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CMU MSAII

Program Overview​

Flagship AI program under SCS, career-oriented. If you want to do research, look at SCS MSR or MSML instead. The program is very flexible and career-change friendly, with plenty of career-change data points from all kinds of backgrounds. The department head prefers candidates with strong metrics -- the higher the GPA, GRE, and TOEFL the better (TOEFL 105+, GRE 330+, top GPA). There are many low-workload easy courses, and the 8 elective slots can all be filled with hardcore SCS systems courses -- CC, ACC, OS, Storage are all available. There's a Coding Bootcamp LeetCode grinding course, which is very friendly for finding SDE positions.

Admission Threshold & Data Points​

TOEFL 105+ GRE 330+ Top GPA is almost required. There can be peer pressure from classmates at the same school.

  1. Rutgers CS undergrad, GPA 3.984
  2. Illinois Wesleyan University Biology undergrad, GPA 3.78, was admitted to Duke PhD but left after half a year
  3. Indian undergrad in Telecom, GPA 8.09/10, had Adobe internship and 3 years full-time Amex analyst experience
  4. Tsinghua Architecture undergrad, rank 1, GPA 3.87, minor in Economics
  5. UVA CS + Physics undergrad, GPA 3.91

Job Outcomes & Data Points​

Internship companies basically cover FAANG. SDE and MLE are the main career paths, with nearly 100% employment rate. Almost nobody pursues a PhD.

Top employers: TikTok, Amazon, Google, Oracle, C3.ai

  1. Indian undergrad, three small company internships totaling one year, landed Amazon SDE intern, later went to a small company as MLE
  2. Tsinghua Architecture undergrad, two small domestic company internships, landed Adobe MLE intern and returned
  3. Indian undergrad, multiple small Indian company MLE internships, landed BNY MLE intern in Pittsburgh
  4. Indian undergrad, worked as MLE at Deloitte for one year, landed BNY MLE and was promoted to Senior DS
  5. UVA CS + Physics undergrad, Riot Games internship, landed AWS SDE intern
  6. Tsinghua undergrad + master's in Automation, 9 months RS internship at ByteDance, landed small company MLE in Palo Alto
  7. Indian undergrad, multiple small company internships, landed MathWorks SDE intern