the decisions process started I could start feeling expectations mount. I might be the first person from my school to go to a place like Stanford in a long time, and if you go to Stanford, that meant you were good. Real good. And if you're that good, you don't fail - people don't go to Stanford to flunk out. Or even to become mediocre. The people that go to
Stanford are brilliant and make changes to the world. Those were the expectations, anyway, or at least the expectations I perceived. At Berkeley I might go there and no one would expect any more out of me than the dozen other students that also went there, or the dozens more that would go there each successive years. But if I were going to Stanford, that meant I was something special - a cut above the group that went to Berkeley every year, and in that case I damn well better be brilliant. After all, why send the guy out to a hallowed institution like Stanford if he's just going to perform like everyone else who went to Berkeley, or LA, or San Diego, or Davis? The same rationale flowed into all my other considerations, although these were perhaps more well-grounded. What was the point of spending more than twice the tuition to send a student to a private school, if he was going to end up performing just like everyone else at a public school? What was the point of abandoning your friends to pursue glory at a place like Stanford, if you never achieved it? Even worse, what if I were to just completely flame out? Not only perform mediocrely, but to simply be a complete bust? It would have made me the greatest waste of hype, money, and abandoner of friends ever. For failure, it's one thing for it to happen when you're doing the same thing as everyone else - not everyone will turn out to be successful 100% of the time. But by going for Stanford, I would've made myself out to be in pursuit of some greater level of success, and in a situation like Stanford I would have been given every advantage to really become something great, and would have every expectation to do so.

Now, this line of thinking was completely irrational, and I knew it from the beginning. In my personal case, I think I have too many self-consciousness issues and too grand and pessimistic an imagination of the consequences of things. So I don't write about this particular reason out of possibly giving anyone insight, but for the sake of completeness and also to dissuade anyone who might on the offchance be thinking these same thoughts.

So at the end of April, these were the reasons that summed up my decision - my four dealmakers or dealbreakers. In truth, many or all of them turned out to be horrible reasons, and if I were to do it again, and do it right, I'd be doing a ton more research and have taken every opportunity I could to actually observe and experience classes and student life at the college - the two nights I spent at Stanford and the one day I spent at Berkeley provided more insight than any other information I had found, and if it were possible I think the best possible way to get a feel for a university is to spend an extended period of time there both in-class and with student social events. For those of you high school students, just about the best thing you can do is to sign up for those overnight host programs, or if you're close enough, look up classes and visit them youreelves.

Being far more personal and subjective than most of my other College Monster pieces, I'm sorry that I couldn't craft something more explanatory and insightful, but hopefully you'll all be able to gleam some useful tidbit of information through my experience.