SCS vs Columbia Fu

mathmom
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:11:11 +0000

It’s too bad that you can’t go to the accepted students weekend at CMU. I think that is what ultimately helped my son turn down Harvard for Carnegie Mellon. My husband missed that, but was equally blown away by the presentation SCS made to parents at the freshmen orientation. He’s not easy to please, having been an undergrad at Harvard and a grad student at Caltech. He came away convinced that my son knew what he was doing. Pittsburgh is not NY, but it’s a nice city, CMU is in a pleasant residential neighborhood. It feels more suburban than Columbia. (BTW I was a grad student at Columbia largely because I was dying to live in NYC.) If you have 4s and 5s on APs you can get out of a lot of basic courses at CMU. My son only had to take Freshman English and a non-US history course. SCS requires a minor, but it doesn’t have to be related to computer science. They are fond of relating that they had a student who’s minor was bagpipes. I wasn’t an undergrad at Columbia, but I felt like Fu was a big separate from the rest of Columbia - I think they have a modified version of their core curriculum for example. My son is a rather single-minded computer nerd - except for the two required courses he’s been taking physics for fun, so I can’t speak too much to the inter-disciplinary aspects of CMU. My impression is, that if you want it, you can make it happen, and that to some extent SCS wishes it would happen more than it actually does. It certainly has top notch drama, art, architecture and music as well as good humanities and science courses.