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Comment by jchonphoenix | Hacker News Reader

Full disclosure, I'm a CMU alum.

I think this article chose CMU because for Computer Science and technical startups, it's well understood in the valley that CMU is a top 4 school (and for many, a top 2 school) for producing software engineers, which tend to underpin a lot of tech startups.

Totally agree if you move outside of software companies that this makes sense. Anecdotally, I'll say CMU tends to produce individuals who are technically overweight but perhaps lacking in business sense. This is both because of school culture and the broader Pittsburgh community.

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I'm a Georgetown alum. Georgetown alumni do the same thing with international relations that CMU alumni do with CS where we like to pretend that because there's a really good IR graduate program that we undergrads were somehow special because of that.

Also, as with CMU, there are definitely more people who are interested in the topic, and a subset of them really are quite talented, but the talent density just isn't as high as at HYPS/MIT/Caltech, and as you noted, the talented people aren't as well-rounded (because if they were, they would've gotten into HYPS/MIT/Caltech).

CMU School of Computer Science has its own admissions for undergrad which is dramatically more selective than CMU as a whole. It really is well known for undergrad CS, it's not just a halo effect of the grad program.

CMU has 7000 undergrads, of whom 600 are in the School of Computer Science. So, if you take a random CMU student who decided to start a company and looked for VC funding, you've got a <10% chance of an SCS alum and a 90% chance of a non-SCS student (assuming likelihood of starting companies is uniform, which who knows if it is but I have no reason to assume otherwise). Whereas at Stanford 100% of students had to get into Stanford.

Carnegie Mellon has a top caliber undergraduate AND graduate program in CS though. The graduate program was heavily focused on research and similarly the undergrad program is heavily focused on execution (coding, fundamentals, design) because... that is where you start and even with the level up most entrants have to the program, they don't have as strong fundamentals (or rigorous math/stats) training.

I might argue that CalTech fits more of the analogy you are looking to make re: Georgetown, but not Carnegie Mellon.

Georgetown has the School of Foreign Service, which has tougher admissions standards than the other 3 Georgetown undergraduate schools, and is the #2 ranked undergraduate program in blah blah blah but seriously the number of people who turned down Harvard for Georgetown SFS was very small, whereas the number of people in the SFS with a big chip on their shoulder because they didn't get into Harvard was very large. (I, personally, did not get turned down by Harvard because I had zero chance of getting in and so did not waste any money on filing an application and was happy to even get admitted to Georgetown.)

CMU is the same. The School of Computer Science had an an undergraduate admit rate 1 or 2% higher than Princeton when I attended. But agree that I only saw a handful of students at CMU who were accepted into MIT or Stanford. And they usually had scholarships or other reasons to attend.

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