Hello all! After a lot of hard work, perseverance, and waiting you have finally received your decision!
I want this thread to serve as a place where you guys can ask questions from me, of each other, and talk to one another.
In terms of academic questions, I obviously will know answers pertaining to SCS far better, but I can do my best for questions about other departments as well. In terms of campus life feel free to ask any and all questions you can think of and hopefully I have the answer.
Furthermore, I would like to plug the April Turn Tartan Overnight and Celebration of Diversity visit, as they greatly helped me in choosing CMU. Getting a feel for the campus, and seeing if it is the right place for you socially as well as academically is imperative, and that is why I highly recommend attending these visits. Furthermore, you can start making friends with (read networking with) people who have also been admitted and could be a freshman alongside you next year. I have hosted for these weekends in the past and will probably also be hosting for the upcoming one as well.
Once again, if you have any questions, go ahead and post them.
NOTE This is not a results thread, someone will probably make one tho.
I know it’s not a part of SCS but what are your impressions of the Statistics & Machine Learning program? I really want to do a stats major while taking a few CS classes on the side to get into Data Science after undergrad. I’m currently deciding between Berkeley and CMU so I’d like some advice if possible. Thank you!
whats the overall social scene like? are people friendly and is it easy to make friends? i’m waitlisted for dietrich so more speaking about that department but curious about the school as a whole also.
@acollegehopeful3 My son is in Dietrich. He was concerned about social awkwardness in other students when he was initially accepted, but has found that not to be a problem in Dietrich. He engages in lots of social events, but they may be considered kind of nerdy – e.g. went to CMU Tedx last weekend, and is involved in music/theatre. I wrote some messages last year at this time asking opinions on social opportunities at CMU, and no one responded, so I thought I would respond to you. If you want answers from actual CMU students, you are much better off posting to reddit cmu than CC.
@psycholing thank you so much! i am kind of nerdy too so im not very worried about that but i definitely wanna be able to make friends.
@skyisthelimit123 one of my friends is in the Stat/ML program here, and he finds it pretty free/open. He isn’t too bogged down by gen eds so hes free to take whatever stats and ML classes, as well as CS classes interest him. I think the power comes from having the ability to take classes from SCS and the ML department which are highly prestigious, and it doesn’t weigh you down and let’s you follow what you’re interested in.
@ACollegeHopeful3 I agree with what has been said. If you want to make friends, you’ll definitely find plenty of people who want to be your friend. And you can find nerdy friends (plenty here) or more relaxed friends, I honestly pretty much up to you. Obviously everyone here cares about their work, but a lot of the time when my friends want to hang out they like to relax and get away from the more “nerdy” stuff for a bit, or they might want to go to an interesting talk that’s being given.
Regardless, if you want to have a social life you definitely can (speaking as a freshman at least)
@ACollegeHopeful3 I agree with what has been said. If you want to make friends, you’ll definitely find plenty of people who want to be your friend. And you can find nerdy friends (plenty here) or more relaxed friends, I honestly pretty much up to you. Obviously everyone here cares about their work, but a lot of the time when my friends want to hang out they like to relax and get away from the more “nerdy” stuff for a bit, or they might want to go to an interesting talk that’s being given.
Regardless, if you want to have a social life you definitely can (speaking as a freshman at least)
My son got into CMU Mellon College of Science to pursue premed. can anyone tell how CMU prepare them for med schools?
Due to grade deflation, Getting into medical school from CMU is very difficult. Plus, the cost of CMU makes it difficult for most of their students to afford medical school, without taking massive, massive loans.
@overtheline Just curious – how have you been able to find the average GPA (or as they call it, QPA) at CMU? I haven’t been able to find that statistic anyway. I know there have been comments about grade deflation at SCS, but are we certain that carries over to other schools? My son is a non-scs freshman at CMU now and he is not finding it impossible to obtain a high QPA, even while taking an overload of classes. Also, there seemed to be a lot of people on the Dean’s list…
I can’t attend the April Turn Tartan Overnight and Celebration of Diversity event, is there any comparable way to get a feel for the vibe of the school?
You can set up your own visit – my son did that last year. They let him sit in on classes, his department matched him up with a student to give him a tour, and he met with some of the profs.
@azoldtech I looked at the Dean’s list for Mellon College and there are 133 undeclared Freshman on it, indicating that a little under half the class have a GPA over 3.5. (Class size this year was 281). The grades don’t seem so deflated to me.
Who else got their flag today?
CMU is one of my top choice, I am concern about FA. Are they consistent with their financial aid every year? Or does it decline in your later years? If you get 50k on freshman year, do you usually get the same amount the following years provided your financial situation doesn’t change?
@Overtheline How bad is the grade deflation? When I went to one of the admitted students days this year (I was admitted into MCS for chemistry on the premed track, class of 2022), the premed advisor said that many students have attended top-ranked medical schools like Pitt’s medical school and Hopkins after graduating from CMU.