Current Upperclassman at Carnegie Mellon: ASK ME ANYTHING!

HSquared2
Mon, 21 Dec 2020 22:44:39 +0000

Hi @Happytimes2001! My apologies for the late response - finished up the last of my finals so now I’m free for the next month and a half.

I do have friends majoring in CS and anything from psychology to business - as a CS major we are required to have a concentration, or a minor, or a double major so feel free to do whatever you want here (we’re encouraged to explore other things outside of CS). Same thing goes for robotics, since robotics is an additional double major/minor only, you can have a primary major in whatever you want! CMU is known as a top robotics school, and so companies do take notice and we do quite a few internships - Hebi Robotics for instance, was founded here and there’s a reason Uber ATG, Aurora, Argo AI, Google, and even Facebook, have offices so close to us in Pitt.

I chose CMU primarily for their level of education in CS and robotics - my two primary passions. We are at the very top in terms of ranking for CS as well as robotics; very few other universities are able to offer a PhD program in robotics, let alone an additional major for undergrads!

Our undergrad robotics program is incredibly rigorous and hands on right off the bat - Introduction to Robotics (course number 16-311) is a course that students start off with and is famous for not only the amount of coverage we do about robotics topics (from reinforcement learning to kinematics to odometry and controls, etc.) but also the pretty high workload (think 20-30 + hours a week, just for one class!). The reason students end up putting in so much work for this class is because it’s so hands on - you’re graded on a physical demonstration of your robot working in each of the labs, so if something goes wrong the day of your demo, it’s directly reflected in your grade. Thus, students spend hours testing, and retesting with their robot just to try to get some level of consistency.

I think that’s what’s so unique about CMU’s Robotics Institute, is that we know that the only way to truly learn robotics is for students to get their hands dirty and to do robotics. It’s the best part of our classes in my opinion and you learn so much just be experiencing it first hand.

You can’t really test out of robotics classes (I also highly suggest you don’t) and the intro level robo courses level the playing field - we introduce topics that even kids with strong robotics backgrounds haven’t seen before. Here’s more info on the robotics major/minor: Robotics Curriculum

Professors teach all of the robotics classes but TA’s are available to help during any lab periods. Sizes really depend on the course - around 40 students for 16-311.

All of them involve onsite learning because like I’ve said before- the best way to learn about robotics is to actually do it, so the classes are always full of demos and fun visuals. In the labs, the students are given more freedom to do what they want in order to complete the lab/ homework.

Hopefully this was helpful - let me know if you have other questions.