Carnegie Mellon University, or CMU, is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They offer a research university experience in a manageable undergraduate environment of just over 7,700 undergraduate students and a 7:1 student-to-faculty ratio. There are a lot of options, too. CMU has 90 majors and minors across six undergraduate colleges alongside an interdisciplinary culture and philosophy that celebrates cross-pollination. Instead of “staying in your lane,” CMU encourages students to break down walls. CMU also has a strong international student community — and a big one — with 23% of undergrads qualifying as international students as of the fall of 2023.
The University is also known for a very high average starting salary immediately after graduation, and 91% of 2024 graduates were employed or pursuing another degree within six months of graduation. This underlines the emphasis at CMU on applicable expertise. They offer an education that is fun and exciting on campus, and wildly profitable beyond. Graduates have gone on to receive 47 Tony awards, 20 Nobels, and 96 Fulbright Scholars called CMU home.
Getting into CMU is a challenge. They received nearly 34,000 applications annually, and most recently accepted less than 12%. Carnegie Mellon attracts unique applicants on purpose. They like exceptional students, with a twist. To lock in the strongest and most driven applicants, they offer a binding Early Decision option.
What is Early Decision at Carnegie Mellon?
While CMU says that they don’t take the “level of applicant interest” into account when assessing an application, the ED option really defies that. They may not care about prospective students visiting campus or attending an info session, but there is no clearer way to show enthusiasm for CMU than to apply Early Decision. The ED option at CMU is critical for emphasizing interest in the undergraduate college you are applying to.
However, the Early Decision route is far from an easy way into the university. For the Fall of 2023, CMU received 4,515 Early Decision applications and accepted 13.6%. This is not an impressively higher acceptance rate compared to the Regular Decision round, which is notable because many top schools do have much higher ED acceptance rates than RD acceptance rates. What it tells us is that applying to Carnegie Mellon early isn’t a trick route into the university. You must be a competitive applicant to be seriously considered.
Choosing whether to apply to CMU Early Decision is all about strategy. If you arrive at school in the fall for senior year and already have the grades, scores, activities, and enthusiasms to get in, ED can be an easy pick as the best possible option. If you have weak points on your application and need the fall months to amp up your profile, it can be a harder decision. Maybe ED is the right pick, or maybe it’s a big risk? This is where expert advice is critical, and we work with our students to make the best decision for their application experience — and outcomes.
In this post, we’ll dive into what this means for you and how you can strengthen your application whether you have a year, a month, or a week before the deadline.
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What can you do to increase your chances of admission Early Decision to Carnegie Mellon?
We love the Early Decision option when it is the right fit. But how do you determine it ED is right for you? Below, we’ve broken the key pieces of an ED application to CMU down, digging into each component to help you, first, determine if the Early Decision path is a good fit and, next, how to create your strongest application possible.
The big picture is this: You need to be a serious candidate to be considered, and ready to make a serious commitment for ED to be your ideal route. What makes for a serious candidate? Read on. This is what you need to do.
Grades
The bottom line is this: you cannot get into Carnegie Mellon Early Decision if you are not already a strong applicant who has put years of hard work into building up an academic profile that shines. If you haven’t been pursuing an exceptional transcript up to this point, start today.
CMU doesn’t have a minimum GPA for admission, and you won’t be rejected based on one activity, score, or grade. Instead, it’s the whole picture that matters most and, as an ED applicant in particular, your enthusiasm for CMU. That said, CMU has high expectations for applicants, and those expectations shift depending on what undergraduate school you are applying to.
There are required course distributions depending on what undergraduate college you want to go to, and it’s critical that you review these far in advance of sending your transcript as part of your application. For example, if you want to go to the School of Architecture, you must have four years of mathematics, including pre-calculus. If you want to go to the College of Engineering, you must have taken four years of English. If you want to go to the Tepper School of Business, you must have taken chemistry, physics, and biology. We spotlight these requirements because they may be unexpected, but there are far more requirements and you should review them immediately after finishing this post.
In addition to carefully monitoring whether you are meeting the CMU required courses for first-year applicants, you need to keep a close eye on your grades. Over 90% of accepted first-years applicants have a GPA of 3.75 or higher, and the average GPA is 3.91.
Scores
Some students operate with the misconception that a super strong SAT or ACT score can make up for weak grades. Unfortunately, CMU is looking for a both kind of application — not either or.
Carnegie Mellon is test-optional for Fall 2025 undergraduate applicants, so submitting SAT or ACT results is not required. This doesn’t mean that you get a free pass, though. CMU says that “School of Computer Science applicants are strongly encouraged to submit either an SAT or ACT score, including the math subscore.” And, for the fall of 2026, CMU will have a college-specific policy where some schools will require a score and others will be ‘test-flexible’.
