And how was her Yale CS experience?
It has been excellent. Classes are actually quite challenging contrary to what is believed, and she was very heavily CS-focused in high school and a top academic, so I find it interesting that she finds it challenging.
Professor are accessible and supportive. No one has ever said “No” to a research opportunity, she has more opportunities that she can actually handle. Advanced classes are easily available if one wants it. Important thing to note however, is that while exploring her interests, she found a different calling - applying CS towards an entrepreneurial venture. So her interest is now not going in-depth into technical CS, but a different pathway. It has been possible because of the interesting people she meets at Yale. Not to say that CMU would not have the same, but this is her experience at Yale.
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I’ll say this though - if the objective is to find a high-paying job at a major tech company , then the internship and job recruiting at CMU might be much stronger. You could look at the data posted on their career websites for comparison.
Also, if the objective is to do further in-depth CS studies, then CMU is the way to go. I actually had a prof tell me that he looks very favorably on PhD applicants from CMU (even over Stanford) because he is certain that they have been through rigorous training before being given a degree.
To reiterate - if the interest in CS is very strong and not likely to change, then CMU. If the idea is explore and grow in college and see how things go - Yale.
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I am actually curious how many of the kids that are doing CS actually want to code long term :-).
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I’m not sure which I would choose or recommend to my own child in the same position. I don’t have enough in-depth understanding of CS to compare curricula or pedagogy, though I did work many years in tech, including at four start-ups founded by former CMU faculty or students. But as a Carnegie Mellon alum, I want to clarify that CMU isn’t one (or even two)-dimensional as is being depicted.
It’s this sentiment with which I take issue — not with @denalibear for stating it or for his/her daughter’s choice, just the sentiment in general:
While CMU’s CS, engineering, fine arts, and business programs have more accolades than its other programs, it is important to remember that those other programs exist and are robust.
Perhaps even more importantly to someone in CS who might want to explore other areas is the extent to which Carnegie Mellon encourages and expects interdisciplinary work. USNews ranks it the 3rd most innovative college in the country, likely in no small part to the extent to which computer science undergrads work closely with with the arts, philosophy, psychology, biology, economics, business, public policy, math, and other programs on a regular basis. It is expected that work and research will involve other disciplines, not something that is only facilitated when someone shows interest in areas outside of CS.
Looking at the CS undergrad majors alone shows some of the interdisciplinary focus: there is a BS in computer science & the arts, music & technology, computational biology, etc. CS students can double major or dual degree in business, physics, etc. The general ed requirements for CS require about 7 classes in the humanities and arts, and another 4 in science or engineering.
Also, CMU loves to support student research. It is generally ranked in the top 5 or 10 for best undergraduate research opportunities. I was a history major decades ago and was given funding for my research. CS majors have a plentitude of opportunities.
These points are not intended to say that these non-CS or CS-adjacent opportunities are not available at Yale. I’m guessing that they are, and some are better pursued there and some are better pursued at CMU. Yale will have a bigger name for the general public, and will carry more prestige among the uninitiated. In my work experience, though, most Ivy alums I knew had ended up at CMU or MIT or Stanford for graduate school before making a lot of impact in their careers. That statement may not hold true for Ivy CS majors in other sectors or other industries.
So…in my experience, Carnegie Mellon is innovative and collaborative. A CS major will explore other interests and be encouraged to find the interesting intersections of CS and those interests. Yale may be the better choice for the OP, but not because Carnegie Mellon will in any way inhibit him from exploring a variety of other subjects.
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These are all great points. I actually lived in the CMU area for several years, and can also attest to the innovative, collaborative and fabulous environment in general. The school is full of very interesting and open-minded people who are truly passionate about their areas and also interdisciplinary work.
Our assessment was that CS students at CMU are vigorously challenged by the very in-depth and challenging coursework. This may leave less time for other pursuits (in comparison to Yale). At Yale, one could explore careers like Law, Engineering, Humanities, Medicine etc while still keeping the CS option open.
