The Tartan

Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.

As a graduating senior, I’ve been saying a lot of goodbyes recently, and honestly, the goodbye to Carnegie Mellon itself is the least painful. Sure, I’m going to miss the people that I’ve connected with. But if all those people moved to a different school, I would have little regrets in following them.

Quite frankly, being happy and academically successful at the same time is quite a challenge here. The semester when I was the most happy and experienced the most of Pittsburgh was also my worst semester academically. And for years after that, I worked desperately to claw myself out of the hole I had made in my QPA.

I’m not proud of those years. I’m not proud of how hard I worked. What I’ve learned in those classes I’ve almost completely forgotten, and for the better, as they are nearly irrelevant to any work I’d do in the future. There is so much hurt and little learning I gained from that experience, except two things: to reach out for help and to desperately cling to happiness. But even when I did reach out for help, it barely alleviated my circumstances, causing me to dedicate enormous amounts of time in office hours, sacrificing my happiness. Even if I wanted to cling to what made me happy, there was almost nothing left in my life that did. In a sea of students and coursework, I felt isolated, alone, adrift with only one oar.

Afterwards, I desperately avoided those situations like a plague. I frantically tried to build up support systems and find things that made me happy. And while I learned a lot about how to ask for help, make friends, and invest in my relationships with people, I don’t think being pushed to the brink should be the way to learn that. I don’t think constant fear of being depressed and alone again is the way to learn that.

I don’t work in higher education, and I’ve never been to other colleges, so it’s difficult for me to identify exactly what contributed to my experience. But I do have a few ideas.

For one, I think the motto,  “my heart is in the work” is terrible. By putting work in the motto, Carnegie Mellon essentially is advocating that work itself is the most important part of our college experience. Not the impact of the work, not whether it makes you happy, just work itself. It means that Carnegie Mellon students feel like they have to work themselves to the bone with little reward.

And what does this teach us in the long-term? It teaches us to have no work-life balance, no investment in things that make us happy, just a future of overworking ourselves to serve corporations that barely give back to their employees.

Another big issue is that student organizations do the majority of the heavy lifting for ensuring campus happiness, when that should be a priority of the administration itself. While we do have some celebrations, like Carnival or departmental/school events, in total those amount to about a week’s worth of events in the 30ish weeks of the school year. The Tartan has previously written about the lack of these kinds of unifying events — Carnival feels like the only time when administration celebrates its students, and even then it still feels mostly like a marketing gimmick. Student organizations are much better at providing consistent, long-term joy to the campus. But when students are already swamped with coursework (and also paying tens of thousands of dollars to the university), I think it’s incredibly unreasonable to expect student organizations to support campus life instead of the university itself. We pay a ton of money to go here, just to sacrifice our mental wellbeing for coursework, and then sacrifice our mental wellbeing in student organizations in hopes of supporting our own mental wellbeing. It just doesn’t make sense.

But despite the issues, I do appreciate the staff that do what they can to improve events and reach out to students. My advisor was the one who gave me advice that helped me get back on my feet when I was struggling with academics. And I can tell that my department’s staff are doing their best to create new events for socializing and getting support from upperclassmen, though they definitely look like they could use some improvement.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad. There are some courses that I’ve enjoyed and some places that I’ll miss (Hunt Library in particular). I’ve made some good memories and friends, and I’ll keep them close to my heart. But these memories and relationships were things that I had to consciously create and build despite the constant pressure from the university structure to focus on academics instead.

If I had to do it again, I’d tell myself to consciously create room in my life for people and things that make me happy. I’d tell myself to be vulnerable and unafraid of showing my genuine interest in people. I’d tell myself one of my biggest lessons these four years — that socializing is a skill, and like all skills, you need to experiment and make mistakes to show growth. That it’s okay to fall down sometimes, and that it’s actually pretty easy to get back up once you get the hang of it.

If someone had told me these things, perhaps I would have had more of a support system to fall back on earlier. Perhaps I wouldn’t have struggled for so long, feeling so isolated. I wish that Carnegie Mellon had encouraged me earlier to explore these ideas, instead of me having to find out myself in such a traumatic way.

In any case, to the incoming and non-graduating students, I wish you all the best. And goodbye, Carnegie Mellon.