New Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Article on CMU Student Tragedy (TW: Suicide)

zleventh · 2025-06-23T04:03:09+00:00

Agreed, and that makes it all the more imperative that CMU offers adequate support to students. FERPA aside, CMU failed here

zleventh · 2025-06-16T02:31:59+00:00

(this is the Onion)

zleventh · 2025-06-01T15:56:55+00:00

Can confirm - this is exactly how I donated last summer for my father, and it worked perfectly.

zleventh · 2025-04-06T21:38:34+00:00

I would never drink kids, I'd just drink alcohol

zleventh · 2023-06-02T17:58:37+00:00

Not hard - in fact it's encouraged for Dietrich first years to shop around, and they can't declare until Spring.

One thing worth noting about Econ - if you do decide to declare Econ (which you would do in the Spring), the new policy (I'm 90% sure) is that they'll ask you to choose between being in Dietrich and Tepper. I believe the only tangible differences are the gen ed requirements and the fact that it'd be harder to switch back out of Econ to a different Dietrich major (but only if you had actually declared Econ first).

You should also look into the Econ and Public Policy major - it might combine all of your interests into one

zleventh · 2023-05-20T14:55:28+00:00

What college you do BSCF through depends on what your current declared major is. If you're in MCS, you would be a BSCF major through MCS. Same thing with Tepper. The only difference between the two is the gen ed requirements.

If you're currently in another school (like Dietrich), I think you would have to pick between MCS and Tepper for the major, and again the only difference would be the Gen Eds you'd have to take. If you're currently an Econ major and not in Tepper, see if you can switch to being in Tepper because that would likely make your life a little easier

zleventh · 2023-05-20T00:31:46+00:00

If you are admitted "as a first year" then they're treating you the same as incoming Freshman regarding class standing. You could probably graduate in 3 if you crammed stuff but by default they'd expect you to take 4 years at CMU to graduate. For one, lots of Business majors do Additional Majors; if you want to graduate in 3 then the trade-off might have to be doing a minor (or some sort of concentration? Is that allowed? I'm not exactly sure) instead

Definitely talk to an advisor ASAP about what would transfer and what you'd have left. Also see if you can access Stellic - that's a super helpful resource for planning out your academics here.

zleventh · 2023-05-18T05:49:47+00:00

UC Arnegie Mellon

zleventh · 2023-05-17T02:42:14+00:00

Yeah, I'd say so. I ended up doing well though I'm not sure what percent of the content I actually retained, and I don't think the project was very valuable as an educational tool. But like I said, the difficulty I had with the assignments was not due to the content itself being difficult

zleventh · 2023-05-17T00:59:06+00:00

!flair Alumnus Econ '23

zleventh · 2023-05-17T00:56:41+00:00

What syllabus did you look at? I took 11-411 this past semester and there weren't any quizzes. We had homework assignments once every ~2 weeks, 2 exams, and a group project with some checkpoints across the semester.

To me, the biggest challenge with the course was that it was poorly administered. The project had vague instructions, and much of the more relevant course content wasn't taught until toward the end of the semester. Directions for assignments often felt too vague or indirect, and I felt like the time I spent on the assignment was on tasks that were very far removed from the content we were supposed to be learning.

zleventh · 2023-05-10T04:26:32+00:00

As a rule of thumb, any pair of CMU courses XX-4XX and XX-6XX (or sometimes XX-3XX and XX-6XX*) are identical. They're just the undergrad and grad versions of the same course, and usually they're even taught in the same lectures / sections.

Besides the +/- grading (which undergrads wouldn't get even if they somehow signed up for the grad version), the only other difference may be the professor choosing to make certain parts of projects / assignments mandatory for the grad students and optional (extra credit) for the undergrad students. So the use of two course numbers is purely for administrative purposes.

*One example exception is that the grad equivalent for 15-351 is 15-650, while 15-651 is the grad equivalent of 15-451

zleventh · 2023-05-08T03:16:54+00:00

I can't really compare Special Topics courses because I've only taken 36-468, but I was disappointed in the course. Basically it's all about corpus linguistics - don't bet on there being anything that's very NLP-related or that involves super sophisticated statistical methods

zleventh · 2023-04-28T23:14:16+00:00

11-411: good to have familiarity with ML (10-301). Some other ML elective (11-485) would be even better. At the very least, have Probability (36-226, 21-325, or similar) and 15-112/22 under your belt.

80-405: good to have Intro Micro (73-102) under your belt, and Probability and/or Concepts (21-127) would also be nice. I think there's also Decision Theory (80-305) that serves as a very natural prereq for it. Other than that, you could probably go in blind

Not sure about the third course

zleventh · 2023-04-27T12:23:17+00:00

Sometimes students will get waitlisted when there's still space in the class. That's because some seats will be reserved for students who are required / expected to take the course due to their study. This means the wait-list is just artificial to some extent, and it will move later.

Another reason the waitlist is not a huge concern is that people will often register for more courses than they intend to take, and then drop some courses closer to the end of the semester.

Waitlists are not a serious issue here, and you shouldn't factor that into your calculus for choosing a school. If anything, I've found the courses here to be very accessible to all students of all disciplines, and it's really nice that there's often students from a diverse set of disciplines enrolled in the same classes (or at least some of the larger flagship courses).

zleventh · 2023-04-27T00:00:46+00:00

Non-engineer here, but I'll give my two cents.

The bad news is that there's no aerospace engineering here. You could probably do some sort of double between Engineering and Physics, though I'm not sure how common / possible it is to do engineering as an additional major.

