Why UC Berkeley?

My internship at UC Berkeley is coming to an end. Next Friday, Evi will arrive and we will travel through California for two weeks by car.

However, I promised you in a previous post to explain in a little more detail what I have been doing here. Let’s skip that—I will write a paper about it and gladly share it with you if you insist—and address a more general and far more simple question: why UC Berkeley?

In fact, this picture says it all:

No, “NL” does not mean that the Dutch can park their cars here for free. Rather, it stands for “Nobel Laureate.” Indeed, so far, UC Berkeley has 20 faculty members and 24 alumni with a Nobel prize…

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a Nobel prize for engineering. But still, try to Google for instance “engineering university ranking,” or add “electrical” if you want to be more specific. On average—considering this, this, this and this site for instance—we could more or less agree on this being a realistic top-3 of engineering universities in the World:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Stanford University
3. University of California-Berkeley

where Stanford and Berkeley are often rated ex aequo.

Ouch, that’s quite enough for some serious boasting here! In fact, it turns out that I did not even contribute to all this: apparently, Berkeley was already in all those rankings before I arrived…

So let me just conclude that UC Berkeley has a very fine engineering department and some pretty bright minds hanging around. Cooperating with some of these researchers—first and foremost with professor Bahai—was a very enriching experience, and provided invaluable input for my PhD project. Moreover, it was a unique opportunity to discover the culture and dynamism of one of the World's foremost high-tech regions, where a close cooperation between academia and industry spurs innovation and creativity as nowhere else.

Would I do it again if they asked me to? Definitely…