Carnegie Mellon University lives up to its reputation for being a rigorous, challenging institution. The English Program is often overlooked, but is a hidden gem in terms of faculty and curriculum. Courses range from Literary Journalism to Pirates and Prostitutes: The Long Eighteenth Century. Not only is the subject matter diverse, so is the student body. CMU is home to students from various international and financial backgrounds and is an excellent place to be.

Carnegie Mellon is a very competitive environment and it will take a lot of work to maintain good grades. However, students and faculty are always here to help you and there are many resources such as tutoring, excel sessions, and supplemental instruction. Everyone here is very friendly and they want the best for you.

As a visitor was unimpressed by the campus and the attitude at the admissions office...It felt like a snotty and uppity kind of place...

Carnegie Mellon is a 'world-class university'. We have undeniably great academics, and that alone grants it a decent rating, but the academics are about as far as CMU goes. Do not come to this school looking for the parties, food, or facilities. We lack all of those. Students are generally nice but very introverted and much more concerned with their work then they are with their friends. Your friends at state schools will be eating better food and having more fun than you are, but you can rest assured you are (probably) getting a better education. CMU is a wonderful place to go to learn very interesting things but if you're looking to have some fun in college maybe choose another place.

I love Carnegie Mellon! The school is very focused on learning, and they support you so that you can absorb as much knowledge as you can. The classes ensure that you achieve mastery of the topics, and they go in depth while covering a lot of different subjects. I am also able to have a life and have fun with friends, which is important for life balance. It's a great school and I would definitely recommend it for students who are excited to learn.

Carnegie Mellon University is an amazing school. The visitor center is always stocked with refreshments and friendly faces, the school plans many events for visitors, and all of the students that I've met have been very friendly. Overall, just a perfect school!

Fantastic college. Best environment. CMU is a default choice for top students to get in the programmes. CMU has a wide range of program.

