Cool. Is that from an email or…?
email.
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Thanks!
This is indeed a good news. While the $800 is a bit high, this deadline postponement is nice.
Deleted.
We mostly enjoyed the Turning Tartan day yesterday.
We lucked out with spectacular weather. The clouds were clearing as we landed Saturday afternoon, then Sunday was completely clear. Mid 30s up to mid 50s by the late afternoon Sunday.
We enjoyed the Uber into Pittsburgh, especially coming out of the tunnel and ‘bang’ seeing the rivers, bridges, and of course the city itself. Kind of a wild transition through that tunnel. Then the ride through the city, including U Pitt, to our hotel…tons of people out and about. Very lively.
The short of it: Linguistics droid (admitted to Dietrich) has ruled it out. The Dietrich presentation was…not so impressive? Kind of disjointed. No student panel. Not a lot of especially helpful info. Also a VERY unpleasant, extended exchange about suicides and depression on campus, lead by a parent who was like a dog with a bone. Bigger problem was the response from the school reps - not very confidence inspiring.
Ultimately though the bigger issue tbh is that it felt like humanities, and to a lesser degree social sciences, in general are somewhat of an afterthought at CMU. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s how it felt to us. At least for linguistics and language study. We also felt that because in contrast…
…the school of engineering (CIT) presentation was great. Clear, helpful, specific info, lead by a dean of the school, followed by a student panel. Like they just had their collective act together in a way that Dietrich seemed not to. So for our ECE droid it’s very much still in play. He has some follow up questions to address with faculty in the next few days, both at CMU and his other main choice, before making a decision.
We did run into kids from our kids’ high school (tippy top BS) along with a couple other BS kids who recognized ours by a jacket ECE droid was wearing. So we got some great first-hand takes about the experience at CMU for kids coming from these sorts of BS. That was helpful.
Liked the ‘distinct campus in a city’ feel, though wish there was more ‘stuff’ immediately adjacent. The little stretch of Craig St was good, but other stuff definitely felt and was further off.
We’ll see from here. Hard to say no to CMU for their ECE program.
ETA: I asked a lot of students, as I try to do at every school we visit, about their least favorite aspect of the school. The winner by a mile was how the campus eateries are mostly closed on weekends. Some stay open of course. But not many. The silver lining is that it sort of forces kids to get off campus and eat downtown or in Oakland or the Shadyside or Squirrel Hill neighborhoods.
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I get your point but I always think of the kids on a tighter budget and how they may be limited in options. Cost of “living/social life” was definitely high on the list of things we considered.
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Being a life-time Pittsburgher your comments are spot on, ie the Humanities and suicide concerns. Both have been a long-time issues. I have CMU grad friends you can easily confirm both and they were happy to make it through, but it took a toll for sure.
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Yes it definitely cuts both ways. Sorry I did not call out that other side of it. FWIW, one place that was open, for lunch on Sunday at least, was Capital Grains (lol) which multiple students told us was the best food on campus. The long line seemed to confirm this!
Another cool feature, there’s an app, student developed of course, that tells you which on-campus eateries are open, and when. You’d think this is simple, but apparently it’s variable enough that it’s a challenge to keep straight. The app dynamically updates.
Still more fun - laundry machines are free (BYO detergent) and there’s an app that tells you which machines are available, and once in use the app alerts you to when the wash or dry cycles are complete 
No standing around or setting timers required.
Thanks for chiming in about this. The “good” news is that our kids have been grinding at their BS (4 hours HW/day is the norm) for four years. So they’re sorta used to it. Their schoolmates now at CMU more or less confirmed it as more of the same. Not that that’s a good thing.
We were there for Thursday’s Turning Tartan Day. I agree that Dietrich’s presentation was underwhelming. Luckily we didn’t have a parent who went off on a tangent.
Our takeaway was slightly different. Since S24 is not sure what he wants to do, it felt like Dietrich would provide flexibility on exploring while including emphasis on what companies are looking for - tech-focused.
Yeah that was truly unfortunate, for everyone in the room. Guessing the person’s child died 1000 figurative deaths in those minutes.
