Ask HN: A question for those who went to MIT/Stanford/CMU

First, don't put too much emphasis on school. Great programmers can come from anywhere.

Many other commenters are emphasizing the role of selection effect: top-tier schools select good students, rather than teaching well. I think the effect of good teaching shouldn't be undervalued. Although, again, good teachers and courses can come from anywhere, here are some things CMU does or did in the way of pedagogy:

1. Focus on concepts and skills, not specific technologies. Many of CMU's intro courses are taught in Standard ML, a language used by basically nobody. This levels the playing field, forcing people who think they already know everything to learn things from a different perspective. It puts the focus on how to design and reason about programs, rather than the minutiae of popular languages.

2. Have project-based courses. The star example here is CMU's operating systems course, which is a thing of beauty and terror. At many schools OS courses teach you trivia about hardware. CMU's OS course involves some of that, but is mostly about (a) working with a partner (b) time management (c) designing concurrent programs. The compilers course is of similar quality.

3. Teach math-as-problem-solving. CMU has a course, 15-251, which is notoriously difficult, because it introduces you to a lot of discrete math very quickly. This is partly because discrete math is the core of CS theory; most programs will never need this, but when you do need it, knowing a bit of theory can save you days or months. But the other goal is to simply practice solving difficult conceptual problems.

* what behavior makes folks at these and alike school smart *

My experience was that almost everyone I met at Stanford had done something pretty extraordinary in high school. Examples: teaching an AP science class, being an amazing pianist, doing well at national science fairs, being a published author.

To answer your question: Almost everyone was very smart, but at least at Stanford there was great variety in the kinds of intelligence on display. This was true even among CS majors.

* what's the learning environment *

I'm not totally sure what you're asking about here. Undergrad CS classes were pretty similar to what you'd see at most universities: Professors lecturing, then people taking home exercises or programming assignments. Collaboration was usually encouraged on exercises, and programming assignments were usually done in groups.

My honest experience was that a lot of big courses were not particularly well taught. The first few CS courses are an exception; they're taught not by professors but by lecturers, who are all really good.

The best CS classes I took were graduate "seminar"-type classes, where we'd read a few papers each week and then come to class and discuss them. Shout out to Dawson Engler; his operating systems seminar was inspiring and eye-opening.

I can't speak as much to non-CS classes. I took some math and physics classes; these were pretty traditional, with lectures and written homework. Collaboration was encouraged on homework, and personally I wouldn't have been able to get through those classes without help from my friends.

* How do you see yourself after graduating from these schools? *

Again I'm not totally sure what you're after with this question. One of the best things that happened to me was that I became friends with musicians and biologists and English majors; people who are (academically, anyway) quite different from me. I learned to dance, and swing dancing has become a huge part of my life.

I work at Google now, and that's pretty humbling. Working at Mozilla when I did was as well. But life isn't all work, and in a lot of ways the non-CS stuff I learned in college has been much more impactful to my life and how I see myself.