Engineering: Carnegie Mellon or Georgia Tech?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Heya, I've already posted this on the CMU forum but I'll probably get less biased responses here.</p>

<p>I have recently been accepted to both CMU (CIT, ECE) and GaTech (Electrical Engineering.)
I'm debating about where I should go. Here is what I'm considering:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Academics. Georgia Tech is more highly ranked in engineering than Carnegie, however Carnegie does have a higher SAT and GPA standards. I also hear that professors at Gatech can be so-so, as in "you have to choose your teachers carefully." How do classes and professors in CMU compare to Gatech? And also, what makes Gatech so highly ranked in engineering? I don't really understand how the ranking systems in the US work, but wouldn't the college with higher SAT and GPA standards be better ranked? And that's not all...</p></li>
<li><p>Recruitment - as in where would you get better jobs upon graduating. I hear that CMU has the better recruitment. I've read it in several places, is this true?</p></li>
<li><p>Status for graduates. Shallow, perhaps, but which school gives its students higher status in the respective industries they go into? Which school is more prestigious, and has the "better name" or whatever you would call it. It's sort of hard to explain but you get the idea.</p></li>
<li><p>Campus. I tend to lean towards CMU here, because it's smaller and I like that. I don't mind the cold weather, it'll be a nice change, and I also don't mind a moderate student life. As long as there are choices of things to do if I want to go out, that's ok with me. How are the dorms in the two universities? Which university has better resources? Where would I have the better 4-6 years of study?</p></li>
<li><p>I've always had a dream of coming out of college with a startup on the way. You know how Stanford is known for the type of stories where people there make Google-type-successful companies? Where does that happen more often, CMU or Gatech? I guess this also counts towards prestige, maybe...</p></li>
</ol>

<p>So to sum:
-I'm very confused about how the ranking works. Why is Gatech ranked higher than CMU, in what aspects is it better?
-Recruitment
-Professors, Classes, and Resources
-Campus, dorms?...</p>

<p>Right now, I'm leaving the cost of attendance out of the equation.</p>

<p>Thanks for all of you who will answer!
Have a great day!</p>

<p>EDIT:
and another thing - if I'm looking to go to places like Stanford for my masters, where would places like these look at more favourably? CMU or GaTech?</p>

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<p>I had similar issue with you on my decision between Georgia Tech and CMU but in my case, it is graduate school not undergraduate. </p>

<p>Georgia Tech and CMU are both great engineer schools. They are both in top ranking Electrical Engineer and Computer Engineer programs.</p>

<p>CMU is known for their Computer Science program. They have ranked number 1 once in graduate school ranking for computer science and because of its great computer science program, computer engineer program undoubtably got the benefit since hardware and software are undeniably linked together. </p>

<p>But in Electrical Engineer, Georgia Tech is ranked higher than CMU in college ranking. I don’t know what area you wanna go into in Electrical Engineer but you will have great academic challenges coming to tech. I did my undergraduate school at Georgia Tech and I have learned alot and been through some hardcore classes to graduate. Here’s quote to tell you how tough is Georgia Tech : “Look to your left and look to your right, one of will be gone by graduation.” Basically 1/3 of student will either drop out of engineer program to management or transfer out of school. </p>

<p>To simply put, here’s my decision if I am in your position. If you want to get into Computer Science or Computer Engineer, go to CMU. It has better reputation than Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech just recently got their computer science program up to 9th and CMU is in 4th.
If you want to go into Electrical Engineer, I say go to Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech ranking is not that significantly better but it wouldn’t be worth it to pay private school fee for program that rival one another that closely. </p>

<p>Here’s ranking for undergraduate engineer program:
electrical: #5 Georgia tech #9 CMU
[Undergraduate</a> Engineering Specialties: Electrical / Electronic / Communications - Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/spec-doct-electrical]Undergraduate”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/spec-doct-electrical)</p>

<p>Computer: #4 CMU #6 Georiga Tech
[Undergraduate</a> Engineering Specialties: Computer - Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/spec-doct-computer]Undergraduate”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/spec-doct-computer)</p>

<p>here’s ranking for graduate school:
[Best</a> Engineering Schools - Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools]Best”>http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools)</p>

<p>Good luck in your decision and for me, I decide to go Georgia Tech for Electrical Engineer master program.</p>

<p>And for Stanford Graduate school admission, either school will be consider highly as candidate. It’s all up to your GPA / GRE / research experience and recommendation from school.</p>