I'm extremely happy to be a student at Carnegie Mellon, though I'm probably more pleased about it than most, because I came from a low-income area, unlike most of my classmates, so I take far less for granted. Overall, CMU is full of a diverse group of very intellectual and/or artistic people who work very long hours (to give you some perspective, it's not unusual for me to spend so much time doing nothing but work that I legitimately forget what I do for fun, but I also take one more class per semester than the average person), and if they don't, they probably either are in Dietrich or their grades are in trouble. The people at CMU tend to fall into one of two categories: their work is their life and you probably won't interact with them unless you're one of them, live with one of them, or have to work with them academically, or, the majority, who are at least a little bit quirky in some way, however subtle. Pressure to fit in is very small, and there is very little prejudice on campus, so pretty much everyone is free to be themselves at all times. It is important to note that there is definitely a group of people (a rather vocal one, at that) who are very unhappy at CMU, which almost always stems from the workload. It's huge, especially if you're in architecture, computer science, engineering, or drama. It can be managed, but not everyone can manage it. This group of people often grows rather depressed, and really probably should have gone to a different college that isn't near-Ivy League in terms of academics. If you're a prospective student and you're bound to fall into this group, don't go to CMU or any near-Ivy League school. Plenty of people go to less prestigious colleges and still become successful. If you can potentially go to CMU and you go somewhere less prestigious, you'll probably stand out compared to your peers anyway, which will likely look just as good on your resumé after graduation. You are most at risk of falling into this group of depressed stressheads if you fall into any of the following groups: 1) You have mental health issues (depression, anxiety, etc.). And if you're a parent of a prospective student who says they have one of these issues and you're not keen on taking it seriously, I'd suggest changing your attitude. Plenty of Ivy-League students commit suicide every year, and I'll bet every one of the parents of those students would have previously said that their kid would never do that, just like you. Also, it breaks your kid's trust in you if you don't take what they say seriously, and that does serious psychological damage. If your kid doesn't think they have the mental strength for a place like CMU, let them go somewhere with a smaller workload for a while. If they're fine there and think they can handle more, they'd probably have a strong application as a transfer student or to attend graduate school somewhere like CMU. Just listen to them. 2) You are a heavy procrastinator. Granted, many people at CMU have habits of procrastinating and still do well, but if you are a MAJOR procrastinator, you may be in trouble at CMU. There aren't enough hours in a day to complete many of the assignments you get at CMU the night before the due date. I'm not talking huge projects, I'm talking even some of your average, weekly assignments for some classes, especially for computer science. 3) You aren't sure if what you're studying is right for you. I learned very quickly coming into Mellon College of Science that science was not for me, and since I didn't enjoy my work, it was very difficult for me to stay happy when work was all I did for days at a time. I did find a more appropriate field of study (game design) by my sophomore year, but by then it was too late for me to both change colleges and graduate in four years. I would definitely not have survived if I didn't find another field that I actually enjoyed. That being said, there are some very good things at CMU that a lot of the students tend to take for granted: 1) WE ARE SO INTERDISCIPLINARY. There's this one program called IDeATe that offers eight minors that are available for any student in any college that have both a very technical and a very artistic aspect (e.g. media design, sound design, animation and special effects, game design, intelligent environments, learning media, innovation and entrepreneurship, and physical computing) which is an AMAZING program, and all the IDeATe classes have a great mix of the super-artistic and super-intellectual students working on projects together that make everyone look super impressive. 2) We are very collaborative. I've heard some (but very few, and it always surprises non-engineers to hear them) stories about cutthroat times in engineering, but in general everyone helps each other constantly. For example, there's this one course that's an intro to programming course that ~400 students take every semester that we call 112 (after the course number, 15-112) that is notoriously bonkers stressful. It's very very hard and has a very large workload even by CMU standards, but everyone learns an incredible amount and actually retains that knowledge, even if they do badly. Everyone knows that taking it means a semester of suffering, and anyone who has taken the course and meets someone who is about to take it will immediately offer to help them. I've seen students who are about to enter 112 and have had so many offers to help them that they don't know who to choose to help them. Being a TA for 112 is kind of a status symbol. 3) The students definitely have a sense of humor collectively. Scotch and Soda's comedic shows, whether they're staged or improv, student-written or not are always very well attended and well-liked. It's common to see strange, humorous posters in the halls about lizard people or instructing people not to lick the walls that don't have anything to do with anything, but students enjoy them. CMU has a meme group on Facebook (your kid knows what that means. It's basically an invitation for people to make jokes about CMU), like most colleges do nowadays, and as someone who is in many of those groups for various colleges, I can tell you that CMU's students are much more likely to make their own memes rather than repurposing existing generic memes about nerds or computer science or whatever than students at other colleges. That's most of what I have to say about CMU, but as someone who's spent many time in many different colleges because of my program of study (major in Mellon College of Science, minors in the College of Fine Arts, the School of Computer Science, and Dietrich College of the Humanities), here are some distinctions in the culture of the different colleges as I have seen them: College of Engineering: Don't know much about them to be honest, but they seem a bit scarier than the rest. There's a mutual awe between them and computer science students, since engineering students know a lot about hardware and not as much about software and computer scientists are the other way around, so they're often impressed by each other. College of Fine Arts: Such stylish kids! Very fun and easygoing. Very attractive. Most of them know some computer programming. Architecture students live in the studio. The art they create is generally much more on the experimental side than the traditional. Drama kids tend to stick with their own kind, and many CMU students graduate before ever meeting one. Dietrich College of the Humanities: Probably the lightest workloads, but boy do they have to read a lot of readings. A fun, inviting crowd, though there are also a fair amount of pretentious people. Most summertime cashiers per capita compared to the other colleges. They have a lot of opinions on their books. Mellon College of Science: Most likely to be forgotten in the scope of CMU. I mostly have experience with students in natural sciences, but most homework is done in group study sessions. The chemistry majors are pretty close, but the biologists don't really know each other super well. Physics students generally appear to be very nerdy on the outside but sometimes aren't deep down. Tepper School of Business: There are always a lot of Tepper students dressed in suits. I don't know much about them. Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy: Small group of people who everyone thinks are computer science, but aren't. Since there are so few, I can't really speak about them as a whole. Also they're all grad students. School of Computer Science: A very impressive bunch. Some are very full of themselves, but most are geniuses who are in awe of how geniusy their classmates are.

Coming to Carnegie Mellon has been the biggest regret of my life. This institution is utterly miserable and most of the students are miserable here too. Many try to get black out drunk during the weekends because it’s the only way they can forget about school work. If they’re not getting black out drunk, they’re getting high out of their minds or both! Which causes a lot of students to develop depression and/or anxiety. The professors do NOT care for the mental health of their students and same goes for the rest of the people employed by this institution. This school fools minorities into thinking there is diversity here by inviting them all on specific weekends to visit when actually less that 20% of the student population is BLACK HISPANIC or NATIVE AMERICAN. They group together all of the minority students to boost their numbers. Overall, really awful institution that only cares about ranking and money. If you are a minority student I beg you to think twice before coming here. This school brags about their stress culture and students usually brag about how little sleep they got. Very toxic and competitive environment.

Excellent