A Response
Posted: 4 months ago (2011-10-15 06:23:23 UTC )
I'm on StudentsReview, a web site which lets students semi-anonymously email professionals working in one field or another and ask them questions about it. I think it's a great idea.
A fellow named Omar asked me this simple and very relevant question:
Hello sir,
I am very interested in CMU, and your perspective of it is quite intimidating. I know i can handle heavy coursework, but im sure a lot of people before have said the same thing and winded up crashing. My question is, in your opinion, in the end, did CMU get you farther than another college would have? Another way to put this i guess is, "Was it worth it?"
My response is immodest, but sometimes you have to call things like you see them:
Hello, Omar. I'm going to guess you're a computer programmer, and write as such. If you're not, well, only some of this applies to you.
It was worth it to me. Not only has CMU done well by me for contacts (my current company, Ooyala, has four or five of us) and for name recognition, it also meant I was around really, really smart people constantly.
That last bit is what separates CMU from, say, a random state college. The state college will have pretty good classwork, and more spare time so you can study and work on your own. You might only go to classes and use your spare time to write programs, but not talk much to your classmates or professors outside lessons. If that's your preference, go somewhere cheaper. Find a better use for the extra money.
But if you're really interested in diving into the deep end, CMU will have some of the smartest programmers of your generation. They will be there to talk programming, and learning, and projects, and perhaps some business. You will learn an enormous amount from them that you otherwise won't have access to. That is worth the price of admission. It's really hard to find smart, driven people with your same interests who really want to get together and do projects and learn voraciously. I live in Silicon Valley, where even a small amount of that with professional programmers or serious entrepreneurs is really, really expensive.
If you go to CMU, you can purchase it in bulk.
So make sure you want to purchase it in bulk or it's a waste of your money.
And if it helps, I'm one of the more intimidating products of my year of CMU, with one of the more intimidating views of it. For a lot of people it was just a hard but good college. I have no idea if they got their money's worth or not. But if you want to be the kind of computer programmer I am, you only have a handful of choices. CMU is one of the best. If you want that, it's worth it.
To be fair, teaching yourself feverishly for many years is *also* one of your choices, and it's much cheaper. But you have to be brilliant with diverse talents to do as well as CMU would. I would have thought I could, going in. I would have been wrong.
By the way, don't worry as much about the coursework. I mean, sure, do your homework, especially the programming projects. But in the end, that's not what will make CMU worth it. If you just do the homework and you don't find time to do extra projects with the other students, you should have gone somewhere cheaper.
You might worry that without good grades you won't get a job. Don't. If you're the kind of person who *should* go to CMU, take screenshots of your projects and stick them together into a portfolio and don't sweat your grades as much. Nobody will care once you graduate.
In fact, why wait? You can build stuff before you get to college. A portfolio can start out as random junk, and you just keep accumulating more and eventually filtering out the oldest or least-impressive stuff. Here's mine: http://angelbob.com/portfolio.
And while I'm doing the "old programmer" gig, here's a link to Paul Graham's articles: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html. They're all good. But here's the one you actually want right now: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html.