college student looking to move to CA (Los Angeles, Santa Monica: find a job, school)

[greatbasinguide]

Average starting wage for Cal Poly Computer Science graduates, $70,000

[5.0 Mustang]

not a bad number there

[Sassberto]

USC is nationally recognized, you can tell a person in NYC you went to USC and they will know it was a good school, not so much USCD or Cal Poly SLO

If you are good you can get a job out of college making 65k in software or IT easily... in SF, LA, or SD. Silicon Valley sucks to live but it is the big leagues!

[greatbasinguide]

Last time I checked, a few years ago, the #1 ranked college in CA for Computer Science; Stanford, #2, Chico.

[5.0 Mustang]

Thanks for all your opinions everyone. I'm pressuring myself to attend a prestigeous school because I am very worried about getting a job with a degree from less-known school. But, I also don't want to have over $150,000 of debt after 4 years. SLO sounds ideal but im worried about getting passed over by someone from a UC or other colleges.

[kettlepot]

Wow, there's a fair amount of not quite right information in some of these posts. First were the people who confused SDSU with UCSD. Second, UCSD is part of the UC system, and a quite prestigious part too. I believe UCSD is the second most competitive UC campus... after UC Berkeley of course. And the highly subjective school academic rankings have UCSD on approximately the same level as USC. Some have USC higher, and others have UCSD higher. So, saying USC far outclasses UCSD would be a mistake, except in Film Studies of course. It is true that UCSD and Cal Poly won't be as well known back east as USC, but that's just a function of their lack of a football team. As for Cal Poly, I'm not as knowledgeable, but it's name should carry weight in the science and engineering fields, not like MIT or CalTech though. Oh, and UCSD is located right on the coast. You cross the road, climb down the cliffs and you're at the beach. A bit on the foggy side sometimes. Personally, I'd save the $150k cost of attending USC, but since you'd pay out of state tuition for USCD and Cal Poly, maybe the cost difference isn't so great.

[Yodelady]

San Diego is a beautiful city, but very expensive.
L.A. is a hellhole. I lived there for 10 years. So many people, so much crime, pollution, smog, noise. Also, it's extremely expensive.
The weather in both places is perfect. You got that right. But to me that is the only good thing about L.A.
When you get outside of the actual city of L.A. the weather changes drastically - for the worst.

[5.0 Mustang]

What will $70k get me in soCal or bay area? I would really like to have a house eventually.

[montevista1]

ROFLMAO!!! Double that and then you can talk about buying a house.

[SandyCo]

Originally Posted by 5.0 Mustang

What will $70k get me in soCal or bay area? I would really like to have a house eventually.

$70K will get you a very small condo in a questionable area if you're in the heart of the city. However, if you build up equity here, you can eventually sell the condo and get a nice house elsewhere (Vegas, Phoenix, etc.). Also, keep in mind that $70K is the starting salary; in a few years if you perform well at your job, you might do much better.

Just to give you an idea of what prices are like around here, condos across the street from me in the San Fernando Valley start in the low $400s. That's common for a decent (not even great!) area.