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Department or School Related
What are Berkeley's strengths as a graduate school?
This is one of the most important questions a new admit can ask when comparing grad schools. Hopefully other current grad students will chip in their thoughts as well, but I (as a CS student) think that our two strongest traits are our:
- Collaborative spirit
- The marjoity of berkeley faculty and students are people persons. this means it is incredibly easy to find advice, opinions, and critiques of your ideas and research.
- CS field interbreeding
- This follows naturally from our cooperative spirit. Our professors talk to each other a lot and so you end up with cross area projects. Lots of hybrid projects, e.g. os && db, db && networking, systems && theory, theory && security, systems && machine learning, etc...
How large is the (school's/department's) Graduate Student Body?
Berkeley's graduate student body as a whole is roughly 9,000 to 10,000 students(wikipedia), the dept as a whole (EE+CS) is ~500 grad students (1/2 cs, 1/2 ee).
What are the main research areas at Berkeley EECS?
See http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Areas/CS for a brief summary of the core research areas in Berkeley EECS.
Research and Classes
How many classes do you take per a semester?
The 12.0 credit hour minimum is misleading. Most students take between 0 and 2 classes each semester and the rest of the 12 credits is research credit. It's reasonably common to have to take a couple classes the year you graduate because you've put it off.
Some very talented students have taken 4-5 courses in a semester. These students often tend to be the students who list their past courses on their personal websites. DO NOT let yourself think that taking more than two courses is normal or expected, it is NOT.
Do first year students do research?
Yes, most graduate level courses are graded with a strong weighting on a course project, which you have to design (i.e. it is not a boiler plate project). You are expected to choose a project that will facilitate you in making progress on your research in addition to pure class-subject related coursework. This model allows us to continue to work on what interests us while learning the course material (e.g. for a machine learning course, I statistical goodness-of-fit tests to analyze application traces, a happy hybrid between machine learning (well, statistics actually) and my research which is systems based).
What do people generally do over summer? do they stay and do research, or go work at tech companies?
You get to choose really. Many first years do internships for their first (and possibly 2nd) summers, then settle down into working on their thesis for the rest of their summers. Just among my group of friends we will be hitting these companies this summer: facebook, yahoo, google, ibm, microsoft... and i'm sure there are many others. Internship opportunities abound. However, a good number of first years are planning on sticking around already their first summer to focus entirely on research here in berkeley.
What classes are good?
Really, pick your area, and there is a world renowned prof. that has a grad level class or seminar on that topic. If you are more mathematically minded, especially in statistics, Michael Jordan is a really well known machine learning professor who wrote a "the" ml textbook for the course i took last semester. Similarly, a grad level architecture course with Dave Patterson is pretty much amazing. I was into graphics and vision a bit during my undergrad so i hope to take a class with Jitendra Malik, who is at the top of his field for vision research. I've seen talks by Christos Papadimitriou, who is famous in theory. If you like developing regions stuff, Eric Brewer is teaching a cell-phone programming class this semester, which a couple of my friends are really enjoying. If you like programming languages a lot of my pl buds are taking a class by Dana Scott on lambda calculus this semester. His advisor was Church.
Visit Day
Do I need to be e-mailing professors about appointments for visit day?
No, you don't have to be e-mailing professors to set up appointments for visit day because there will be a web form (link to be sent) which you will use to sign up for meetings with profs (https://willow.coe.berkeley.edu/gradmits/gradvisit -- your person id and password should have been emailed to you, contact Audrey if that's missing). That said, I still suggest you review the research of the professors that interest you and e-mail those profs to introduce yourself and ask a question or two about their work or Berkeley.
When is CS Visit Day?
See the Visit Day page.
How do I get from the airport to campus (for visit day)?
What are we going to do on visit day?
See the Visit Day page. That said, visit day is used for an in-person introduction to the EECS department at Berkeley. This includes both the faculty, students, and the environment as a whole (weather, the buildings you might work/take classes in, the campus, the city...). We also get to have a lot of fun!
- CS: Official CS Visit day Agenda
- EE: Official EE visit day Agenda
Housing
Do most students live in Berkeley's graduate housing? and do you end up living close to your buddies?
From my experience, very few of us live in grad student housing. The stipend is more than enough to afford nice apartments. I live with other grad students (some cs, some non), and all of us live within walking distance of each others houses. Some of us have cars which we pile into for activities further away but most of the time we just hang out within a 1 or 2 mile vicinity of campus. Some of us are talking about housing together this next semester too.
Social Life
Is there an active graduate student community
There is so much to do around campus. I have made many great friends to hang out with. A bunch of us play volleyball every Friday, I'm on an intramural soccer team with another group, some of us are hopelessly addicted to halo3 and rock band on the xbox360, others are fans of the wii. We do rock climbing, camping trips, eating out both in berk and sf, and make trips into the city (sanfran) for an infinity of social activities (including the recent v-day flash mod pillow fight). I also play racquetball and basketball, and some weightlifting at the [RSF]. Several people go up to tahoe to ski like every weekend. Others head to Santa Cruz for surfing. There's a ton of hiking around here from the [East Bay Parks] to Marin County and Mt Diablo.There are endless options for socializing with fellow grad students on campus.
Post Grad School/Career
When berkeley students look for summer jobs and post-graduation opportunities, do they tend to gravitate towards positions in industry or in academia?
Berkeley produces record numbers of professors (at top schools). Undoubtedly, they'll brag about it at visit day, but the stat i remember is that we have produced more profs at top 10 schools than any other university (my undergrad advisor at wisconsin, remzi, did his phd here). So yeah, if you are interested in one day being a professor, Berkeley is great. However, even at the top professor generating school (here), the majority of phd grads go on to work in industry, both industrial research labs, and engineering positions (or a mix, e.g. google gobbles up a lot of top tier grad school phds) and startups. One of my roommates, who just finished his phd in databases here is part of a sweet web startup that was born out of a berkeley research project. Another one of my roommates is also part of a web startup that is run almost entirely by current berkeley grad students. Some non-zero number of berkeley phd students actually get sucked out of grad school into startups to become rich and famous (or so they hope). Even the professors, here and at the other top cs schools, mix it up by taking industry leaves to do their own startups. Lots of the systems profs around here do that, including two that i meet with for my research project weekly during the short time they spend on campus one day each week.
I know Stanford is known for having a very entrepreneurial graduate student culture; how does Berkeley compare in this regard?
We like to joke: Stanford starts companies, Berkeley starts industries. At the high level I think this is right, Stanford produces more startups and we produce more professors, but those can be misleading generalizations. The bottom line is that you have to figure out what you want. There is no doubt in my mind that I could join one of these startups out here tomorrow and be rolling in a 6 digit salary in under a year instead of pursuing my phd. If you are good enough to get into the top cs schools, and you are interested in startups or big tech giants ( of the ms/goog sort) then silicon valley is the place to be. But that's not why we're getting phds, is it :)
City of Berkeley
What is parking like in Berkeley?
The parking is fairly strictly controlled around the University. Residents can get permits for $30/year from City Hall to park within a few blocks of their house. The streets are otherwise a mix of 2 hour parking and metered parking. There are parking cops who drive around constantly writing tickets. I once got a ticket when I parked in front of Soda for 2 minutes on a Saturday at 9:30am.
Take a look at our Parking page for more info.
