Article by Kirsten Mickelwait in the College of Engineering news, (Sep. 30, 2020) copied below.
The article’s “hero image” is a photo of one of the BEST Lab’s MEng teams working on our tensegrity robot: Students joined by mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino display their Tensegrity soft robot at a Fung Institute capstone showcase.
Berkeley Engineering came in first in Grad School Hub’s 2020 list of best master’s degrees in engineering. The online publication used public data released from educational, commercial and government databases for the 2019–20 academic school year. Berkeley was followed by Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University and Cornell University in the top five.
Berkeley offers six different master’s programs in the engineering fields, including the Master of Engineering (MEng), Master of Business Administration/Master of Engineering (MBA/MEng), Master of Design (MDes), Master of Translational Medicine (MTM), Master of Molecular Science and Software Engineering (MEES) and Master of Development Engineering (MDE) programs.
Furthermore, according to Pitchbook’s 2020 university rankings, UC Berkeley ranked second worldwide and first as a public university among the undergraduate programs that produce entrepreneurs who later receive venture capital funding. Fifty schools were evaluated by the number of companies and founders produced by each university and the amount of total capital raised by their entrepreneurs. Nine of the top ten spots were held by U.S. schools.
The 2020 rankings were based on a new methodology that tracked founders of companies that received a first round of venture funding between Jan. 1, 2006, and Aug. 31, 2020. During this time period, Berkeley had 1,365 founders, 1,225 companies and $36.3 billion in capital.
These achievements come on the heels of the annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report, in which Berkeley Engineering’s undergraduate program moved from third to second place, tying it with Stanford University. Evaluated among more than 200 engineering schools, Berkeley had the highest-ranked public university program.
Caption for feature image: Students joined by mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino display their Tensegrity soft robot at a Fung Institute capstone showcase.