<p>My son loves Carnegie Mellon. He has no regrets about being there (and he turned down Harvard to attend.) My one reservation about Carnegie Mellon is that, more than most schools, you can be a 100% computer geek there. The generous AP policy means he’s only had to take a couple of courses outside his interests. They tend to assign roommates with similar interests - his freshman roommate was in engineering and it seemed like most of his floor were either in engineering or computer science. I’m told that if you want to it’s easy to branch out and meet other people, but it’s also easy not to. Given that my kid was likely to go find his own crowd no matter where he was, it’s nice for him to feel like he’s normal and not a rareity. Academically he’s been challenged - and he’s got a good well-paying internship this summer - which he found through the CMU grapevine. </p>
<p>From the feel - I’d say CMU is a little more pre-professional than most colleges. It has a lot of kids who already know what they want to be when they grow up and is particularly strong in those fields. (i.e. engineering, computer science, drama, music, art and architecture.)</p>