Need advice from sa/g/es

Been lurking for a while, but need to finally get some advice from the boiz.

I'm a community college transfer, studying muh CS. Got 2 years left till bachelors and have essentially 2 options for unis to transfer to. And since I'm an international student in the USA everything is crazy expensive.
I can go to Berkeley but pay over $46k per year for the next 2 years, or I can go to SJSU, that's located right in the valley for $17k per year and I imagine networking opportunities and industry locality could be very beneficial too.
Would the difference in education be worth an almost $60k difference in price across the 2 years?

I'm not a normie fag, so don't really care about the prospects at some prestigious botnet inc after college. Just want to land some proper internships/starting positions so that I can stay in the USA on a work/whatever visa at a preferably some libre friendly-ish place like redhat or something.

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>going to the US to study at a community college

Best advice: go back where you came from.

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too late, already in the system. Would have to restart back home.

any bay area anons with advice?

go to Berkeley, it has a better reputation, you'll get a better paying job.

yeah, but that's an extra $60k.

I keep hearing that what really matters are your side projects and experience with working or real projects. This might be easier to get at San Jose State.

Part of the reason of going to a CC first was to save money, Berkeley is unreasonably expensive for out-of-state/international students. Really conflicted on this.
An important point could be that I'd have a higher average GPA after SJSU than Berkeley due to easier official workloads.

Just pick the cheapest option then. You won't have a problem finding a job in any case. Locality _probably_ won't matter much as companies seek universities out anyway. Paying back debt fucking sucks. Don't be stupid, choose the most responsible option. You're not in law school, you don't have to go to Harvard.

Just curious: where are you from and what type of Visa do you have? I'm guessing the chances:

50% from Commonwealth
30% curry
20% eurofag

slavic eurofag on F-1 visa.

>most responsible option
I keep coming back to the idea that the difference in education is not going to be worth the $60k. Post first job, it will be your talent, reputation, work ethic and past projects involvement that sells you, correct? These things are mostly independent of the educational institution, so why should I shell out even more into the educational industrial complex of this country? Living expensive of bay area are already insane enough.
But I still don't know if this is the right way to conceive of the issue. Don't want to regret it later once it's too late to change my mind.

bump to harvest more advice

I go to school at SJSU. Pretty easy, but im in the SE department, not CS. Its not a bad school at ll

Yeah that's why it's my option out of all the other State school. Nothing else really competes in value/price ratio.

I've done some summer classes at Berkeley in order to have a better application, which worked out and I got accepted. I know I can pull the material at their pace, but money is money and I can learn anywhere. I guess I should just commit to SJSU. It's the most rational decision considering everything, but something about passing the opportunity on a place like UC Berkeley, a place that people talk about with aspiration and glimmer in their eyes, gives me pause.
Ah I use debian on a thinkpad, why the fuck am I now trying to go with the more societally-approved/economically-beneficial option, even if it results in me paying off fat debts later on?

honestly bro, does the university really matter that much in a place like Silicone Valley? The only big difference I see it making was if it was some Ivy League School like Harvard, Yale or something like MIT. We just want to get a job thats all. But again its up to you, im sure the experience at Berkely would be better than SJSU.

>wasting money on undergrad shit at university
OP dun gud, nice selfie btw.

Also, confirmed for never attending college.

Lots of Berkeley people like to think that they're in the same league as Stanford and co.

It's only undergrad too. Maybe it would matter more with graduate programs, but I don't know if the whole "prestige" matters that much for undergrad. And as for the material, I'm sure that if I study at the same pace and intensity while at SJSU, I would learn about the same amount as Berkeley?
The big difference would be the fact that I wouldn't have to put as much time into the class work while at SJSU with me having more free time on the side. I got a bunch of ideas for projects to do in my own time and I want to do something as part of the open source community. This would be hard to balance with Berkeley's load.

As you said just trying to graduate and get a job at the moment so that I can start building my life up. I'm pretty good academically and am capable of putting out good work, the uni shouldn't matter this much, I guess I'm giving it more significance than needed.

Thanks for being my blog/journal today Jow Forums.

Last bump, just to see if there are more good thoughts on the subject.

Just get any degree you can and get out. Real world workplaces don't care (((whom))) you chose to hand your shekels for your paper. Get a portfolio of project though

>leaves free education for muttland hell
???????
you deserve what's coming for you

Yeah that thought has crossed my mind before. Too fucking late now though.

what were you thinking, for real
everything is shit in the US, politics are shit, entertainment is shit, culture is shit, education is shit, healthcare is shit
it might be a bearable place to work if you find something that pays a shitton ... but living there?
ya done fucked up son

From the other side, the grass is greener so to say, especially coming from mother Russia. It was largely a dream of my parents due to them having grown up always thinking that America is this great place.

I have lived here for a few years now, and while I have problems with the way the society works here, as you listed, I prefer it over anywhere else I have lived before. Especially the bay area. And it's not that I spend a lot of time with people in general, but people are less hung up over irrelevant stuffl. Russia is all about the most lowest common denominator pursuits: get your dick sucked, get money, get a mansion and cars, stereotypical shit like that. People don't care whom they must fuck over, in what way, and what they will do and achieve during their lifetime. People here let themselves dream and really grasp for things that are outside of the usual stream of consciousness. Granted most of these attempts get trampled and people degrade working monotonous jobs in order to simply survive in 2018, but there is a certain atmosphere around the people I meet as if there's always a certain hope hidden in the back of everyone's mind that something out of ordinary is very much possible, even though most people are eating a "shit sandwich".

