Take a look at the course sequences and make a side to side comparison. That may help. Look at the specialization tracks, that may help as well. Too bad you can’t visit. My S and I visited both several years ago. He preferred CMU (but it wasn’t winter).
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It is so sad you can’t visit the campuses. That made so much difference to my son. He liked that 6 houses were across the street from each other. For $5, he could join another House. He liked that the cost for each House, whether a single room or a double, cost the same. That wasn’t true at CMU. He liked the Honor system, and got quite involved with it. The president knew him well, because of his activity.
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CMU CS is better just because it has better silicon valley connections and more research opprotunities. People at Caltech SURF come to CMU to do research in robotics/software engineering
Congratulations.
+1 for CalTech.
My daughter will be starting at CMU (Engineering) in the fall. We were at the campus last weekend. I liked the campus a lot as it seemed well designed, efficiently laid out and had a number of student-friendly features (out door seating, well maintained bike racks and maintenance stations, convenient garages, sports field access and so on). It was visually interesting with plenty of (small) elevation changes. It is also nicely placed in the city with an adjacent park.
All of that said, unless you have a compelling reason to choose CMU over Caltech (which is perfectly reasonable, people choose CMU over Caltech all the time [and vice versa]) then I would head to Caltech because 1. I am a fan of nice weather and 2. I could start thinking up pranks to play on the good neighbors at Harvey Mudd (at CMU, I fear, one would have to introduce the concept of prank culture).
Good luck.
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There’re a lot more CS students graduated from CMU SCS than Caltech, so it isn’t surprising that there’re more of them working in the SV. However, research oppotunities are much more available to Caltech students (who are practically guaranteed to have such opportunities all their four years there, if they so choose). It’s also unsurprising that a few Caltech students may choose to do their Robotics research at CMU SCS since it’s clearly a top-notch program. For SWE though, I’m not sure that’d be the case. First of all, what kind of research can one do in SWE? I can’t think of much. If a student is interested in SWE, s/he would more likely do an internship, which is widely available to students of both schools. Caltech students are also less likely than CMU SCS students to be interested in the traditional SWE. They tend to be more interested in research (and research internships) and graduate schools.
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Oh by software engineering I meant the theory of it. Also when I mention research opportunities its with reference to CS/ECE research. Caltech is good for natural sciences research but has a small CS and ECE faculty
also in terms of research caltech is only better in natural sciences. In technology research CMU is waaay better
I’m not sure what you meant by research in the “theory” of SWE. Do you mean research on computability/complexity theories, or algorithms, or something else? There’re plenty of those opportunities at Caltech. Caltech students also tend to have acquired background for such research earlier than their CMU counterparts.
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Sources?
I mean programming languages theory which CMU is ranked no.1 higher than MIT. Also like it really doesnt matter whether you do research in high school or not. Not eveyone is privileged to do research at universities
And Caltech CS+EE department is like less than 35 professors. CMU CS+ECE+information systems=350
For technology research like CMU is way better than caltech
At Caltech, it’s not the EE department that’s the most associated with its CS department. The most associated department is its applied math department, followed by its engineering and applied science department. A student who’s interested in research can deal with professiors at any of these departments and other departments (including the physics department which has a quantum computing specialty). Because of Calteh’s size, its professors work more closely across all their departments.
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um ok but CMU has software systems, digital systems, human computer interaction, computational biology, artificial intelligence, stats and machine learning, nano technology specializations. And discrete math, logic and computation and programming languages and algorithms and complexity specialization
ok so
csrankings is based on total research papers published at CS conferences, not adjusted by the size of a school’s CS department, so it favors schools with a large CS department (such as CMU). It also doesn’t include papers published in journals or in other professional settings (such as in applied math conferences and journals).
ok so
like if were arguing physics or something caltech is waay better. CS, ECE and technology, CMU is better overall because higher reputation and higher research
The only thing on your list that Caltech doesn’t have is HCI (it also doesn’t have NLP, which isn’t on your list). If a student is interested in these specialities, s/he should choose CMU SCS.
im p sure caltech is way too theoretical to have stats and machine learning specialization
Of course, it does. You just haven’t done your research.
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