Aiming to go to grad school; Cornell vs. Carnegie Mellon in CS?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Hello all!</p>

<p>I am aware that there is no shortage of threads asking for advice choosing between Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. However, I would like specifically to know of your guys' opinions on which school might be better at giving me a better ability to choose between grad schools for computer science if I eventually applied to them.</p>

<p>I'm willing to work hard to get there, so it's not really a question of which would be easier. I'm more concerned about burnout, opportunities from each, etc. They are both equally expensive, unfortunately.</p>

<p>Thanks for the help!</p>

2

<p>Cornell’s strong here, but Carnegie Mellon is pretty much unbeatable when it comes to computer science. (Well, unbeatable by anyone but Stanford & MIT). </p>

3

<p>So I have heard. Do you think the advantage would be so large as to be a deciding factor, though?</p>

4

<p>Do you have other, less expensive, choices?</p>

<p>Unless one of them has a significant drawback in its curriculum that the other does not (e.g. an overreliance on Java, which does not appear to be the case), the difference in “academic quality” is not likely to make a big difference.</p>

5

<p>Yes: UT Austin, UIUC, UCSB, and UCSD. My relatives and parents, though, who are going to pay for my education, seem to prefer I choose from the above two. Obviously their judgement isn’t infallible, but it’s not like I can really go that strongly against all of them.</p>

6

<p>Grad school will be affected by the extent that you can do research. So as long as you avail yourself of the opportunities to get involved it shouldn’t make any difference. If you can find out how the departments are run and how much prof contact and research is involved that will be key. Obviously students from both can and do go to grad school if that is their aim. I do not think which place you did your undergrad will be the deciding factor. Grades, research, the LOR from people you did research with, your personal statement and how good a fit your research interests are with the professors in the target grad schools, and finally GRE will be what is important.</p>

7

<p>You may want to go through the schools’ course catalogs and schedules to see which has a better selection of elective CS and non-CS courses that you may be interested in. Also consider the overall structure of the curriculum for the CS major in terms of CS and non-CS course requirements. Note that Cornell offers both an engineering-based and a non-engineering-based version of the CS major.</p>

<p>Of course, also consider the non-academic factors that matter to you.</p>

8

<p>Check out the new Bill and Melinda Gates Building at Cornell for CS.</p>

9

<p>CMU also has a Gates building. So do MIT, Stanford, UT Austin, and Cambridge (UK).
<a href=“William Gates Building - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gates_Building&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

10

<p>^ What’s your point?</p>

<p>By the way, the Cornell Comp Sci faculty edged out CMU in scholarly productivity:
<a href=“http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?primary=4&secondary=34&bycat=Go”>http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?primary=4&secondary=34&bycat=Go&lt;/a&gt;
They are virtually the same in CS.</p>

11

<p>Thanks for all the help!</p>

12

<p>Perhaps campus life can be your selection criteria. As far as academics concerned, both are excellent schools. Do you wish country or rock and roll, that is the question.</p>