In my experiences, Moscow is filled with cutthroat capitalists as its elite, the rest of the people are fucked economically, just trying to go month to month, but no one is really looking beyond the circumstances of their lives too much. I meet more people in the Bay Area that have their eyes open.

It might be that I hang around other students too much, or haven't seen how real workplaces work, but I believe my thoughts aren't unsubstantiated.

you had all of the rest of Europe, you had Nordic countries, you had Asia, you had fucking Africa
and you chose muttland
just think about that for a second

Don't have much to say other than that, in retrospect, I agree to an extent. But you might also be too critical of USA. This would be how I would have reacted if someone was talking about moving to Russia for pretty much any reason, but I would be an idiot to attempt to completely disqualify the greatness of a nation be it Russia or America. That would be ignorant of history and developments in the future.

How would you address that the computer & phone combo in your possession use technologies that came out of Bell Labs, New Jersey? Transistors, C, Unix just to name a very few things. So many other things came out of the heads of individuals that called and call this country their home.

Every country is a place of human beings with varied and complicated backgrounds, so it's good to have respect for people no matter where they came from, but especially when you consider such historically monumental countries as the USA. Generalizing across groups as large as nations is fucking braindead anyway.

let me just say, if you're living in the pyramid, you don't go out to the slave camp
should have been glad you got that shit without needing to get close to there, but now you fucked up

Community college, lol.
The difference is Berkley is a more respected state college.
Great, another pajeet taking a job from an american, fucking poo in the loos.

it would be nice if you read the other correspondences in this thread before passing your judgment. Nothing wrong with pajeets and neither am I one.

I'm not going to read every post then scroll up to reply, I have better things to do with my time.
He's an ex-commie from one of the world's most corrupt and moraly bankrupt countries, not much better.
Pajeets are smelly curry eating wont bathe compuslive lying lazy motherfuckers, i'd never hire or work with one.

I think you're a lost case. Hopefully you'll never hold anything close to a remotely relevant position of authoritative power.

Hello Slav user

California native here. Berkley CS has a prestige on a level equal to MIT. What is $60k in difference to a lifetime of prestige? That prestige may allow you to command higher wages over a life time that equates to a million or more dollars over the other degree. For $60k? Fuck it, go for it if you can handle it.

To be honest, when you get out people will be sucking you off to hire you because:

1. Chinese are spies that illegally send intellectual property of their employers to China
2. Indians are weird and smelly and generally just good enough.
3. Slavs, in the US anyways, garner a lot of respect in CS and tech (got a Polish America rocket scientist uncle myself...). A Slav Berkley graduate is like a fucking unicorn.

Don't be afraid of the debt. They can't take your degree away and if you don't want to live in the USA anymore you can just ignore it probably. lol

>California native here. Berkley CS has a prestige on a level equal to MIT.

No it doesn't.

3. Slavs, in the US anyways, garner a lot of respect in CS and tech (got a Polish America rocket scientist uncle myself...).

LOL, how many pollacks does it take to fire a rocket?

Thank you for the advice.

I personally don't care about prestige much at all, on a personal level. On a professional level it could be important as you mention in order to command higher wages over a life time, but do you really think, given that I as a human am somewhat immutable with an already given set of talents and capabilities for learning, would not be able to make a name for myself that goes beyond the university I did my undergraduate studies in? I thought that this didn't matter as much, especially outside of grad school and beyond, am I wrong?

Another aspect is that you assumed that I can just borrow money in the US. My parents have payed for most of the stuff, outside of the money I got from some jobs that I did as permitted per student visa status. So this extra $60k would be a further financial burden on my family whom are already struggling with the cost of the education and living expenses due to the state of the Russian economy. I suppose that I can get a loan back home maybe, but our family kind of has always lived within our means, outside of things like proper healthy lifestyle, education and some family activities, so we didn't really consider taking out loans at all.

Would having a Berkeley degree really change the outlook of my whole career or only the beginning of it? I'm ok with the thought that my first job will be just ok (I know Berkeley people that land serious gigs with Google, Facebook, Apple, etc right out of college), but I wouldn't want to jeopardize my future if I have this capability to go further thanks to my achievements so far.

Plus I also, really want to work for a company that is central around libre technologies. Out of big ones in the US that's RedHat and some other ones, but I don't really care as long as it's a libre stack. I know those are rare. Would the difference in degree really cause me to miss out on a lot of opportunities later down the line and not just fresh out of college?

Will be happy to hear from anyone else that might have had experience with Berkeley CS, and possibly SJSU.

Will you admit you're actually a butthurt burger already?

heh telling a Russian that they're American. Sure man, can I have my fucking green card already so I don't have to pay out of my ass for university, not be in fear of getting deported if I fail any one class or if Trump's administration continues to destroy the work visa program of this country or apply more sanctions, fucking Russia's economy more.

Sure user, I'm a burger.

Does anyone have any idea on how SJSU may stack up to CalPoly? Also seems like a solid state uni. Although it's $23k a year instead of $17k, that's still half the price of Berkeley.