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<p>Thank you for your response! :slight_smile:
However, there’s another issue:</p>

<p>Firstly, I am not sure exactly how different Electrical Engineering is from Computer Engineering. How do career options vary with each option? Is CE more limiting than EE? I’ve been told that the main difference is analogue circuits (for EE) versus digital circuits (for CE.)</p>

<p>What more, CMU doesn’t offer a straight forward EE or CE major, but rather a ECE - Electrical and Computer Engineering, meaning they teach both.</p>

<p>So now it seems like a decision between EE or CE, or more specifically, EE or ECE.
Where could I get more information about the differences in the materials AND the career options that these two offer?</p>

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<p><a href=“you%20will%20likely%20to%20change%20want%20to%20change%20EE%20major%20when%20you%20face%20DSP%20class%20at%20sophomore”>quote</a>

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<p>yes, that class was hard. I was always afraid of taking emag. Many people took re-mag and three-mag.</p>

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<p>This is probably true at any engineering school. Some teachers want to teach and others want to research. Look at the grade distributions.</p>

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<p>CMU is private and can afford to be more selective. GT has in-state requirements to follow that ties into budgets etc. Looking at the list, computer engineering is the only field where CMU out ranks GT. Like gtgblows said, that’s probably due to the CS program. If you ever decide to double major or change majors, GT in some cases ranks much higher than CMU for some majors, slightly ahead in others, and in some cases CMU doesn’t even appear to either offer the major or rank high enough to make the list.</p>

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<p>yea, i saw someone posting that on the CMU board. That person failed. CmpE and EE are very similar. The difference isn’t analog vs digital circuits. Both majors study them in depth. At GT you could major in CmpE and satisfy all the EE requirements with electives (could virtually do the reverse too). The majors are virtually identical. CmpE is required something like an additional math class, CS class, and ECE requirements (see below). Also, some EE electives are required courses for CmpE. The difference really depends on what you want your focus to be. You should check out the CmpE/EE Depth & Breadth course to see what interests you the most. This is what will really distinguish the two major at GT.</p>

<p>See degree requirements:
<a href=“http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academics/undergrad/cmpe_require.html[/url]”>http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academics/undergrad/cmpe_require.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academics/undergrad/ee_require.html[/url]”>http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academics/undergrad/ee_require.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>These are required by CmpE but are electives for EE:</p>

<p>ECE 3035 – Mechanisms for Computing Systems </p>

<p>ECE 3055 – Computer Architecture and Operating Systems</p>

<p>ECE 3060 – VLSI and Advanced Digital Design</p>

<p>Anyway, they are both elite engineering schools. It doesn’t make a big difference where you go for EE. Both are nationally recognized and are well recruited. Both have great facilities and research opportunities. It should come down to cost and environment.</p>

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<p>GT has a higher GPA average and CMU has a higher SAT average. So I don’t follow.</p>

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<p>Computer Engineer is specialize field within Electrical Engineer. Here’s list of field in Electrical and Computer Engineer: </p>

<p>Bioengineering
Computer Engineer
digital signal processing
electrical energy (power)
Electromagnetic
Electronic Design & Application
Microsystem
Optics and photonics
System and Control
Telecommunication</p>

<p>You can think of Computer Engineer as specialize field within Electrical Engineer. In Georgia tech, you gotta take 3 more courses in core curriculum to get Computer Engineer degree. Those courses are are VHDL coding class (machine level coding), Computer Architecture, VLSI (very large scale integration). Also another thing different about Computer Engineer is that you can replace Electrical Engineer course with Computer Science courses. </p>

<p>I can’t tell you about EE and CompE in details since it’s your duty to find out what’s the difference between the two majors and decide what career path you want to take. But don’t decide between two majors sorely on job availability.</p>

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<p>Not at all. As mentioned before, small private schools are generally more selective because they can be. Some schools are less selective because they are large state schools that have room for lots of people. The rankings are based on the quality of education you receive (arguably), not the average ACT score of the matriculant. If it was based on the entry requirements, Harvard would outrank most of the top engineering schools, yet the fact remains that Harvard is only really an above average engineering program. More important to rankings is the faculty/student ratio, research expenditure per student, peer and industrial reputation and quality of professors along with various other subjective and objective measures of quality.</p>

<p>The most important thing to remember about rankings, though, is that they are not perfect. They are good at placing a school in generally the right area, but there is always some degree of subjectivity to the system. If two schools are ranked 5 and 20, it is a good bet that school 5 is better than school 20 based on the rankings, however, if two schools are ranked 5 and 6 in the rankings, there really is no guarantee that 5 is better than 6. The rankings are made up by people, and people are, as always, prone to error and/or bias.</p>

