Andrew Moore, the dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, was blown away upon reading a college application essay from a student in rural Texas who described how he spent evenings writing computer code in pencil because he didn’t have a computer at home. He’d head to school the next morning to try the codes out on the school’s computers.
“That is awesome,” Moore said. “That is so much a Carnegie Mellon person.”
The Pittsburgh-based school has one of the best and most rigorous tracts in the country for computer science majors, and as such, requires students who plan to pursue that field of study to have a strong foundation in math.
“Rightly or wrongly,” Moore said, “we have not done a good job serving students who come in without enough of a mathematics background. And this particular applicant did not have that background.”