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CMU MSE-SS

Program Overview​

Most courses are liberal arts / non-technical courses. Not recommended for career changers to CS without SDE-related work experience. Recommended for students with 3+ years of full-time work experience. This program has almost no coding courses, limited course selection flexibility, and the required courses are not high quality. It feels more like MISM rather than SCS. During the application process, they will send you an email requiring you to solve two LeetCode problems.

Admission Preferences & Representative Data Points​

The student body is roughly half Indian and half Chinese. Work/internship experience is valued highly — having internships at major companies like BBAT (Baidu, ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent) can help you get in despite a weaker profile.

  1. CMU IS undergrad, GPA 3.5
  2. Indian student, VIT undergrad, GPA 3.95/4

Job Outcomes & Data Points​

Very good. From a pure results perspective, the outcomes are excellent. The admission email even explicitly states that CMU MSE-SS graduates get promoted faster than CMU MSCS graduates (I am not sure how they measured this, but if they dare to say it, there must be some basis). My guess is this is likely related to MSE-SS placing heavy emphasis on candidates' internship experience.

  1. CMU IS undergrad, two small-company internships, landed Amazon internship
  2. Oregon State University undergrad, internships at Siemens and a small company, landed Microsoft new grad
  3. Indian student, one year full-time, landed GoDaddy internship (the domain registrar company), went to Google for new grad
  4. Indian student, internships at MathWorks and a small company, landed Microsoft internship and converted to full-time
  5. Indian student, three years of work experience, landed Microsoft SDE 2 (roughly level 60 in Microsoft's internal leveling system; new grad is level 59)
  6. Indian student, three-month Samsung internship and six-month SAP internship plus two years full-time, landed Adobe internship and converted to full-time
  7. Indian student, VIT undergrad, multiple five-month internships, landed Armada new grad