My son was accepted into Deitrich. We hear so much about computer science, business, music, etc. at CMU, but little about social sciences. I was wondering if any current students can comment on the academics and opportunites (including internship placements) at Deitrich. Probable major would be behavioral economics or decision science + IR.
@psycholing , you may want to poke around the following, it shows job placement and internships:
@skeptialofmost Thanks – I had seen that – I think another kind poster sent in some old thread, and I forwarded it to my S. Do you happen to know about internships while in school (such as summer)? I had read that CMU has great paid internship placements for students, but I wasn’t sure if that really applies to the social sciences. If he went to CMU he would have to earn some decent money in summers to render it viable.
@SkepticalOfMost Just minutes too late to edit my posting above, I realized they do have info there on summer internships. My bad! Thanks.
@psycholing, did you look at the internship pages under Dietrich? It’s broken down by major, companies, locations and salary ranges. Example: http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries_and_destinations/intern-stats-2016/DC.%20SD%20Sciences.%20Internship%20One-Pager%20Final.pdf
My daughter’s experience has been very good - she’s in DC but in the IS program which is perhaps a bit of an anomaly in that it’s more ‘technical’ than some DC majors. Freshman year is the toughest, depending on major, but she had an internship at a CMU lab over the summer. She had volunteered in the lab during the spring.
After her sophomore year she interned w a major networking company in North Carolina. This summer she’ll be in Cupertino…
She speaks highly of the placement office for resumes, interview skills, etc. But the internships seem to come from the job fairs and networking and the kids have to hustle. They’re not handed to them. The job fairs are a ZOO, btw, so the kids have to be patient and persistent.
Profs often provide leads and kids also need to pay attention to the research lab opportunities - someone from HCI talked with a class freshman year and that piqued her interest which led to the volunteering, summer job and eventually acceptance into the program for a double major.
@SkepticalOfMost What is the IS program? Sorry I am not up to speed on CMU acronyms. I really wish admission decisions came out sooner so we would have more time to process all this before decision day. Arg!
Sorry, IS = Information Systems. And HCI is Human Computer Interaction.
@skepticidal Thanks. My son is visiting tomorrow. We will see what he thinks…
^^ As @SkepticalOfMost says, it’s important to note that IS is quite different than the rest of dietrich in terms of quite everything jobwise and relatively is a statistical outlier (though technically it’s also the largest major in dietrich … so the latter wouldn’t be a true statement)
@jwombat Would you happen to know more about social sciences – Decision Science, or International Relations?