edit: did this legit... took some time, hope it helps people
Where did you go?
UCSC... Transferred out of UC Berkeley, hated it there, disliked half my profs because they were horrible educators, disliked the area, disliked my major. Transferring ended up saving me ~30K so I got out with only like $3k in loans and the bit remaining is now deferred until 2017 or something.
What did you major in?
Originally EE but when my programming class from UC Berkeley didn't transfer to UCSC because we spent a semester learning SCHEME instead of something useful I again felt fed up with my major. Switched to chemistry mostly because I liked it and was good at it.
So BS in Chemistry. I slid around at 3.5 for a while then took some upper divs I really liked, got more motivated and boosted to a 3.7 in the last year.
When did you graduate?
2010
What did you like about it?
People are chill
The area is fun. I grew up there. It's relatively quiet, beautiful. People are nice. Everyone is liberal. No excessively conservative/religious people.
What did you hate about it?
A few people have told me that they see it as a less serious "party" school. Some time ago they didn't have grades... lol, and some people think that's still the case. But the UC System is an ENORMOUS monstrosity of people and $$$ and the UC campuses are blowing up, UCSC is riding on a burgeoning biotech industry and is mostly focused on biotech: biochem/molecular biology/bioinformatics that stuff. The lab I worked in was in a very new building, Engineering II had just come up, and they just finished a new biology lab building recently.
So its kind of annoying. This little school is moving along at a good pace.
And I saw what happens to the level of teaching at the "good" schools like UC Berkeley. It takes a back seat to research. Which makes the experience kinda overpriced and shitty for undergrads.
What would you do differently?
I thought about this a lot and part of me thought that I could have stayed at Berkeley to major in chemistry instead... But then I think about living there again and I could never do that, Berkeley is a filthy city teaming with homeless people, bad smells and theft. Most of the people I know who went there compromised on their majors to get through the hard work.
So I would have gone straight to UCSC instead of spending a year at Berkeley at all. Woulda saved a ton more money doing this too. Wouldn't have to deal with transferring, which sucks because its hard to make friends. A lot of your friends are made first year in the dorms getting drunk and living the crazy freshman "college" life. I left a lot of friends in Berkeley.
What would you look for in a college if picking an undergrad school knowing what you know today?
It's simple really, "good" schools are often "better" because they spend more money on faculty and research, and the faculty are paid for their research. Teaching isn't a priority. At UC Berkeley, the physics professor god mad and snapped at the class saying that she didn't like teaching the class. And this was the engineering series Physics where class is tough and having a real teacher would be useful. She was literally a rocket scientist... so she didn't give a piss about a bunch of undergrads.
At a smaller school, UCSC, I saved a ton of money and got a very solid education in chemistry. And in general my teachers taught better and were nicer/more available. Was also easy for me to get into a good chemistry research lab and work on a project of some importance and get access to high-level equipment as an undergrad.
What do you do now? (why don't we have this question???)
Im working on a PhD in a Nanoengineering lab at UCSD. Here I can use my knowledge of chemistry to engineer inorganic/semiconductor nanomaterials for more specific purposes (the kind of applications that made me interesting in EE in the first place).
So I am very happy, we are paid what I think is a solid stipend at 27K a year, with which I can live in graduate housing in La Jolla quite comfortably, upgrade my computer, and still put a significant amount of every paycheck into the bank. San Diego is pretty much perfect in terms of weather too.
Just really seems like it's not necessary to shell out a fraction of a million dollars and go to a top-end research university where you'll have terrible profs and exams with ludicrous fail rates. It's not that hard to get into a good graduate school, in fact it's far, far easier than landing a good job. Sure compared to a job the pay is nothing for how much work you do. But you get to work on what YOU want, you get to make your own hours, you're given the resources and $$ power (re: good instruments and high tech stuff) of a strong university.
With the economy so bad I've been extremely encouraging of anyone who's an undergrad in the sciences to consider going to graduate school. You get paid to get a doctorate... it's a good deal. It's OK not to go to "THE" top school in the area, you can just get better grades and try to focus more on what kind of technology FASCINATES you, and then use your good grades to get into one of the "better" schools as a graduate student. As a graduate student, you WANT to be at all the top level research schools... I often feel like I'm riding on the coattails of the undergraduates' parents, paying for us graduate students to order new gizmos for the lab and beer socials.
So ya my bottom line... more hardcore research universities are good when you are a graduate student, not as good when you are an undergraduate.