I’m sure there are great things about Houston.
However cmu in squirrel hill right on Schenley Park and Pitt Oakland area plus the upmc vibe make it a sea of students. It’s an incredible place to go to college. The people are lovely and it’s a pretty compact city to navigate. Beautiful falls and shorter springs. The collegiate atmosphere is all around you in Oakland and squirrel hill is a beautiful city neighborhood for off campus is nice too.
I don’t live in Pittsburgh but spent a lot of time there. It’s a very inviting place people wise.
@PengsPhils
The top two employers for Rice CS are Microsoft and Google, both of which have Austin offices. Third is Schlumberger. Everything below that is 1 hire each.
Top three for CMU CS are Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Fourth is Jane Street. There are seven more companies with more than one hire each. I interpret this to mean that more companies are consistently recruiting at CMU.
I don’t want to belabor this point though. Rice is a great school and if OP will be happier there, it is the right school for her.
@RelicAndType
There’s also a Google and Microsoft office in Pittsburg, but I don’t think we’d go assuming that CMU is a regional school because of that, nor that every CMU grad goes to the Pittsburg office. And focusing on those two misses that the companies I highlighted are mostly based on the west coast.
If you look even on Microsoft’s website for new grads, there are no open positions in the Austin office - most are at the main office in Redmond.
Looking at these lists of outcomes they overlap quite a bit and are both star-studded. I just can’t see how you’d make the argument that recruiting will be that much different. Speaking as someone who works for one of those known tech companies, I can tell you that recruiting will not care in the slightest between the name of either of these schools.
I said I didn’t want to belabor this point so I won’t. Congratulations to OP on your acceptances!
Gawd, I hate to bring this up, especially being a SW Pennsylvania resident, but D1 was accepted to CMU with a pretty good scholarship for both engineering and chemistry (i.e, she was accepted into both the school of engineering as well as the Mellon school of science.) At the time, one of her path-forwards was bio-medical engineering. In addition, she was being recruited as a runner for the track team, and her grandfather was a “Carnegie Tech” (emphasis on “Tech”, as opposed to “Mellon” - old timers will understand what I’m saying here :)) engineering grad.
She never seriously considered enrolling at CMU when her other acceptances came in. Her perception (as well as her younger sister, two years later) was she really did not envision the CMU campus as being an environment in which she wanted to invest four years.
I SERIOUSLY emphasize that this is an anecdotal experience and certainly not a statistically valid assertion, but I had two daughters who grew up in the Pittsburgh area who both decided they would prefer to attend schools other than CMU. One of whom did graduate from a Pittsburgh university and go on to become a university professor in California, so their resistance to CMU had nothing to do with it being in Pittsburgh.
YMMV
Congratulations! You can’t go wrong with either of these two fabulous choices. At Rice you can major in anything you want (except architecture and music which require audition/portfolio) regardless of how you framed your application to the school. You can change majors by filling out a form until the end of sophomore year. Rice is very generous with AP credits so many students are able to double major or take lots of classes in non-major subjects. Many Rice students go to work for FAANG companies. At Rice, the focus is on the undergraduate experience as opposed to graduate students. Academics at both places are going to be terrific. If cost is not really a consideration, where do you feel the fit is best? If you are going to be taking out loans, it makes sense to go to the school where you will graduate with the least amount of debt. Of course I am biased as the parent of a Rice student that loves it there. I would accept the merit scholarship at Rice and not look back.