Are you certain that you want to pursue a career in computer science? If yes, than go to CMU. It is the gold standard (tied for first with MIT), while Yale barely breaks the top 20. If you are not sure, and you may switch majors to another field other than engineering (CMU #7 / Yale #33), Business (CMU #5) or Design, then you might be better off going to Yale.
Don’t succumb to the siren’s call of the Ivies. While they are amazing schools, and generally strong in most fields, there are many other schools that rival or surpass them academically.
You are smart to consider the culture of the two schools. I jokingly refer to CMU as the Nerd Farm because the emphasis on empirical and technical (all humanities majors had to take programming classes when I was there) and the workload. It has a reputation for not being very student friendly, though my guess it is better today than in the past. CompSci is hard wherever you go, and CMU will be particularly demanding, but you will be studying with the best and brightest in the field.
Since the hiring of Prof. Po-Shen Loh, who has been the head coach of the USA IMO team since nearly 10 years ago, CMU has been active in luring IMO/USAMO medalists. These students are obviously more keen to participate in math competitions.
Thank you so much for your advice! I really appreciate it, I just have a few more follow-up questions regarding some points you mentioned:
Do you mean that the hiring of tech companies is mainly based on the ability of the individual as opposed to the name of their school? I’ve always thought that these companies filter applicants based on their school before the technical assessment. Also, do you think that the reason that CMU students tend to be stronger applicants is due to the competition within their school’s cs community? Or is it because they have a more challenging cs curriculum that allows them to perform better than those from other schools like Yale?
From your years of hiring experience, do you think it’s still likely for Yale graduate students to locate a tech job on the west coast? Or is there a geographical factor when these tech companies are hiring people that make them favor students who graduated from schools around the company’s location?
The demoralizing part is one of my concerns as well. This is a stupid question, but do the"average" CMU cs students eventually end up where they’re happy to be? I have a lot of enthusiasm for cs right now, and I’ve seen people losing that passion as learning becomes too intense and competitive at CMU. I do wish to thrive in college and occasionally feel and little pride in what I’m doing.
You also mentioned that one of your family members is a CMU grad, I was wondering if you could share their experience at the school because due to my location, I don’t think I’ll have a chance to travel to Pittsburg and visit the campus any time soon. It would be very helpful to my final school selection, thank you so much!
For jobs in CS, I see it as a close call. The Yale kid will be better rounded and will have better soft skills. Unless, as many have pointed to above, this profile doesn’t fit the student, and the student is looking purely for a hard skills education.
For jobs in finance, especially quant (not swe) I think Yale will have a clear edge.
Even empirically we see a lot of ivy people in senior management, including the founders.
I totally agree. IMO, it’s even close. In the tech world, Ivys are generally not a big deal. It’s very hard for non-tech people to understand this. Very rare to see anyone in high up management tech or otherwise with an Ivy degree. It’s not for lack of opportunity but the respected schools are MIT, Caltech, CMU etc.
Parent of a CMU CS ‘22 grad here, and just want to second this - CMU is intense, yes, but not cut-throat or hyper-competitive. Lots of great people with diverse interests, and a buzzy, energetic vibe.
He had a great experience and he and all his friends have great jobs, as you might expect. FWIW, the employers (he told me) assume any CMU grad can handle to work, so the interview process (for him at least) was about presenting and explaining the work, rather than just “technical assessment”.
Colleges may be targeted when recruiting new college graduates for various reasons depending on the employer. Being nearby is often an advantage (though it may be lessening due to remote interviews) due to convenience (no traveling to recruit, easy to bring candidates in for in-person interviews), and probably more so for small companies. College prestige has a variable level of influence depending on the employer and those making the initial screening decisions, though any such influence of prestige tends to be CS-specific when it comes to hiring for software jobs and the like (i.e. CMU > Yale in most such cases). Prior experience with recruiting and hiring from the school can matter – if the employer has not had good yield from the school (perhaps it cannot compete against Wall Street that recruits there), then it may no longer bother with the school. Size of the school (or the relevant major(s) at the school) can also matter in whether it is seen as worth the bother.
Large employers are likely to recruit widely, since they have greater recruiting resources and greater needs. For some reason, people here seem to think that Google recruits only from a small number of elite colleges, even though it is on the record of saying that it recruits from dozens or hundreds of colleges.
Yes. Unlike Wall St/finance firms (which tend to hire from a small set of schools), tech firms work differently. They do target certain top CS schools - and I’m willing to bet more visit CMU’s campus than Yale’s - but applicants are free to apply from anywhere. They will all go through a technical screen first, either online or over the phone. If they don’t pass that they’ll be out of the running. Even if they’re from a “target” school. So yes, individual ability is what matters. What schools like CMU give you is the academic and experiential foundation and opportunities. Then it’s up to you.
