A Dose of Realism, Please?

psycholing
Tue, 02 Jan 2018 04:11:38 +0000

CMU’s two highest prestige areas are CS and acting, but some of their other majors are extremely well respected in the field. I am (per my user name) a psycholinguist, and so was aware of their groundbreaking work in this area, as well as in cognitive science more generally. My son is majoring in ISP + plus their new program in behavioral economics — he has so far been very impressed with his professors in these areas. He is already doing (paid) research with one prof, and will start a second research project in the spring with another one. He says all the students are very focussed and passionate about their topic(s) of interest – CMU is for people who basically know what they want to do – not for those who are exploring or who are likely to change majors several times (like I did in UG – haha).

I mentioned CMU to you because they appear to prefer poly sci types who also have talent in math. My son was offered a nice merit scholarship – I suspect he was considered desirable because he had the combination of quantitative skills, + poly sci experience + languages.