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<p>There is a prominent building on GT campus that’s named “Carnegie”</p>

<p>There is no building at CMU with the name “Georgia”</p>

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<p>What does Andrew Carnegie have to do with anything? If GT changed it’s name to the “The Gates Institute” it would be higher ranked?</p>

<p>Still, all this talk of GPA/SAT ignores the fact that GT had a higher freshman GPA than CMU last year, and the average GPA for Tech went way up this year (and the admission rate fell to 40-something percent, which rivals CMU).</p>

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<p>^May have more to with the expected budget cuts in education I think, pretty awful, since I know a lot of people who definitely deserve to get in didn’t get in, and vice-versa. Also, if you happen to know, why are these 4.2 students who took general calculus and physical science classes getting in over kids taking BC calc and physics c with 3.7’s and consecutive ISSEF (international science fair) placements + lab research? Are they cutting people based totally off their GPA and SAT or what?</p>

<p>Also, to stay on topic, CMU is a giant money vacuum… the place costs around 55 grand a year to attend. There’s absolutely no reason why you should take on a debt so high, especially with a great school like GT that would be much less. That should be one of your top priorities I think.</p>

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<p>GT has always had a low acceptance rate for international students. The posters in the GT forum with 2300 SAT + 3.9 UWGPA tend to be international. When the acceptance rate gets low enough (below 10%), the holistic approach makes analyzing GPA/SAT scores meaningless. No one is automatically admitted based on SAT + GPA.</p>

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<p>I am also international.</p>

<p>Interesting responses - I’m getting quite the opposite opinions elsewhere.
Not making it any easier to decide lol…</p>

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<p>My understanding of the way ECE works at CMU is this:
Freshman Year: All engineering students are required to take two Intro Engineering classes (choices: Chemical, Civil, ECE, Mechanical, Materials, Biomedical, and Public Policy).
Sophomore Year: All ECE students take roughly the same classes. I know one requirement is an “advanced” Intro CE and Intro EE.
Junior Year: You split up into your respective specializations.</p>

<p>Also, CMU isn’t necessarily a giant money sink. It cost less for me to go there than it did for my brother to go to one of our in-state publics (Pitt). I imagine the same thing could happen with GT.</p>

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<p>Oh noes, here comes the burdell man to spill propoganda about his school!</p>

<p>Ok, seriously though, while Georgia tech and CMU are both great for engineering, CMU is without a doubt better. Ignore the rankings, they’re just opinion polls, and everyone in the south votes for Gatech because its one of the souths relitivly few good engineering schools.</p>

<p>CMU has much higher quality of life: Pittsburgh is a nicer place to live than atlanta, less crime etc. Also the gender ration is 60% male, versus 70% male at tech, witch is much more balanced. The professors at CMU geniunly care about their students, whereas the professors at tech, like those at any big state school, dont really. Also, the undergrad research opertunities at CMU for ece are unparalleled, and Gatech doesnt really come close. Even though the research in some areas of ee may be better at gatech, the professors at CMU actually go out of their way to involve undergrads in the work. Also, starting salaries at CMU for ee are higher than those at Gtech; around 67k vs gtechs 60k, although this may be due to geography (georgia is much cheaper than pittsburgh). The students at CMU are also generaly smarter and more pleasant because CMU’s admissions requirements actually look at what you are like as a person (gtech, like most state schools, doesnt really) and has higher sat standards.</p>

<p>Also, CMU is definatly more prestegious than GAtech. GAtech carries a lot of perstiege in the south, but at all of the big technology centers up north (witch is most of them) carnegie is considered to be a peer to schools like stanford and MIT. CMU is also more well known to more different kinds of people because it has awesome programs in arts, buisness, humanitees, and engineering, not just engineering like GAtech, so more people will have heard of your school/looked at it when they were applying for college and been impressed with it, than those looking at gatech.</p>

<p>I’m saying this despite the fact that Im very likley going to gatech next year :P</p>

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<p>And I am saying, without ties to either school, that you are wrong, SpacePope. As far as engineering academics and prestige go, the schools are on par with one another. While I tend to agree that the quality of life has the potential to be better at CMU for all the factors you mentioned, I would also argue that that is a personal opinion and doesn’t apply the same to everyone else.</p>

