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When it comes to completing a college application, one of the major decisions to be made is which teacher to request a recommendation letter from. Here at Carnegie Mellon, we require that applicants submit two letters of recommendation - one from a guidance counselor and one from a teacher. But which teacher?
We prefer to see recommendations coming from a teacher who has had the opportunity of interacting with you during an academic class. Beyond that, the choice is up to you. Many applicants feel that they need to get a recommendation from a teacher whose subject is the major they intend on applying to, but this really isn't the case. Just because you are applying to physics, it doesn't mean your high school physics teacher has to be your recommendation source. We want to see recommendations from teachers who can speak to your academic potential, your work ethic, how you interact with your peers and instructors, and what kind of a member of the high school community you have been. If this describes your physics teacher, great. If it describes your English literature teacher, great as well.
Another common concern I've heard from applicants is that they don't want to get a recommendation from a certain teacher because they struggled in that teacher's class. This is an issue that requires a bit more thought, but a teacher should not be an automatic no because you struggled in his or her class. If your struggles were due to the rigor of the class and the teacher can speak to the time and effort you put into mastering a difficult curriculum and show your progress academically, this teacher may be a good candidate. If you struggled because the class was first thing in the morning and, let's face it, you just weren't awake yet, you may have better options. Again, it all comes down to which teacher can speak to your potential, inside and outside the classroom.
One last bit of advice, for anyone out there who is thinking of getting a reference from someone other than a teacher who knows you in an academic setting, don't despair. While we require a teacher recommendation, you may submit a supplemental recommendation or two to our office from varying sources. This is the place to get a letter from an employer, a coach, a community leader, or another teacher. Please consider whether or not this individual has new information to offer about you, if he or she does we are more than happy to have their input as well.
Good luck as the application process progresses and feel free to comment with any questions or concerns!
Saturday saw the Tartans facing off against the Bears of WashU in the 2009 homecoming football game. Despite the gloomy weather, the cardinal and gray staged a dramatic second half comeback to beat the Bears and thus secured the 35th consecutive non-losing season of Tartans' football.
Check out the athletics webpage for a write-up on the game!
Just a quick update on how one Carnegie Mellon grad fared in the Emmy Awards. Actress Cherry Jones won the award for Best Supporting Actress in a Dramatic Series for her portrayal of President Allison Taylor in 24.
24 is a favorite show of mine, and Cherry Jones' character is (in my opinion) the best President in the show since David Palmer, so I was excited to see her win both as a fan and a fellow Carnegie Mellon graduate.
This week’s issue of The Tartan featured an article on the changes to the dining system here at Carnegie Mellon. Check out the details on the revamped first year meal and the new and/or improved dining options on campus.
Stalwart locations like the Underground, Ginger’s Deli, and Tartan Pavilion remain while other locations have been either renamed or altered entirely. The food court in the University Center now features a juice bar and upgraded salad station, for instance.
Looks like you guys aren’t rid of me just yet. About a month after graduation I accepted a position as one of the Assistant Directors of Admission here a Carnegie Mellon. After a couple of months I’ve gotten pretty settled in and my duties in the office are starting to take shape. One of those duties, as it turns out, will be to continue with this blog (started when I was a Junior in the business program).
My other duties include working with our student workers and volunteers (apparently I have experience with that sort of thing) and functioning as the newest member of the logistics and operations team. Logistics and ops handles things like scheduling and tech support in the office in addition to the recruitment efforts and application reading undertaken by all of our counselors.
It’s good to be back! Look for updates from me on recruitment events and news about Carnegie Mellon and/or the city of Pittsburgh.
 This weekend was my final weekend as a Carnegie Mellon student and was filled with graduation events from start to finish. Saturday morning I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa along with around 50 other graduating seniors and then attended the business honors reception. The Phi Beta Kappa ceremony was a more traditional, formal ceremony complete with a guest speaker and a bunch of grads in robes. The honors reception was less formal with a breakfast-like buffet.
Sunday was the big day though. Above is a picture of the football field from the night before graduation to give you a feel for the setup. The ceremony itself started out with a procession onto the field (complete with bagpipers). We weren't arranged alphabetically, which meant I had the opportunity to walk near the front of the line of business students. We were among the very first groups of students to walk onto the track, and it was such a rush to be up at the front of that line. In the picture below I am the fifth person back on the inside row of people. The procession was also kind of nostalgic for me as there were five of us from the first floor of New House in the front group of people for the business and engineering schools, which walked in side by side. Here is a GigaPan photo of the ceremony to check out.
 The actual graduation ceremony was a very well done event featuring three main speakers. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, delivered the keynote address. I thought he did a very good job of addressing his remarks to us, the graduating seniors, in a way that they were relevant and on the topic of entering the 'real world'. Two more speeches were delivered by a graduating senior and the president of the university, Jared Cohon. Check out the links above to watch the speeches on YouTube. After the main ceremony concluded I went down to Soldier's and Sailor's, a museum about a mile off campus, for the Tepper diploma ceremony. There was a lunch buffet from the same caterers who put on the wine tasting featuring sandwiches, fruit, and cookies. My family and I really appreciated the food at this point, we were pretty hungry from the morning ceremony. At this ceremony we were addressed by the dean of the business school and a graduating senior in the Tepper School. The heads of the two departments, business and economics, also presented special awards to about a dozen of the graduating seniors. I was one of the award recipients; the picture to the right is of Dean Dunn, myself, and Professor Cofield (the head of the undergraduate business program) as I received the award. It was a nice surprise for me at the ceremony and really quite an honor given the caliber of student I was surrounded with in Tepper. We were also each called to stage to be presented with a scroll before the ceremony was wrapped up and we retrieved our actual diplomas.
