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Carnegie-Mellon Sends Hundreds of Acceptance Letters By Mistake
An anonymous reader writes As reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Carnegie-Mellon University mistakenly sent 800 acceptances for its Master of Science in Computer Science program. They're not saying "computer error," but what are the other explanations? High irony all around. The program accepts fewer than nine percent of more than 1,200 applicants, which places the acceptance level at about a hundred, so they're bad at math, too.
I'm a PhD in CompSci, not a software engineer!
Wait though, given its February I assume these are early acceptances for Fall 2015 semester? I don't recall ever "turning down other offers" of acceptance is that even a thing do people do that? I thought you just let the other offers expire. Those letters usually say you have until a certain date to contact the school about enrolling. Given that its still only February, I suspect most students still have the ability to exercise any other offers they might have gotten.
Well unless they did something stupid like dial up the admissions office at $STATE to say "Suck-it fools I got accepted at Carnegie!"
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Why the hell should they offer anything? It was a mistake, tough luck. Why does the topic of compensation come up for every simple mistake these days?
So what if you were disappointed - welcome to the real world, sometimes your hopes are dashed after being raised.
Submitter can't be so dim that "human error" doesn't occur to him, can he?
(Females in the 21st century are too sainted to make this kind of mistake...)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Depends on the actual harm. I doubt your story of how you told the 7-11 to go fuck themselves once you got into C-M is going to get much sympathy in court. That just sounds like you burned bridges unnecessarily. Besides, there are tons of shit jobs out there, as long as you don't want to make a career out of them.
As the article said, however, if you were accepted elsewhere prestigious and declined their offer, and now you had no place to go in the fall, that's something that represents real harm. In that case, you have to accept either waiting a semester or a whole year to reapply to the other school, or you have to accept going to a less prestigious school, which would have longer term effects.
You could then additionally argue (without mentioning any burned bridges) that a year of waiting to try again (and possibly failing the second time around) would represent a hardship financially as well, but that is less persuasive because going to grad school costs money, it doesn't make you money. You could get TA jobs and grad living arrangements, of course, but it's not like being a grad student is actually more lucrative in the short term than being a pizza delivery person who lives with their parents for another year.
Nope. Google does not care about the useless "where you went to school" nonsense.
I don't believe that for a second. It might not be of primary concern but I have zero doubt that if you went to MIT or Carnegie Mellon and graduated with an IT related degree, it WILL factor into the hiring decision at Google.
They want to know you have skills and abilities.
Of course they do. That's precisely why they care whether or not you graduated from a known good training program. It is evidence that you are likely to have the sort of skills they are looking for. They'll test you further but it is a piece of evidence.
Show up with a brilliant invention under your arm and they will gladly take an ITT Tech graduate.
Perhaps but since that doesn't happen very often where you went to school WILL get looked at.
The problem with the burned bridges "tough luck" is that, as you say, you may have declined another grad school opportunity. In that case, I think CMU has responsibility for the situation and should work with the other school to make sure the applicant gets in somewhere.
Being a grad student isn't more lucrative than pizza delivery, on the whole, However, it advances one's career much more, and so having to wait another year is simply cutting a year out of the applicant's professional life.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes