nawl

I'm in the atrium of the Newell-Simon building at CMU, having finally found an unsecured wireless network. This building seems to house the "exotic programs" in CS here: robotics, HCI, language technologies, other stuff. I can see in the windows of one of the robotics labs bordering the atrium. I'm impressed that the buildings here are unlocked at 7 am on a Sunday morning.

The CMU visiting days were pretty fabulous. Huge. I think there were 50 people here, of 70-ish admitted. On the first night it became clear that this is relatively late in the visiting season for CS schools, so there were crews of kids who already knew each other from visits on the MITBerkeleyStanfordUCSDWashington circuit. The word on the street was that this was the best organized and smoothest of the visit days. There were six of us total from Berkeley, including four girls all of whom had lived in the co-ops.

We all got huge gift bags when we checked into the hotel, with bags of caramel corn, snack mix, a canvas Carnegie Mellon lunch bag, little bottles of ketchup and mustard, a Heinz pickle pin (?), and folders of tourist information. Higly amusing. They fed us all dinner in the hotel on the first night. The evening's entertainment was a powerpoint presentation by a professor that pushed the "look at all these awesome toys and awesome projects and awesome people at CMU" angle (jedi knight and Matrix imagery, "you define the future"-style flattery, robots and Disney).

The next day was lots of talking: official information about the program, area introductions, and then meetings with professors. The theory introduction focused on this Aladdin center they have here and applications of theory that result in pretty videos that can be shown in presentations. A grad student later told me that this spin often gives prospective students the impression that there's not much pure mathy theory going on here, but after actually meeting with the professors it became pretty clear that first, you can do pretty much whatever you want, and second, there's lots of pure theory being done. I could be happy here research-wise.

In the evening there was a gigantic party at the Blum's house. Beautiful house. Hired waitresses and catered food. Steven Rudich gave a magic show.

The next day was, erm, student panel and a housing and city tour. Honestly, I was impressed. So CMU's second big recruiting theme (after the "we do a lot of cool stuff one") is "we treat you like a human being". Of course every school will say that, and the students will all tell you how happy they are at a recruiting weekend (or maybe not, I heard a story about the student tour guide at another school telling the prospectives he was leaving because his advisor had just been denied tenure), but the students here actually seemed happy with both their treatment by the department and the quality of life as a grad student here.

They had us all tour a stunning grad student apartment occupying a whole floor of a house in Squirrel Hill. The jaws of every Californian in the room dropped when they told us the rent, something like $700 or $800 a month for the whole thing, multiple bedrooms, short commute to campus, proximity to trendy student areas and all. You can have your own multliple-bedroom apartment for what a room in a crappy apartment in Berkeley costs. You can *buy a house* and your mortgage payments will be about the cost of sharing a Berkeley apartment.

As for the city itself, I was also impressed. The two student areas they pointed out to us, Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, both had a perfectly fine selection of streets lined with cute little shops and cute little restaurants. (The official city tour guide they hired to comment on things during the bus tour amused us all and the grad students by telling us that these were really upscale expensive parts of town. Our guide pointed out every ethnic group that had ever lived in any area, and talked about "orientals". Ok. Old vs. new Pittsburgh.) The downtown areas they took us through had enough bars, clubs, and funky discount shops to keep anyone happy. I was amused by the Church Brewery, a, well, brewery and bar in a converted Catholic church, and The Sanctuary, a night club also housed in an old church. Shrinking population and decline of religion, I guess.

This all actually starts to give me the sneaking suspicion that, er, California might be over-rated. Not weather-wise, nor food-wise. But the equivalent cute areas and cute shops and cute restaurants in the bay area are generally found in isolated areas that you probably have to drive to, and they're probably overpriced. I don't know if I'd want to be 35 with kids in Pittsburgh, but it doesn't seem to be a bad place to be 25, and if nothing else there are 200 other CS nerds in your same position.

We had all been rather concerned by the repeated message from everyone that "Pittsburgh isn't that bad", as if they were all seriously trying to over-compensate, but most of us were sold by the tour.

Randomly, I noticed that among the grad students there were first, a lot of Americans, and second, a lot of girls. I don't know if CMU makes a conscious effort in their admissions along these lines, or if there are cultural things influencing who goes where, but it's interesting.

I think that's all.

It's back to Princeton for me for tomorrow and Tuesday, then to Toronto for the rest of the week.