That’s fair. My linguistics droid is pretty clear about what they want so they were able to drill down on specifics (though, I’m of the camp that they’ll change their mind 1 - 100 times before the end).
I can totally understand that if you are certain about what you want to do especially in the humanity field, CMU might not be the best fit.
Although S24 had a better opinion of CMU after the visit, the bad weather and food options were negative for him. I think CMU is still at the top of his accepted list.
Funny enough my son really liked the vibe in the large atrium-like seating area just next to Capital Grains (and the food was actually good). Not sure if you checked it out but it’s upstairs from the lobby where you checked in for the Tartan day (it’s also the main entry lobby for Tepper). By 1pm it was full and I mean full of students. Like people had to look around for open seating, and there was quite a lot of seating!
Also, son’s other choice has more or less the same weather, so at least that’s mostly out as a consideration! He’s not overly moved by that regardless, unlike his sister! Anyway, still very much on his list.
Linguistics at CMU might be a good path if your Droid is interested in combining it with CS/AI classes to work on LLMs at big tech companies.
They’re not. Computational is their least favorite part of linguistics
@DroidsLookingFor Your thoughts were similar to ours in many ways. We were there for tartan day on 4/7. My D24 was accepted into school of engineering. We were underwhelmed in many ways and didn’t feel like we got a good sense of school. The campus was much better than we expected and grounds were small but beautiful. I liked that town was campus adjacent and walkable, but didn’t like that some first year campus housing was not actually on campus. Not sure how safe the streets are at night. I initially liked the ideas of the eateries, but my DD pointed out that not having a meals commons/cafe means harder to run into or meet up with other students…also not having a variety of food in one place means you may have to walk farther just to get something you want to eat which I hadn’t thought of.
We actually were not impressed with the engineering presentation. The dean was monotone and panel of students didn’t really provide information on how hard classes are, stress levels, amount of work, or types of classes in curriculum. We would have also expected some discussion on safety, housing, meal plans, course selection etc, and we only got this information by asking so many questions on our student tour - this was the best part of the day.
We had lunch in the atrium of the Tepper and ate the admit provided boxed lunches which were actually pretty good.
We were surprised how many students were from California, not just in CS and engineering but across the different schools. Seemed like there are prob good opportunities for jobs and internships based on cmu name in CA and certain areas of country.
My D24 was torn bc cmu is ranked high for engineering, but she also wants options if she decides engineering is not for her. Being full pay, admit day was determining whether cmu is worth the extra cost compared to our flagship public. Weighing all the pros and cons, we decided it wasn’t.
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Yup that’s understandable. A top notch flagship at in-state pricing is hard to pass up.
We’d gotten a lot of “straight from the students’ mouths” info about workload and other aspects of the experience from the other BS kids we met up with, and we did the morning tour before the panel and learned about housing, meal plans, etc then. So we weren’t really looking for any of that from the panel when the time came.
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If your daughter is uncertain about the Engineering pathway, don’t overspend on CMU. It would be safer to get BS from public, and continue MS somewhere else.
California is a major feeding state for CMU. They very actively advertise the college there. Also, the majority of CMU grads secure the first jobs on the West and East coasts.
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Curious, what did the students say about the engineering courseload?
About the same as the workload at their boarding school, which is to say about 4 hours of HW/day. There’s variability of course, but that also tracks pretty neatly with the “Unit” structure of the course load.
Rather than “credits” or “credit hours” as some schools use, CMU’s approach is to try to approximate the # of hours per week one can expect a course to require, both in class and out. It calls those Units.
A typical course load in a semester is 45 Units. So, 45 hours per week of in-class and out-of-class work, total. More or less a full time job. Back to the 4 hours of HW per day cited above, that’s about 28 hours per week. Add to that 16-18 hours of in-class time, and boom, there’s your 45 hours (Units) per week.
I’d note that one of the kids from our kids BS is taking 60 Units (!) this semester, yet is also very active in her sorority (she was building a house for the carnival while we were there) and gets 8 hours of sleep every night.
One thing about the BS our kids attend is that it very much gets them used to a heavy workload. Mostly they get to college and, depending on the school, find it somewhere between easy and just more of the same.
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