[quote=joec]I think getting into UCSF and some of the other UC med programs are just as hard probably as some privates. That said, something that wasn’t mentioned is that if you were seeing a doctor, a lawyer, tech guy or anything in life, doesn’t it make sense to see someone who is probably the best or hardest working?
Usually, but not always, the guy who even got into Harvard or top programs are already people who can and have worked their asses off to get there. I’m sure you have some folks who are smart at SDSU, but I don’t think those people are anywhere near the caliber of the guy at some of these other places. The reason is because the person at the top private school, if he was top probably was recruited and given free tuition if they couldn’t afford it. Look at this high school guy who I know is smarter than me…Look at the end of the article where me would like to go to school: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/dec/10/eric-chen-siemens-flu-project-canyon-crest-academy/
Do you see a UC there? Will your own learning or research or think big go further working and studying next to this guy or the 3.6 gpa guy going to SDSU?
The reason Essbee posted about her med school experience was because if you wanted to go to a top program, you probably have to also go to a top school and do really well. Going to Cal State isn’t going to cut it I feel and think some folks here are being a bit short sighted when it comes to the money.
scaredy, I think you’re doing your kids a disservice by not at least considering the option as more of a positive if they even get in rather than forcing SDSU down their throats.
Again, please note that there is no guaranty that the ivy grad will do better, but, in general, they do make MORE money so the guy who posted that the cal state guy can make more or just as much is smoking crack:
UCB is 20th on this list. Other than the military ones (which are awesome deals if you can get in (also very hard to get in)), all the pay from graduation to 5 years out is higher on average for all the private schools: http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/full-list-of-schools
That said, you still have to get in…Is it worth it? Generally, you can
Again, my views are also based on my own experience and I felt UC degree is worth “less” than say a degree from Stanford/Harvard, etc…when looking for new jobs, business connections, etc…[/quote]
Based on my observation from engineering at my company, we don’t make a distinction between a good state school or a ivy league school. Maybe when you are a fresh out of school with 0 experience. But anyone with more than 10 years of experience, more importantly is their experience and whether they can pass get through our onsite interview, and even then it’s sort of random.
At one point we did try to recruit interns/0-2 year experienced people locally from both UCSD and SDSU. Here was our observation. The really good UCSD candidates we couldn’t get, because they were going to Google, Facebook, or Apple. For some reason, UCSD teaches a lot of their coursework in Java but folks have very little school experience with embedded O/S and fewer understand multi-threading and concurrency. The really sharp ones tend to stay in research and aren’t interest in most of the positions offered.
For SDSU, we exclusively interviewed master’s students. Even then, it was hard to find candidates that we felt knew enough for what we needed to be done. The few good candidates we hired were people who already had a solid work experience that was simply taking part time classes to get a masters degree, but otherwise had very solid backgrounds.
I think the candidates we ended up hiring were the ones that had self interest in teaching themselves beyond what their coursework taught them.
GPA never came into play. We also blew it on a few good candidates, simply because of the moronic administrative overhead of our hiring process.
