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I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here. My son picked Carnegie Mellon over Harvard because he’s a computer science nerd and has been 100% sure of his career since he was in elementary school. At Carnegie Mellon he hung with friends in the Linux cluster, shared a house with kids who had Magic cards and Games Workshop figurines scattered over the dining room table, and had cables running all over the house so everyone had ideal conditions for their computers. He was not the sort of kid who was actually going to enjoy talking about the latest play that some student had produced, the latest lecture in Ec 10, or taking one more general education courses outside his areas of interest (math, comp sci, physics) than necessary. (The only thing CMU made him take was a general writing course, a technical writing course and one semester of world history.) He enjoyed his accepted students weekend at Harvard, and found that there was a critical mass of kids who also read sci fi and played board and video games, but ultimately having close to 500 students in the major (plus all those engineers and science majors!) was more attractive to him. If his choice had been one of his safety colleges vs. Harvard I’m pretty sure he’d have chosen Harvard based on prestige alone, but while it was a difficult decision to turn down Harvard, once he made it he never looked back.</p>