CMU Heinz 2018

[thismustbetheplace]

I attended the admitted students day this weekend and I think I'm mostly sold on Heinz. But I recently read about how Carnegie Mellon has had issues with a "culture of stress" where there seems to be pressure to take on more than you're capable of - does anyone know if that's more of an undergrad thing or if that's how Heinz students approach school as well?

[AddSmith]

4 hours ago, thismustbetheplace said:

I attended the admitted students day this weekend and I think I'm mostly sold on Heinz. But I recently read about how Carnegie Mellon has had issues with a "culture of stress" where there seems to be pressure to take on more than you're capable of - does anyone know if that's more of an undergrad thing or if that's how Heinz students approach school as well?

I feel like a current student can answer this better, but from my experiences with friends in a variety of CMU undergrad and grad programs, it's mostly for undergrads. Friends in PhD programs don't seem to stretch themselves out due to CMU culture. At the same time, all the students I met this weekend had their hands in so many jars, and I felt the need to commit to some organizations quickly as a result of the weekend as well. They really pushed involvement outside of the classroom in sessions. 

[ctrlaltondelete]

Current student here.

Speaking on the Culture of Stress:

It exists and that's good and bad. CMU tends to attract students that work extremely hard. I was more laid-back in my undergrad, so seeing how hard people work has helped me a lot in terms of my productivity. That said, you don't have to buy into the culture either. I had 66 units in Fall 2017, which was tough. This semester, I'm at a nice 48. No one really cares. I still complain about my classes alongside everyone else.

From what I've seen of students at Heinz, those with the highest stress levels are those that came in with no/limited quantitative experience. Imagine trying to learn Python, R, Stata, and SQL at the same time while trying to grasp grad-level statistics/data analytics. 

[abnimbal-MPP]

Hello all,

I am not able to finalise between CMU Heinz (MSPPM-Data Analytics) and UChicago (MSCAPP). I have received $10k scholarship from UChicago and 25% (around $24k) scholarship from -CMU. After graduation, I want to be Data Scientist/Analyst/technical consultant. MSCAPP is having great coursework which mainly focuses on Machine Learning/AI and lots of flexibility for selection of courses. CMU is also having good coursework but I do not know about flexibility of coursework selection. I want to take maximum number of technical/statistical courses as I am already having 3 years of public policy experience in Govt. of India and 2 years in IBM as Application Developer.  I think CMU brand will help in becoming data scientist after graduation than UChicago.

Guys need your suggestions.   

[myshuffle]

On 5/21/2018 at 7:40 AM, abnimbal-MPP said:

Hello all,

I am not able to finalise between CMU Heinz (MSPPM-Data Analytics) and UChicago (MSCAPP). I have received $10k scholarship from UChicago and 25% (around $24k) scholarship from -CMU. After graduation, I want to be Data Scientist/Analyst/technical consultant. MSCAPP is having great coursework which mainly focuses on Machine Learning/AI and lots of flexibility for selection of courses. CMU is also having good coursework but I do not know about flexibility of coursework selection. I want to take maximum number of technical/statistical courses as I am already having 3 years of public policy experience in Govt. of India and 2 years in IBM as Application Developer.  I think CMU brand will help in becoming data scientist after graduation than UChicago.

Guys need your suggestions.   

If you're interested in only the stats/ML type courses, is there a particular reason you picked a policy program? Seems like a waste of half your coursework, especially when there are so many new data science and ML programs that focus only on those technical aspects.

[abnimbal-MPP]

Thank you for your message myshuffle.

I wanted to have economics and business oriented course in the program. Moreover, I did not know about new programs in data science field. My complete focus was on policy plus technology courses. However, I now feel that I should be focusing more on ML/Stats courses as I already have policy experience and in this CMU will help me more than UChicago. Later after graduation, even if I decided to go in technology domain then also CMU name will help me. 

[ax062320]

On 1/15/2018 at 12:54 PM, pozole said:

Hey - just completed my video interview! I submitted my app on Jan 1 and received the video interview email from Kira on Jan 11. My questions were something like this: 1) How have you been preparing academically and professionally in applying for graduate school at Heinz? 2) Talk about a time you had to multi-task and how you handled it/what did you do, and 3) What is the most complex problem/challenge (?) you've ever had to tackle and how to did you approach it or bring a fresh perspective to solve it...

Something along those lines! The practice questions were more fun: If you could be any animal, which would you choose and why? and Would you rather write, paint, or compose music and why? 

The system is pretty straight forward, though I wasn't able to play back my final recorded responses to the three "real" assessment questions. Hope this helps, and good luck!

Hi there, thanks so much for sharing that. I'm applying for MSPPM 2020. And I'm preparing for my video assessment. It seems that this year they only require for one question. So did you do all three questions before?