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Comment by jez | Hacker News Reader

Some context for those who don't go/didn't go CMU:

15-251 Great Theoretical Ideas in CS is the freshman spring semester discrete math & theoretical CS (a follow up to the discrete math course they take freshman fall). The course itself goes for breadth over depth. In this aspect, it serves as a solid foundation for all theory classes students take going forward. It's a class where students learn proof techniques, collaboration, and problem solving.

The course is often praised for its rigor. The problem sets require a fair amount of work to complete, and the course staff sets a high standard for responses.

On the other hand, it commonly receives criticism for being quite intense as a freshman class. Many CMU students look back on it as one of the hardest classes they took.

I personally feel quite lucky to have taken 251. It gave me a foundation to appreciate a lot of deeper CS topics, and taking it freshman year meant I had 3 years more to put it to use.

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I was just about to comment that the topics seem really intense. I got the impression that Carnegie Mellon is an excellent university with very high standards (much better than Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, etc., which are prestigious and have lots of professors which do great research, but the actual scientific education is good, but not extraordinary, and moreover, the courses are not very hard from what I've heard).

It happened multiple times that I googled some relatively obscure topic, and I found multiple excellent sources from Carnegie Mellon professors. For example, there is this excellent document [1] by Jonathan Shewchuk, about the conjugate gradient method, and you will found as many as four lectures about DRAM memory on youtube.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate-grad...

My friends had him and I hear Jonathan Shewchuck is indeed an excellent teacher. However, he has never been a CMU professor. In 1994, when your link was dated, he was getting his PhD at CMU, and since 1998 he's been a professor at UC Berkeley (where I went): https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/

I have no doubts about CMU's excellence, but I found Berkeley's undergrad CS education to be quite good. There certainly were research professors who were bad teachers, but many like Shewchuck were outstanding teachers, and there were also several Teaching Professors whose job description to focus is more on teaching than research, like Dan Garcia, Paul Hilfinger, John DeNero, and Brian Harvey (since retired): https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Lists/faculty.html

I too have heard that private schools like Harvard and Stanford are not very hard once you get in, just very hard to get into (though I can't speak from experience). I haven't heard people say that about Berkeley, which is a public school so it doesn't have shareholders where alumni can form a controlling majority, and it's funded more by the state than by tuition. That also certainly was not the experience of myself or anyone I know.

I also studied EECS at Berkeley and had Shewchuck.

There's this mentality at Berkeley that the EECS classes are the hardest and most competitive in the country (and that private schools just give everyone A's) but after meeting many CMU graduates I realized that it's program is also similarly rigorous. The classes might not be as competitive but then again I don't think that means it's worse for it.

Hard courses burn students out substantially reducing the ideas and research work you might be able to get out of interested students.

That course sounds brutal from the schedule. Sometimes I wish my education had been more so.

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