Reply to Are students unhappy at CMU?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Are students unhappy at CMU?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]CMU is not unnecessarily hard. It seems hard because many universities artificially reduce courses rigor to accommodate the increased unreadiness of nowadays high school graduates. There are big portion of CMU students graduate with high honor. More importantly, CMU students are trained to get jobs done. The practicality and reliability is highly valued in work place, but disdained by many individuals as outdated qualities. [/quote]
Examples? Most top colleges are still…well, really freaking hard. The difficulty of CMU just sounds like the difficulty of stem degrees. The honest question becomes why does it seem CMU’s education comes at a detriment to the college experience, while peers at other institutions can have both rigorous stem education and an amazing college experience.

Frankly everyone at top colleges “studies a lot” [/quote]

Peers at other institutions with rigorous stem education don’t have “amazing” college experiences. If a program is known rigorous, the complains are similar. Though such programs can be small at many universities and thus overshadowed by the overall school experiences. [/quote]

This simply isn't true.  Stanford, Rice and Berkeley are very much STEM-oriented schools that no one would call "easy", yet they have plenty of happy students who have fulfilling experiences in college.

What sets CMU apart is a few factors:

1)  CMU kicked off about 80% of its fraternities from 2003-2013 or so.  A few have recolonized as shadows of their former selves, but without nearly a century of tradition you aren't going to get anything remotely resembling the same experience.

2)  The lack of a D1 sports scene is a huge detriment.  There's nothing to rally around or rejoice in on a regular basis, and school spirit is in the negatives.

3)  Anecdotally, from the students I've known, CMU does not place a heavy emphasis on high school extracurriculars during the admissions process.  Thus, it selects for a very one-dimensional workhorse type of student without social aptitude.

4)  The amount of work CMU piles on is absolutely different than peer institutions, as is the grading scale.  Professors are completely merciless in both regards.

5)  The weather is godawful, which both discourages venturing outside and puts a big wet blanket over your spirits.

These aspects set CMU apart and aside from the nice surrounding city (which most CMU students will never venture more than a mile into, if that) the school basically offers nothing to counterbalance the brutal academics.[/quote]

Pittsburgh resident here. Totally agree. My kid’s school sends a lot of kids to CMU each year and my kid’s stats are definitely good enough to get in and he won’t even consider applying. Former students from his school who went to CMU have universally stated that it’s a miserable place. It is just insane academics and nothing else that makes up college life and the campus sucks.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics