The summer beckons, another college academic year is behind us, and so we thought it fun to look at some social media insights around Bay Area university students. Here thanks to the wonders of social media data and Optimal’s number crunching capabilities, we once and for all can answer that age-old question – how are Cal Berkeley students different from Stanford students? These tidbits may surprise you…

BTW If you are a recently graduated Stanford or Cal student, we’d love you to apply to work at Optimal (we have several alums from both schools!)

The way to read the data is, for Stanford vs. Berkeley Students, a top TV show/movie/book category value “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” of 7.66x means that a Stanford student is 7.66 times more likely to like Diary of a Wimpy Kid than is a Berkeley student. In the second set of data it is reversed, namely a Cal student is 2.60 times more likely to like 500 Days of Summer than is a Stanford student.

And now for the viewpoint for Cal students compared to Stanford…

The tea vs donuts thing was a bit surprising to us, but really Cal, what’s up with that bubble wrap thing? Something you want to tell us?