CMU attracts many of the strongest CS students in the country. So they are strong candidates to begin with. Plenty of freshmen have more programming experience than the average CS sophomore across the country. Add to that the course rigor, advanced classes, etc.
Absolutely! Nothing prevents you (if you’re a Yale grad with the right skills) from applying to and getting hired at a west coast firm. You will also find yourself working with grads from tons of other schools around the country.
Smaller firms and startups tend to hire locally or directly from schools they are familiar with as they don’t have the resources to cast a wide net. This gives a leg up to local SV schools, but most firms also post online so you can apply from anywhere but you need to seek out these jobs. Large employers like Google or Amazon, on the other hand, are much more school agnostic.
If an intense environment isn’t your thing, Yale might be more suitable. Not everyone at CMU is going to be like that, and certainly you’ll find fun loving students; but there is an overall intensity to the atmosphere.
He graduated about 6-7 years ago. Doesn’t regret having gone to CMU because of the education and career opportunities he got, but he does wish he had a different college experience - more like those of his friends that went elsewhere. Of course, it’s just one person’s opinion.
fwiw - we just hired a new grad from Yale CS … uber-bright guy … went to Yale because it was free to him (his mom works for Yale). We were in comp with a few tech firms (2 of them west coast), had to pay a ridiculous amount to freshly-baked BS.
Of course - this is totally anecdotal.
The way many employers look at it - school/gpa/coursework are a filter - an indicator of how smart/hard working you are. Will the grads use Theory of Computing, Turing Machines at work … likely no … Math/Stats - likely yes … There are so many things that newly hired kids will need to learn at work, kind of sets them all on even footing whether they went to CMU or Yale …
Schools teach you HOW TO LEARN …
So, IMO both schools are excellent and will teach OP how to learn … and having gone to Yale won’t deprive OP of the opportunities.
Just to clarify (and so as not to confuse OP) - this is at a financial firm and not a west coast tech firm, correct?
As I mentioned above Yale prestige carries weight at these firms in a way it simply doesn’t out west.
Although if they remember what they learned in that class, they may recognize which problems are computationally difficult before trying to write a program to solve them in reasonable time.
I think it depends on the role the candidate is hired into. For front office jobs (traders of quantitative products, desk quants, etc.), financial firms should be very competitive, at least in terms of compensation. For the traditional middle and back office jobs (design and implementation of trading systems, etc.), financial firms may not be competitive. Job candidates may prefer the perks and life styles that tech firms offer.
As AI use in code generation becomes more widespread, mere programming skills may not be sufficient. Knowing what problems can actually be solved computationally or solved efficiently can make a job candidate much more valuable to a firm.
Such an incestuous pool
Luckily some of these firms (including my large BB former employer) have started casting a wider net and are benefiting.
For fresh grads - yes, the salary and bonus are fixed. We try to entice the best candidates to join us by offering cool projects (for example, we are doing some exciting work with AI/ML and creating customized investment products built around digital assets).
For experienced candidates that have skills and experience that we have a high need for, we do juice up the offer if we need to. But it’s always for skills, not for where they went to school.
My son told me that the name-brand private schools were over-represented / punched above their weight the summer he was at AWS. Representation above their perceived CS reputation. This hiring is being done starting with an OA – so there is no incestuous pooling happening :-).
For a school like Yale, where they have many campus constituencies to satisfy, such as the english department, the classics department, the music department, the history department, the theater department etc, they have so few slots open for STEM kids, and fewer still for vocational STEM such as CS. So whatever CS kids they take, grudgingly, are likely to be on the non-vocational side, and a good big stronger than the raw reputation of the department would suggest.
I also think a school like Yale (and more so when it comes to Harvard, Princeton, Cornell) is closer to CMU in spirit, in the way CS pedagogy works, than schools like GT or Purdue. More theoretically grounded. Which might actually work for large employers like FAANG. Of course my friends who are startup founders and VCs really want the UCSB and SJSU kids. They are very clear on what their needs are. Raw code output rather than slower more thoughtful additions to a mature code base.
I recognize this is an off-topic sidebar, but AWS is not part of a financial firm (and I was referring to the traditional hiring practices of the latter type of firms).
That helps a lot in the research areas of these firms. Unfortunately, the majority of jobs are on the regular bread-and-butter side that bring in the bulk of revenue. And for these, like you said, programming prowess is highly valued. Clean, efficient, maintainable code is the mantra there.
All things considered, for this OP, I think Yale might be the better choice given that he’s not sure he’d be comfortable with a very competitive environment where he might not be in the top 10-20%.
My oldest faced this exact choice - she picked Yale. The advice given to us was “If you want to do CS and only CS then pick CMU. If you are interested in a variety of subjects and want to explore alongside CS, then pick Yale.” She is super happy about her decision, no regrets at all. Yale’s broad base of opportunities has allowed her to find her true interests and most importantly, interact with a very wide variety of interesting people.
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