UC Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley — founded in 1868 — is consistently ranked the world's #1 public university. Berkeley discovered sixteen chemical elements (berkelium and californium among them), launched the Free Speech Movement, and anchors the intellectual axis of the Bay Area alongside Stanford. Its 45,000+ students study across 180+ departments, with EECS, chemistry, economics, and English all ranked at or near the top globally; Berkeley faculty and alumni have earned 110+ Nobel Prizes. The Sky Deck accelerator, open-source software culture (BSD Unix, RISC-V, Apache Spark all born here), and proximity to Silicon Valley make it a founder factory — and Berkeley enrols one of the largest Indian and Indian-American student communities of any elite US campus.