How cutthroat is the engineering competition at ucla and ucsd compared to uc davis and cal poly slo?
Question by SkyO: How cutthroat is the engineering competition at ucla and ucsd compared to uc davis and cal poly slo?
In undergraduate engineering what is the competition like? Are they overall the same or is ucla full of uber geniuses compared to slo? How hard are the professors on grading? etc etc
Any comments, opinions, and anecdotes are helpful
and if it helps, I’m not one of the brightest students in high school
weighted gpa 4.19 (right under ucla avg for all freshmen)
AP US 5, AP World 5, AP English 3
sats 1990
act 31
math 2 800
us history 750
and I know most freshmen engineers have stats better than mine
So what is the competition like at these schools relative to each other? Is ucla and ucsd so hard in engineering that I would not have a college life cuz of the workload?
ok yeah that answer had good details t now im scared cuz if it turns out I don’t love engineering I’ll probably end up in medical school which i need a good gpa for
more opinions comments and experiences plz
Best answer:
Answer by Alec
I dont know about cutthroat competition, but i think UCSD would be an excellent choice. yes it is pretty competative but i think u have the scores for it. san diego has a very scientific and techy field market, anything from software developement, to nuclear physics, to building tracer bombs. it provides for great opportunity career-wise after u obtain your degree, its a very well established school. my dad works in computer science and looks at UCSD for interns and grad students all the time (in fact his offices are right across the street, lol)
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
I’m a current student at Cal Poly and I believe Cal Poly has the most cutthroat program out of any of the schools. I’ve known engineers at all the other schools and its ridiculous how fast they get out of the curriculum. UC’s are in the business of graduating as many students as possible… hence the max units you can take before they kick you out.
An example of what a normal EE class is like at cal poly… No partial credit for hw or quiz’s and an actual bell curve for exams. Cal Poly has a significantly higher failure rate then those at the UC’s. On average less then half of the people that start off will graduate. Haha my friends and I always laugh about how skewed the UC’s GPA’s are. At Cal Poly getting an average score gets you a C not a B- or B like other schools (Even with upper-division course work). Most employers recognize that and adjust accordingly. I have a 2.5 GPA and last summer I was offered an internship at several companies (Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Pacific Scientific Energetic Materials, Rockwell Automation…)
If you plan on working in industry Cal Poly is comparable to graduating from Stanford or Berkeley. The students that enter in may not be as bright as the students from UCLA but they get a lot more out of the curriculum. An example of a situation that happened to a friend of mine that tried to get an internship at St. Jude Medical. It was a Cal Poly student going up against my friend that goes to UCLA. Both had similar GPA’s and were Juniors. When the interview came around and they started asking technical questions about the instrumentation … my friend from UCLA wasn’t as familiar with the configurations or calibration settings or the various oscilloscopes, function generators, or spectrum analyzers.
Final comment about the largest difference in education between the UC’s and Cal Poly. The largest class size I’ve had in any course at Cal Poly was around 70 (not 400). Most classes and labs the professor will memorize everyone’s name by the end of the quarter. There are zero TA’s that teach or are in the classroom during your undergrad curriculum. You get to know your professors very well and most better from that experience.
Ohh and the majority of the top students that I met at Cal Poly in Engineering were accepted to Berkeley and UCLA. The majority of them just couldn’t afford the significant cost difference for the UC’s. So there’s plenty of intelligent students.
Sorry it’s so long…