Which Is More Interdisciplinary for Undergraduates: Carnegie Mellon or Caltech?

For the combinations you named, Carnegie Mellon is likely the more naturally interdisciplinary undergraduate environment. It has distinct, accessible pathways connecting computer science with design, biology, statistics, public policy, and the humanities, including the BXA interdisciplinary programs and cross-college majors or minors.

Carnegie Mellon fits a student who wants computer science to interact with people, products, institutions, or creative work. Its School of Computer Science sits alongside highly developed programs in design, biology, the social sciences, and public policy, and the university has a long-standing culture around areas such as human-computer interaction, robotics, machine learning, computational biology, and technology policy. A CS-and-design student, for example, can pursue structured arts-and-technology routes or combine coursework across the School of Design and computing, rather than having to create that connection largely independently.

Caltech suits a student whose version of interdisciplinarity is intensely quantitative: using computation to address problems in biology, neuroscience, physics, chemistry, or engineering. Its small scale, common core, and research culture make it possible to work closely with faculty across scientific fields, and programs such as Computation and Neural Systems reflect that strength. Undergraduate research can be a major vehicle for building a cross-disciplinary path there.

The tradeoff is that Caltech’s undergraduate curriculum is more tightly centered on math, science, and engineering, with a smaller menu of humanities and social-science offerings and no comparable design school. Choose Carnegie Mellon when design, social science, or applied human-facing technology is central to your plan; choose Caltech when your second field is a fundamental science and you want the most rigorous technical-scientific integration.