Carnegie Mellon Reputation

2331clk
Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:26:14 +0000

POPKING:

Thanks guys but I think i have been a little misunderstood. Im aware of all the rankings and I know that CMU places really well in them. What Im asking about is what people associate the name ‘Carnegie Mellon’ with you know; is it an 'oh my god! that friggin awesome" place or a “oh ive heard of it” kind of place…I hope you get my point…



My answer to this is it depends more on the person you’re talking to rather than the school itself.

We live about 6 hrs away from cmu by auto; my son graduated 3 yr ago so I’ve been answering ‘Carnegie Mellon’ for a long time. Some people haven’t heard of the place, I can tell by the blank stares. More have heard of it but don’t know it’s a high quality place. And probably an equal number know it’s a very good school. I’ve gotten ‘isn’t that ivy league?’ and ‘wow that’s a really prestigious school (exact word)’. But we’re in a kind of hick area of NJ, not the elite suburbs of NYC or Phila, so here if you say College of NJ, Rutgers, U of Delaware or god forbid Penn State, you’ll get people falling on the floor, they’re such amazing schools. Lots of the US is provincial, or regional like this. I can also say we’re about an hour from Phila and I can guarantee you plenty of people have no idea UPenn is a good school, and have never heard of Swarthmore or Haverford (less than 1 1/2 hrs away).

One of my son’s current co-workers, at the time a Princeton student, was asked by his interviewer why they should choose him over someone from MIT or Carnegie Mellon. This is anecdotal I know, and it was for a CS related position at their firm, but it does show the name CMU is out there in force where it matters.

Also, when you think how few people across the US and the rest of the world are actually accepted for engineering into Stanford or MIT, second best isn’t so bad. If these ‘rejects’ end up at CMU, Cornell, Berkeley, RPI, Harvey Mudd etc that isn’t too shabby in the grand scheme of things.