When it comes to what you submit, though, there are some statistics to take into account. Over 50% of admitted first-year students who enrolled in the Fall of 2023 submitted an SAT, while only 16.6% submitted an ACT score. The scores aren’t shabby, either. To stand out, you should be aiming for an SAT at or above 1560, or an ACT score of 35 or 36.
CMU likes Early Decision applicants to have completed all standardized testing by November 1. If you will have to take the SAT or ACT later in November, they will try to delay their decision on your application until they have the scores. However, you don’t want to make them wait as they can’t guarantee that there will even be a spot available and even a strong ED applicant may be deferred simply due to late scores.
Activities
If you are seriously considering Carnegie Mellon, chances are that you are already a CMU-type student. That means that you are passionate, driven, and love pursuing academic exploration beyond coursework. If you haven’t been doing independent research, interned for a local business or mentor in your potential area of study, or become a leader in an academically-oriented club, now is the time to get on it…seriously, now. Simply being in clubs or volunteering a few times a month will not make an ED application to Carnegie Mellon stand out. There must be a clear ‘direction’ your most time-demanding (and non-sports) activities, and ideally that direction is towards your area of academic interest.
Last, and certainly not least, CMU wants to see a team-minded nature in applicants. This doesn’t mean that you have to be on a team, necessarily, but you need to be approaching something from a team-oriented perspective. This can often best be emphasized via a story in your supplements, which means planning ahead and collecting stories and experiences. We encourage our students to keep a journal on them during junior year to collect those tiny but impactful moments that can float out of your brain if you don’t jot them down.
Essays
CMU uses the Common Application exclusively, so you’ll have the main college essay and a supplement that is CMU specific. If you are applying Early Decision, though, everything should be geared towards CMU. In the Regular Decision round, the main college essay will be read by every school you apply to — but only CMU will get the ED application.
We do not recommend writing your main college essay for CMU, but we do recommend keeping CMU in mind as you begin drafting early in the summer before your senior year — yes, summer. We work with our students to start their main college essay before the supplements are released, and this isn’t just because we like beating a deadline. The main college essay requires strategy and time for drafting and editing. When you apply the CMU filter on top of this, that means crafting an essay that emphasizes your individuality, creativity, and curiosity, most likely outside of an academic setting.
Once you have an essay draft, it’s time to get into the CMU supplements. This is where you’ll specify why CMU and what CMU — what you want to do, and what makes you a perfect fit for the Carnegie Mellon community.
In recent years, CMU has had a small number (most recently, 3) of 300-word supplements. This length is ideal, as it gives you room to develop a narrative and truly tell a story with each essay. We work with our students to craft each supplement with the big picture in mind. Together, each piece of your application comes together to create a compelling and cohesive whole. Successful applicants tell stories that connect with the readers across miles and through screens. Crafting these narratives takes time and skill, and we love bringing focus, direction, and a passion for writing to the table when working with our students.
Last, Apply Early
There are three potential application outcomes: admit, deny, or defer. Obviously, we want you to do everything in your power to avoid a rejection. An offer of admission is the best case scenario, but if you are deferred you do still have a chance. Working with an expert can be critical when navigating a deferral decision — but if you can you just want to get in on the first try. That’s where we can help.
If you are in a rush to finish your ED application ahead of the deadline, be careful about using AI tools. Carnegie Mellon is proud to be “a first-mover in the AI space,” and they embrace the possibilities that AI can offer to their students. This doesn’t extend to wanting you to use ChatGPT to write your supplements, though. Using AI as part of your application writing process will not disqualify your application, but it may seriously downgrade the impact your application has on readers. “Submitting genuine, authentic application materials can make a significant difference,” they write, and “AI should never replace your unique voice, experiences and personal expression and, if used at all, should only serve as a supplementary tool to enhance your writing.”
They also warn applicants about the danger of “unintentional plagiarism,” when using AI. These are all reasons why we do not use AI tools when working with our students. Your application should be yours, not a computer-generated facsimile of you. So, you can embrace that CMU loves emerging tech. However, don’t use it here.
Work with Us
Applying Early Decision isn’t for the faint of heart. The ED application cycle is the most powerful tool that you have has a college applicant, so deploying it well is crucial. We start working with our students as early as freshman year to begin crafting impactful applications through research, internships, summer programs, and even employment (we love an unglamorous summer job!). These experiences come together like ingredients in a recipe, forming each applicant’s ideal strategy. With an ED acceptance rate of less than 14%, this is more crucial than ever if you want to get into Carnegie Mellon — and it’s why our track record of acceptances at CMU is so exceptional.
Working with an expert is like having a professional athlete on your pick-up team. Get your advantage.