<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I've been accepted to these three schools, and I'm having a tough time making the decision. I'm pretty sure I want to major in math, so I would say math academics at the school is my primary consideration.</p>
<p>Could anyone tell me about the math program at CMU?
How well is it at getting students into good graduate programs/ good job positions?
Where do the math grads end up?</p>
<p>I basically want to know how the math department at CMU compares to these other schools.</p>
<p>Thanks for any help</p>
<p>You might want to post this on the parents board. There are lots of folks there who have specific knowledge about various schools and they might be able to make the comparison for you or at least provide insight into one of the schools.</p>
<p>USN <em>graduate</em> ranking:
Carnegie Mellon: 33th
Washington: 40th
Northwestern: 18th</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone can tell you how the undergrad programs compare</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/career/employ/salary/math.pdf[/url]”>http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/career/employ/salary/math.pdf</a></p>
<p>There’s a link to how math students at CMU do upon graduating. Keep in mind a number of them are probably CS (or some other field) doing a double major.</p>
<p>Thanks for your help.</p>
<p>I also became interested by CMU’s concentration in Operations Research. Can anyone comment on Operations Research (OR) at the three schools? I don’t see OR at Northwestern, but it does have a top Industrial Engineering (IE) program, which seems to be closely related. Does anyone know the difference between OR and IE?</p>
<p>If I ultimately go to grad schools for OR, would it make sense to go to Northwestern for the major in math and then take courses related to OR? Or if Industrial Engineering is very similar, should I attend Northwestern (college of arts and sciences) and then try to transfer into the engineering college for IE? Would I have a good chance of switching schools like that?</p>
<p>Thanks for any help.</p>
<p>Stanford’s managemnt sciences and engineering department used to be called IEOR. The shift is probably due to the diminishing role of manufacturing/merchandizing companies. MS, OR, and IE are used interchangeably for many people while for other people/schools, there’s a slight difference in emphasis (with MS being more about business management). Look at the curriculum and the required core/concentration electives and compare.</p>
<p>You can easily switch to engineering school from WCAS. There’s also a 4-yr dual-major already set up between econ and IEMS at Northwestern. You can also easily double-major in math and IEMS though it may take some extra effort to finish in 4 years.</p>
<p>I believe CMU’s Operations Research is ranked # 1 in the US.</p>
<p>It doesn’t even have a department, how can it be #1?</p>
<p>I think you confused it with “production and operations management” track which USN says it’s #3. But any “business track/concentration” at the undergrad level is so superficial that it doesn’t really mean anything. Not to mention the fact that it’s not the same as operation research which is usually under the engineering school and engineering school ranking, in which CMU is not listed.</p>
<p>I think OR is considerably more math-oriented than IE is. So you could probably do any sort of engineering degree in undergrad while taking extra applied math classes and get into a good graduate OR program.</p>
<p>OP,
Here’s the curriculum of IEMS at Northwestern:
[Northwestern</a> University - Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering](<a href=“http://www.iems.northwestern.edu/programs/undergraduate/curriculum.html#bsie]Northwestern”>http://www.iems.northwestern.edu/programs/undergraduate/curriculum.html#bsie)
The graduate ranking is ranked #5.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know about undergraduate programs, but I believe you must be familiar with the Faculty Scholarly Productivity (FSP) Index from Academic Analytics. Basically, it is a metric that ranks ** individual graduate programs ** in different universities according to objective criteria such as number of publications and citations per faculty. </p>
<p>CMU’s PhD program in [Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization](<a href=“http://aco.math.cmu.edu/intro.html”>http://aco.math.cmu.edu/intro.html</a>), jointly offered by the Tepper School, SCS, and the Math Department (MCS), is ranked # 2 in the country under the category “Operations Research” according to the [FSP](<a href=“http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopPrograms.aspx#5”>http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopPrograms.aspx#5</a>) ranking. The same program is ranked # 5 under the category “Applied Mathematics”.</p>