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CMU MITS

Program Overview

This is a joint program co-offered by SCS, CIT, and IPS. (Nobody really cares -- at CMU, aside from MSCS, the reputation differences between other programs get smoothed out by individual differences.)

Four Tracks

Software and Networked Systems, Data Analytics, Information Security, Technology Strategy & Governance

Representative Data Points

  1. SJTU undergrad, GPA 91, WXG (WeChat Group) internship
  2. Regular 985 IS undergrad, GPA 89
  3. Hefei University of Technology EE undergrad, six years of full-time work experience, also completed a Harvard Extension School program before enrolling in MITS
  4. Fudan IS undergrad, GPA 3.39, rank 7/35, Microsoft internship
  5. Nanjing University Software Engineering undergrad, GPA 3.6, SAP internship
  6. United States Air Force Academy CS undergrad, minor in Chinese
  7. JHU CS undergrad, had Amazon Security Engineer intern during undergrad
  8. Fudan University Software Engineering undergrad, GPA 3.58, combined 13 months of internship at Tencent and Meituan
  9. Tongji University Engineering undergrad, GPA 90, minor in AI

Courses

Very flexible. As long as you want to, you can basically make your schedule very SDE-oriented, similar to an MSCS/DS course plan. You can also make it very easy and just start LeetCode grinding right away -- kind of like a Pittsburgh version of NEU. Based on this year's job hunting results, CMU's reputation is still very high, and there's no noticeable difference between programs. Plus, some companies like Adobe, Apple, NVIDIA, and Databricks recruit directly from CMU.

Course selection flexibility and priority are both very high. For students pursuing SDE roles, choosing the Software and Networked Systems track allows you to freely take all of SCS's legendary systems courses within the maximum credit limit per semester (51 units), but be careful to balance workload. For students pursuing MLE roles, the Data track similarly lets you take nearly all the top data courses. For career changers to CS: it's doable -- you can start from data structures. However, I personally recommend finishing your LeetCode grinding in China so you can start interviewing as soon as you arrive in the US.

The program also has a capstone, somewhat similar to UW EE PMP's capstone -- working on projects with companies.

In later semesters, you can basically get into any SCS course you want. Course selection has no restrictions, including but not limited to: 15640 Distributed System 15619 Cloud Computing 17637 Web Application Development

Admission Info

Tuition is relatively expensive, around $85K. The admission threshold is reasonable -- GPA 3.8+ and speaking score of 25 gives you a very good chance. There's a good chance you'll be tested on speaking during admission. If your speaking score is below 25, you'll definitely be tested. Even with a 25, you might still be tested -- they'll send an email to schedule an interview.

My interview questions at the time:

  1. A UK-graduated interviewer asked about my volunteering experience and why I wanted to do it
  2. Chinese food
  3. They wanted to visit Chengdu and asked if I'd been there and what's fun to do

Job Outcomes & Data Points​

  1. Nankai CS undergrad, two internships at Megvii and a quant dev internship, intern landed Splunk, new grad landed Meta
  2. Hefei University of Technology EE undergrad, six years of full-time work experience, landed Uber Senior, later moved to Google
  3. Fudan IS undergrad, GPA 3.39, rank 7/35, Microsoft internship, landed Mobi Systems new grad
  4. Nanjing University Software Engineering undergrad, GPA 3.6, SAP internship, landed Oracle new grad
  5. JHU CS undergrad, had Amazon Security Engineer intern during undergrad, returned to Amazon intern, then landed Microsoft SWE intern and successfully converted to full-time
  6. Fudan University Software Engineering undergrad, GPA 3.58, combined 13 months of internship at Tencent and Meituan, couldn't find a US internship, went back to China to intern at ByteDance. New grad landed Splunk
  7. Tongji University Engineering undergrad, GPA 90, no internship, landed Amazon
  8. ZJU CS undergrad, two-month internship at China Merchants Bank, then five-month internship at ByteDance, intern landed Apple, new grad landed Goldman Sachs