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<p>this…</p>
<p>Fit, fit, fit. They need to be some place they’ll be happy (or at least not miserable) and can have friends to commiserate with when they are overloaded with tough classes and there is no end in sight.</p>
<p>Please, please, don’t take my off the cuff comments as criticism of CMU - it is an awesome school with arguably the top CS program after MIT and Stanford. I also understand that the “nerd factor” is really mostly evident in the engineering school, maybe not so much in the business school. My S was just looking for a more social environment ( and found it at the “social ivy”). OP hasn’t addressed the ED question yet, curious to see if he/she will post again now that the cc firestorm is set to flame her on bailing on a ED offer?!</p>
<p>CMU has a special EA program for certain kids who took summer classes there and yes I was thinking Tulane as well.</p>
<p>Based on OP’s other posts, it does seem to be between CMU and Tulane. For the record, I have 2 family members at Tulane on pretty nice scholarships who are both extremely happy freshmen who turned down some higher ranked schools (mostly for financial reasons, but I think the concept still applies).</p>
<p>Don’t worry, 3bysmom, I know CMU is not the right school for everyone. It’s a great place for kids who know exactly what they want to do when they grow up and want to delve into it. (Not just engineering and comp sci nerds, business nerds, art nerds, architecture nerds and drama nerds too.) You can be well-rounded at CMU, but you don’t get a lot of brownie points for it, and you won’t necessarily find huge number of kids like you. It’s perfect for my older son. He would have done fine at Harvard, but he wouldn’t have taken advantage of its strengths. He is taking advantage of CMU’s strengths.</p>
<p>We will be going through this with our daughter if one school accepts her. But we will be doing it opposite. The one highly ranked schools we think is a rather poor fit for her for many reasons. So we are having her visit at least five schools before that one and hopefully she will see it our way. (No, it isn’t about money since we won’t be paying anywhere). It has more to do with things like d needs to keep a high GPA for law school and said school prides itself on hard grading, also said school has very large work amount. It isn’t that she wouldn’t keep up (though because she isn’t the fastest reader, it could be an issue) but more because she needs to be in a less stressful environment. Well we will see.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, a major advantage of CMU is that it’s in a good city and physically next door to a large, diverse public university with thousands more undergrads. It’s not a school where the social life on campus is the beginning and end of student life.</p>