Current Upperclassman at Carnegie Mellon: ASK ME ANYTHING!

HSquared2
Fri, 24 Jul 2020 03:22:07 +0000

shredd:

I am interested in being a CS major, but my ECs don’t really reflect that; I’m very into entrepreneurship, music and sports. How important are major-related ECs into getting accepted to that kind of program?

Hi @shredd! The interesting thing about CMU SCS is that they actually do admit a few students without any CS background at all into our program. Although the majority of those admitted have at least one CS related EC, there are definitely students in SCS with no previous experience in CS (and then SCS helps you build that experience!). So, while it’s certainly helpful to have CS extracurriculars, it is absolutely by no means necessary.

In fact, I remember my freshman year, the assistant dean of SCS told us that the subject that is best able to predict how well a student will perform in CS is actually physics! That’s right, not APCS, not math, none of that. It’s physics.

I believe that a factor that students who succeed at CMU have are their problem solving and critical thinking skills. After all, CS is field tailored for solving problems. If you have top notch problem solving skills, then it doesn’t really matter what your ECs are - if you come to CMU SCS, you will get exposure to CS in and out of academia.

So, my advice for you is to not place as much emphasis on ** needing ** to have the major-related ECs. Go far and deep into whatever you’re passionate about. If you’re really curious about CS, dabble a bit in it and see if you like it. CS is a very broad field, after all: make a website, build a robot, learn about neural nets! There’s a wide variety of possibilities here. Then you can decide if this is really want you want to pursue in college (CMU SCS is very ** very ** rigorous, so you’re going to need to be genuinely interested and willing to work for it to thrive here).