In hindsight, you sound like a good candidate for a smaller liberal arts type school. But sometimes we don’t know that until we try other things. CMU is a big enough institution where you can try taking classes in other departments and explore other majors (with the exception of the extremely competitive ones like CS, etc.) I think NYU could potentially bring up other issues, such as the difficulty/distraction of living/studying in NYC. CMU has much more of a campus feel, has a small town setting around it and is very close to the urban downtown. I think that you can be happy at CMU if you expand your friend network and explore other fields. The “grind” is actually making you a well-prepared college graduate without you realizing it 
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