DS at CMU(CS) tells me Jane Street, Hudson, etc. actively recruit CS talent there as do many banks.
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Agree 100%, and thank you for calling this out. I have no dog in a yale vs cmu choice, but I can confirm that cmu is not a one-dimensional environment. Pre-professional…yes; but across many, many areas and you will find your place with a variety of interdisciplinary kids. Mine was a CS major, music minor. Lots and lots like him across various areas.
This is what I meant:
From the CMU careers outcomes page:
CMU has great SWE placement into the quant industry.
and the one JS trading hire doesn’t show up if you select just the CS major as opposed to all majors.
Of course CS has one Jump QR hire:
There is also an IMC QT hire up the list.
It is possible CMU CS kids don’t want to go into QT and QR roles because they don’t want to atrophy their CS skills, which you would if you went into QT and QR roles, and want to keep their options open to move back into mainline tech and/or don’t want a volatile income stream that is normal in a QT/QR role.
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Sorry that I didn’t respond earlier, but I addressed my objection to the idea that a “renaissance person” wouldn’t thrive at CMU in my earlier post tonight. As @DC4k2a mentioned, his son was a CS/music double major. Kids pursuing multiple interests in that way is really part of the fabric at Carnegie Mellon. I would argue that a renaissance person would love CMU because for those opportunities and not for the lack of them.
I also disagree that CS is somehow the only or one of the only valued majors at CMU, or that CS kids never interact with non-CS majors. While there is pride in the university community for the CS program, as a student I never felt that there was any sort of preferential treatment and that other majors were lesser. I can’t think of a single department that seemed to be under-resourced, or where students felt that they weren’t given ample opportunities. There may be some — if anyone pops in and says their child didn’t get to do this or that as a non-CS major, I won’t argue. But it certainly wasn’t my experience and it hasn’t been the experience of the kids I know who have attended since. Like many schools, the business students had the nicest stuff in my day and with the influx of Tepper money they continue to have the nicest digs today…though the new Gates Center isn’t too shabby, either. Along the same lines, and along the lines of the interdisciplinary emphasis I made in my other post, CS kids WILL have friends with varied interests.
I will stop at those two comments. I really don’t know which school is a better fit for the OP, but I wanted to offer him a different perspective than what I was seeing presented in other posts.
Yale is a target school for investment banking hires, but generally not for quantitative trading and research hires, probably reflecting its relatively weaker offerings in STEM (in comparison to its peers). Since OP has stated her/his desire to have a career on the West Coast, one possible career path, if s/he chooses Yale, would be to go into investment banking and then work for a VC firm (or some other firm) using mostly her/his financial (rather than technical) skills in CA. The odds of success taking this path, though, is significantly longer than taking the CMU SCS route to a tech job on the West Coast.
Interestingly I think Yale places more kids into QT/QR roles than CMU does. That was the point I was trying to make above with the outcomes data for CMU. I have only anecdotal evidence about Yale – no university published data.
I’m not sure that’s the case. Quantitative trading and research positions used to heavily favor math or physics majors, but recently more CS majors are hired, because a) technologies play an increasingly important role in finance, and b) some of the best STEM students have chosen CS instead of math or physics. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that some CMU SCS graduates may choose a career in tech over one in finance (thus distorting the outcome data) even when they have both options.
Thanks, that’s fair.
My daughter was very interested in several of the cross-disciplinary “BXA” majors at CMU. She was even thinking about applying ED. We traveled to Pittsburgh for a two-day visit. In addition to the standard tour, we went on specific tours of several departments and spoke with students and faculty from several more. Everyone we talked to discouraged the BXA majors and several expressed that faculty weren’t supportive of, to paraphrase, diluting the primary major in this way. Granted, we spoke with a very small percentage of the overall student/faculty population and our “blind man and the elephant” impression may be an outlier, but my daughter was a bit disappointed. It also seemed as if everything came back to the corporate/pre-professional angle. When questions were posed in an “I would love to explore this area just because I find it fascinating” vein, the response always brought the conversation back to a corporate-world theme. When a parent in the info session asked about employment stats, the facilitator mentioned the relatively-small percentage of students not employed in their field 6 months out (about 10% as I recall) and as much as called them deadwood that shouldn’t reflect on the institution… and I found that distasteful. (Of course, all admissions presentations should be taken with a grain of salt; we attended an abominable one at Tufts, for example, and I still think it’s a wonderful school, just poorly represented in that instance.) I wouldn’t say we got a negative impression, just a “this is not for me” one. It was also an exciting and dynamic place and I had no trouble imagining many students thriving there and getting fantastic opportunities, when it’s a fit. It just felt a little jarring that the vibe was not what I’d expected from the (fairly extensive) research we’d done online. There was no other school where the in-person vibe felt like such a mismatch with my pre-visit impression.