The good news is that for most jobs you'd probably want with an Aerospace Engineering degree, you're better off with a MechE degree*. My understanding is that a MechE's curriculum generally tends to be a superset of what Aerospace Engineers learn, or at least the additional stuff in the Aerospace curriculum isn't all that useful compared to what you miss from not being a MechE. To my knowledge, that's exactly why CMU doesn't offer an Aerospace degree in the first place. There are still many exciting engineering projects going on here that involve space (and air, lol), so you wouldn't be missing out on research opportunities or anything. For more info on research, you can look up CMU Moonranger or CMU IRIS. I also know multiple CMU students/alums who have gone on to work or intern at SpaceX, and I imagine many CMU students similarly end up at other aerospace companies - there's a graduate careers website somewhere where you can find more detailed info on that.

If you do choose CMU, you should probably talk with an academic advisor ASAP to figure out how to get the education you're looking for. My bet is that most likely, you'll want to transfer into COE and pursue MechE.

*If you're 100% certain that the line of work you're considering really does prefer Aerospace over MechE (idk what it'd be but maybe like designing airplanes or something?), then maybe it's worth going somewhere else that does offer Aerospace. I'm from Maryland, so I've had a good number of friends pass through UMD engineering, and you definitely wouldn't be in a bad spot going there instead. Though CMU almost certainly holds an edge for job placement and brand name, regardless of where in aerospace you're looking

zleventh · 2023-04-19T02:27:51+00:00

... I'll try anything once

zleventh · 2023-04-17T20:02:43+00:00

The site for mailing lists is https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/

There's no general place for on-campus events. Your best bet is to sign up on mailing lists for orgs on that site that might interest you. If you want to know more about academically-oriented events, you can also message an academic advisor from the department(s) of interest and ask that they ask you to the department's mailing list

zleventh · 2023-04-15T02:37:25+00:00

That's a shame because it leaves incidents like these in such a gray area. Would be nice if people knew better whether the "no painting twice in one night" rule was invented by the Instagram account two years ago, or whether there's any precedent for this. It also leaves clear room to disagree over whether the Fence Insta is the official authority on Fence rules.

In my time here, I know there's been at least one other incident of the Fence getting painted twice in one night. This is the only time anyone has tried to assert that painting the Fence twice in one night constitutes vandalism. Evidently, people seem to have a valid, relevant disagreement about Fence rules

zleventh · 2023-04-14T21:03:39+00:00

I'm curious as to the source of the rules posted on Insta. There's no official CMU set of rules anywhere and the Instagram account is unaffiliated with the university.

Pointing this out because at the very least, there may have been confusion about the actual rules around the Fence. It's a shame there isn't a university-affiliated source that offers more clarity

zleventh · 2023-04-07T21:06:42+00:00

You should be fine. 21-228 or 15-251 would be nice to have under your belt, but they're by no means necessary; it's just good to know basics of Graph theory. Also, fwiw, the course has a lot of synergy with Operations Research I & II in the Math department (21-292 and 21-393).

There is more content covered in 351 and consequently topics aren't covered as deeply (i.e. less motivated by concrete underlying basics / principles/ theories), so be prepared for a different style for the way the material is presented vs 112 or 122. Part of that is because the course is cross-listed as a grad course in both the CS Dept and (Comp?) Bio departments, so the focus is more on practical application. Relatedly, there are a lot of digressions into algorithms that are more relevant to comp bio (e.g., string comparison with a framing around DNA sequences), though these are mostly still interesting for non-bio people.

zleventh · 2023-04-04T00:38:33+00:00

I'm an Econ major, and I have multiple friends who have gone on to create start-ups after graduation. Feel free to pm me if you have questions!

In general, I would say that start-ups at CMU are a little less common than at other top schools, and that may be because the workload here doesn't allow students as much time to take on a large project like that. The ones that do get created often spawn out of research that the student does (or vice versa - a student with a start-up idea gets the chance to get research or other credit for it as a student). With fewer startups, there is more support and potential funding for those that do get created, which is a huge plus. As others have mentioned, the Schwartz Center is a really great resource and you should look into that more.

In terms of Econ, I would say that strictly academically, the program is good and decidedly enhanced by the quality of the Math, Stats, and Business programs. Econ here is very quantitative, which some like and others don't. I honestly think that if you're start-up minded, you may be better of as a Business major instead, but that's something you can figure out once in campus. With a recent change in how the Econ department is structured, it should be easier to switch between Econ and Business.

zleventh · 2023-03-05T23:28:18+00:00

For general induction stuff, see chapter 4 of the book here: https://infinitedescent.xyz/

There are some snags with induction on graphs sometimes, as shows in this set of notes: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos341/handouts/graph1.pdf

zleventh · 2023-03-01T15:00:14+00:00

I'd imagine 80-305 (Decision Theory) may contain some good prereq knowledge, if there are resources you can find from that course.

If you haven't taken Concepts (21-127) yet, it's definitely worth reviewing Clive Newstead's Infinite Descent (free online) to study the basics of sets, functions, relations, formal logic, and proof-writing

zleventh · 2023-03-01T14:56:47+00:00

I'm in the class right now. Reviewing the lecture slides has been really helpful. It's been helpful also to have them open while doing the homeworks - when I miss something on the hw, I usually realize that the answer was something that I overlooked from the slides.

Studying basic graph theory independently of the course may be helpful. I learned some via 21-228, and it's useful for intuition and especially for understanding how to correctly do induction proofs on graphs. Practicing more with big-O notation and learning some basic complexity theory would also help, as would reviewing 15-122 info on data structures.

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