MIT in 4 years or CMU in 2 years?

I am finishing up my freshman year at Carnegie Mellon as a CS major. I've talked with my advisor and I will be able to graduate by next year. However, I recently got into MIT, columbia, and Caltech as a transfer student. Should I transfer over to one of those schools and graduate in 4 years or just grad in 2 with a cmu cs degree? I'm not really dead set on IB and am open to different careers in both finance and tech

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All of the schools (including CMU) are great schools and will give you plenty of opportunities.

My first question would be whether or not you want to graduate in two years. And can you afford additional years of schooling or will it be a financial burden?

I personally wouldn’t advise graduating early, but I can see many reasons why it would be appealing to others. I actually don’t think I took advantage of all the learning opportunities offered at my school and was so focused on graduating and getting a job that I didn’t take time to explore things outside of my area of focus, which I think is a mistake (and something that is much harder to do once you graduate). It also might be tough socially, but that depends on the type of person you are and the people you hang out with (I’m assuming you won’t be 21 if you graduate early so just harder to hang out with people at bars, etc).

As for the schools, as I said, all are great, but if you want to get a sense of relative ranking, etc since I live in nyc my bias would be toward MIT. In finance they have great representation and having interviewed, worked, and met several students and alumnus from all the schools you list, the MIT students, on average (with a relative small sample set) tend to be more impressive.

But if you want to be I’m tech and if you prefer normal (or very nice) weather Cal Tech would be great. I tend to run into fewer alumni mostly due to location, but it’s a great school and have talked with a few of their professors as part of recruiting and they have some great programs.

EDIT: I don’t mention Columbia because even though it’s a great school, if you want to study CS and are considering tech I think the other options are more down that path (tech/quant finance/etc).

 

I agree with the point but I’d personally choose cal tech over mit. Mit is great school no doubt, and has good presence in finance world. However to me, MIT ppl images are good students talented in STEM. Cal tech on the other hand feels like goddamn genius with even unimaginable intelligence. If I had to choose either MIT or Caltech without talking, I would always choose caltech kids who survived surrounded by numerous Nobel laureates in 1:3 student faculty ratio, with soon to be Nobel laureates colleagues.

And I went to Columbia :/

 

I would actually say the exact opposite. From what I've seen/heard, Caltech has way more of a reputation for compsci nerds than MIT does. Granted, at either school, people know you're a genius, I just think MIT has a better reputation for students being incredibly smart but also being crafty enough and good enough with people to drop out and start a business. MIT definitely has more students go into careers outside of tech than Caltech does. Coming from someone who knows students at both schools and got into one of them and didn't attend.

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