<p>GT is like other big state schools where the undergraduate research is 100% doable, you just have to actually make the effort to go out and find some. At smaller schools, there are more research dollars spent per student and thus more openings per student. That, in theory, sounds nice, but in reality, it gets balanced by the fact that there are fewer students at the large state schools trying to get research positions. You honestly end up with about the same number of research opportunities per undergraduate that wants a research opportunity at places like CMU compared to GT as far as I can tell from visiting schools as a prospective undergrad a 5 or 6 years ago.</p>

<p>You can argue all you want about the higher admission standards, but in the end, they don’t mean as much as people would like to say they do. State schools will always have the “disadvantage” there because it is their duty to take a relatively large number of people due to their public status. However, at the prestigious state engineering schools (GT, UIUC, Purdue, UMich, UCB, UT, etc) you are going to have plenty of extremely high-caliber students and you will just have a little bit more, for lack of a better term, filler students outside of that same elite core. In fact, due to the size difference between the departments, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that GT or any of those schools has roughly the same number of high caliber applicants as CMU, only with that filler thrown on on top of it. The nice thing is, some of that “filler” is are actually quite intelligent and just didn’t apply themselves in high school but are quite capable when they start to in college. So now you will say that the filler itself is what constitutes the disadvantage. I would say it depends on how you look at it. To some, these filler student would be an annoyance: a group of people who they feel are inferior to them because their grades were or are lower. To others, these filler students offer an opportunity to work with a potentially wider array of backgrounds and personalities. The bottom line here, again, is that it is a personal preference.</p>

<p>Last, it really doesn’t matter how prestigious your school’s literature department or law department or med school is if you are an engineer. When you apply for your internship at Intel or your job at Lockheed or your fellowship at MIT Lincoln Labs or your faculty position at Stanford, they aren’t going to give a rat’s behind if your school graduates good lawyers or does a lot of meaningful work in music composition. They are going to care whether your school produces quality engineers and whether you have demonstrated the ability to succeed at a high level without any outside prodding. In other words, in the engineering world, CMU and GT are equal in prestige. That includes all the technology centers in New England and California and Texas and Chicago and every other corner of the country. The only exception would probably be in computer science, because we all know CMU has a phenomenal computer science school.</p>

<p>So that brings me back to my original point. It is personal preference. It all depends on what you are looking for.</p>

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<p><a href=“georgia%20is%20much%20cheaper%20than%20pittsburgh”>quote</a>

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<p>Not really true. Pittsburgh is one of the most inexpensive cities in the country. A cost of living calculator ( [Cost</a> of Living Comparison: compare Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Atlanta, Georgia](<a href=“Cost of Living Comparison Calculator”>Cost of Living Comparison Calculator) ) says Atlanta is 33% more expensive. The areas outside of Pittsburgh are also rather inexpensive, as I imagine are the areas outside of Atlanta.</p>

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<p>Geography might play a factor still, though, in the fact that Pittsburgh is closer to the extremely high priced areas of New England, so it wouldn’t be surprising if statistically, a higher percentage of grads worked in that geographic location. What would be most useful is if someone compiled a list of the average salary normalized for cost of living or listed schools’ salaries by region rather than overall, that way you could compare GT’s average salary in, say, NYC to CMU’s average salary in NYC. That would be a more fair comparison.</p>

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<p>Also, if I’m understanding some of these charts and tables correctly, these are all self-reported salaries. You can’t really make such big claims with data like that, you gotta have more concrete basis for your argument.</p>

<p>@G.P. Burdell: I was actually referring to some of the kids at my school. I know it’s impossible to say on a case-by-case basis for everyone, but some high caliber students had been rejected, including the couple BC calc, international science fair, 2000+ SAT 3.7’ers. This made no sense to me really, and even kids who had graduated last year were surprised to see so many people with great stats get rejected. It was especially surprising to see the students who had a 3.9 or 4.0 who did absolutely nothing, maybe take a joke AP class or two like psychology or world history, with 1700 SAT etc.</p>

<p>I guess I’m just ranting here, I just wanna know if this is actually part of something significant, possibly the school trying to look ahead a bit in response to the soon-to-be budget cuts, or something of the sort.</p>

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<p>Industry considers Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon equal.</p>

<p>I would choose the less expensive and save my money for grad school.</p>

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<p>Overall Engineering: GT #4, CMU #6. EE: GT #6, CMU #7. Without a doubt.</p>

<p>But then again, people should know better than listening to someone that starts a post with “Oh noes”.</p>