I definitely didn’t mean to imply that CMU students don’t have diverse interests. It’s just that my impression of Yale runs more toward a “banquet of learning for its own sake” vibe (although certainly there’s no shortage of pre-professional ambitions there) whereas things at CMU felt more “means-to-an-end” (which is not objectively bad and obviously also not universal, but different). While most Yale students could probably have a good experience at CMU and vice versa, it didn’t strike me that the ones who find their perfect “happy place” at one would feel the same about the other.
There’s no bad choice here, and I didn’t mean to imply that there was.
Kind of like this thread with all of the talk about which school is better recruited for which kinds of jobs on Wall Street…
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While this discussion has focused largely on academics and career positioning - both important considerations - these schools offer pretty different experiences. Not that everyone wants Yale’s version of fun, but I would guess that a “mainstream” student would find it offered more distractions of the typical college type outside the classroom.
My CS inclined kid with a strong humanities side interest placed CMU #7 or #8 on his list for undergrad. I think fit is the right word that comes to mind for his concerns. Of course Yale was not on the list at all :-). Indeed when he was considering grad school in CS (not anymore), CMU was not in his top 4. Not sure why.
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FWIW, we had a rough visit at CMU too. Our engineering tour guide only talked about CS even though the majority of the students in our group didn’t intend to major in CS. We didn’t see any engineering facilities and my D’s take away was that the majority of the school’s resources were going into CS and not her major. She didn’t even apply.
I appreciate hearing first hand student accounts in this thread because it seems like the tours can be missing the boat.
Hopefully the boots on the ground answers will help OP in making a decision. Either way though, they will get a great education. Congrats to op on wonderful acceptances!
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Carnegie Mellon’s information sessions and tours were the worst we attended. The admissions office seems to be trying to present the most dire version of the school so that only the hardiest of students apply. It’s definitely not a flies to honey approach and I think they are doing the school a disservice, but they must like it it because the sessions i attended a few years apart were EXACTLY the same…and obviously outdated in parts.
Fit probably does matter more for CMU than for many other schools…but perhaps not as much as the admissions office makes you feel after a campus visit.
Neither of my kids went to CMU. The older one applied but chose a college that offers an experience that couldn’t be more different than my own. My younger one said from a very young age that she had no interest.
The OP has gotten a lot of insight into the job prospects for each school, and he has gotten some comments that put a finer point on what the culture of Carnegie Mellon is. I don’t think I can add anything more because of my limited knowledge of the specifics of the rest of the decision, but I wish you luck!
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A friend’s daughter considered CMU very seriously, but had better merit offers elsewhere, so she politely asked CMU to re-evaluate her merit offer. They could have just said no, but instead they came back with a worse offer! Seemed unnecessarily petty to me, lol - definitely not “flies to honey!”
Yale has scaled back their distinctive “shopping period” that really highlighted the “banquet of the mind” feel of the school, and a lot of students and alumni seemed to be unhappy about that. There’s still more ability to “try before you buy” in terms of classes than at any other school I know of, though.
I have known a few student who attended CMU, undergrad and grad, and had excellent experiences. Also, I personally like Pittsburgh better than New Haven, and the area around CMU is nice - fun shops and restaurants, Phipps Conservatory, etc.
Anyway, OP has an enviable decision to make!