Engineering: Carnegie Mellon or Georgia Tech?

boneh3ad
Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:24:54 +0000

And I am saying, without ties to either school, that you are wrong, SpacePope. As far as engineering academics and prestige go, the schools are on par with one another. While I tend to agree that the quality of life has the potential to be better at CMU for all the factors you mentioned, I would also argue that that is a personal opinion and doesn’t apply the same to everyone else.

GT is like other big state schools where the undergraduate research is 100% doable, you just have to actually make the effort to go out and find some. At smaller schools, there are more research dollars spent per student and thus more openings per student. That, in theory, sounds nice, but in reality, it gets balanced by the fact that there are fewer students at the large state schools trying to get research positions. You honestly end up with about the same number of research opportunities per undergraduate that wants a research opportunity at places like CMU compared to GT as far as I can tell from visiting schools as a prospective undergrad a 5 or 6 years ago.

You can argue all you want about the higher admission standards, but in the end, they don’t mean as much as people would like to say they do. State schools will always have the “disadvantage” there because it is their duty to take a relatively large number of people due to their public status. However, at the prestigious state engineering schools (GT, UIUC, Purdue, UMich, UCB, UT, etc) you are going to have plenty of extremely high-caliber students and you will just have a little bit more, for lack of a better term, filler students outside of that same elite core. In fact, due to the size difference between the departments, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that GT or any of those schools has roughly the same number of high caliber applicants as CMU, only with that filler thrown on on top of it. The nice thing is, some of that “filler” is are actually quite intelligent and just didn’t apply themselves in high school but are quite capable when they start to in college. So now you will say that the filler itself is what constitutes the disadvantage. I would say it depends on how you look at it. To some, these filler student would be an annoyance: a group of people who they feel are inferior to them because their grades were or are lower. To others, these filler students offer an opportunity to work with a potentially wider array of backgrounds and personalities. The bottom line here, again, is that it is a personal preference.

Last, it really doesn’t matter how prestigious your school’s literature department or law department or med school is if you are an engineer. When you apply for your internship at Intel or your job at Lockheed or your fellowship at MIT Lincoln Labs or your faculty position at Stanford, they aren’t going to give a rat’s behind if your school graduates good lawyers or does a lot of meaningful work in music composition. They are going to care whether your school produces quality engineers and whether you have demonstrated the ability to succeed at a high level without any outside prodding. In other words, in the engineering world, CMU and GT are equal in prestige. That includes all the technology centers in New England and California and Texas and Chicago and every other corner of the country. The only exception would probably be in computer science, because we all know CMU has a phenomenal computer science school.

So that brings me back to my original point. It is personal preference. It all depends on what you are looking for.