All in all, it was a truly amazing weekend. I enjoyed each of the events and so did my family. It really doesn't seem like I spend four years at Carnegie Mellon, but I certainly do have four years worth of memories from my time here.
This is likely to be the last entry I write in this blog as a student blogger for the university. I'd like to thank each of you for reading this blog for the last year and half and for your interest in Carnegie Mellon. Best of luck to all of you!
Senior week is a college tradition for the final days before graduation rolls around. As such, Carnegie Mellon hosted a series of events for the graduating seniors this year.
The first event that I attended was the premier of Star Trek at the local theater. The university bought out one entire theater for Carnegie Mellon seniors only and subsidized a part of the ticket cost. And for an early screening Thursday night none the less. Star Trek has a couple of Carnegie Mellon connections, which made the choice very appropriate. Randy Pausch, the late professor of computer science, has a split second speaking role at the start of the movie. The filmmakers heard of Pausch’s love for Star Trek and invited him to the set. The second connection is Zach Quinto, who plays Spock in the new movie. Check out this YouTube video highlighting Quinto’s involvement in Star Trek. Quinto is a Pittsburgh native and Carnegie Mellon grad. I have a feeling his career may really begin to take off after this movie. We had a pretty good crowd for the movie and I personally loved the film. A room full of Carnegie Mellon students is probably one of the only places where you can watch a Star Trek movie or a Transformers preview and not feel like a nerd.
The other large senior week event that I attended was a jazz reception held the day before graduation. All seniors and their families were invited to come. The reception was held in the Miller Art Gallery in the Purnell Center for the Arts. The Gallery featured student work and a jazz band. I have to admit, I’m not much for modern art and was there exclusively for the food. Carnegie Mellon catering is excellent, I recommend taking every opportunity for a catered meal. The event featured appetizers ranging from cheese and crackers to fresh fruits and vegetables to stuffed mushrooms.
I also had two other senior related events to attend in my last week. The first, a wine tasting, was hosted by the Tepper School of Business. Tepper faculty and staff were there to mingle with the graduating seniors and an outside caterer provided an assortment of wines and finger foods. The foods ranged from a chocolate fountain with pretzels and fruits to angel hair bird’s nests (basically appetizer sized servings of spaghetti). It was a nice event and a good opportunity to catch up with classmates and faculty members from my earlier years one last time.
The other event was a senior dinner for the senior tour guides. We got together the evening before the Star Trek movie and went down to Joe Mama’s with our current bosses and one of our previous bosses. Joe Mama’s is an Italian restaurant about a mile down Forbes Avenue from campus. The food is excellent and you should definitely check out their appetizer menu if you get a chance to go. (Have you noticed the food theme to my final weeks yet?)
Having that week without academic requirements before graduation was a great chance to catch up with old friends and unwind a little before the big day. And, obviously, to eat a lot of good food.
My final weeks at Carnegie Mellon turned out, much to my surprise, to be among my busiest at the university. (Thus, it has been a while since you’ve heard from me.) Each of my classes involved an extensive final project, paper or exam of some sort.
My Arab Israeli Condition class turned out to have one of the most time consuming final projects I experienced at Carnegie Mellon. The class culminated in a role playing mock peace conference in which each student was assigned the role of a world leader with an interest in the outcome of the Arab-Israeli peace process. I was assigned the role of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We had to dress the part for our meetings (which meant several days in suits for me, no complaints there). We first met on Wednesday to structure of the negotiations and had formal negotiating sessions on Friday and Monday. In between we had informal negotiations held via meetings, email, and phone calls over the weekend. The professor tossed in a monkey wrench or two and all in all the week turned into a very valuable, albeit time consuming, experience. Taking on the role of an individual with such a wildly different background and point of view really drove home the value of my history minor. That value, in my opinion, was the development of the ability to look at an issue from different points of view, to anticipate counter arguments, and synthesize multiple approaches. All skills that, I hope, will serve me well as a professional.
Graphic Media Processes concluded with a presentation and paper, designed as a magazine spread. I chose to research the methods used to apply sponsorship decals to NASCAR cars. NASCAR has been a bit of a passion of mine that grew out of the time spent with my grandfather, who is a fan of the sport. It was a cool experience for me to be able to bring my knowledge of the sport to the classroom. Tony, the professor, seemed to think I might know a bit too much about car racing. A product of living in the country I suppose. The real takeaway from the project was the experience I gained in designing a magazine spread and using design software. Between this class and my Photoshop student led course I gained a lot of experience with Adobe software, another skill I hope to take into my professional life.
Marketing Research culminated in a final presentation of our final recommendations for my team’s client, Scotch’n’Soda Theatre. My other classes had more traditional exams and essays to wrap up. I had exams for Arab Israeli Condition, Pricing, 20th Century America, and Graphic Media Processes.
Oh yeah, and there was the little fact that I had to complete my thesis in there too. The thesis, titled “Front Office Efficiency in America’s Pastime”, turned out to be a 90 page behemoth of a document. I looked into whether there was a statistical relationship between a team’s market efficiency (by comparing a team’s payroll to the value of the player’s as determined by my market valuation model) and a team’s on field performance. I found that the relationship is very weak, and negative, when looking at all thirty major league teams but that there is a stronger positive relationship when looking at teams with similar payrolls, suggesting that overall spending overshadows efficiency but that efficiency is very important in segments of teams. I’d even go as far as to suggest that efficiency would be a primary determinant of performance if team payrolls could be contained in a tighter range. I also had the opporunity to present my findings to a group of faculty, friends, and family at the annual undergraduate research symposium, Meeting of the Minds.
It was an incredibly busy couple of weeks for me, but also a very valuable couple of weeks. Because I knew it was going to be the last time that I experienced the end of a semester, I actually ended up enjoying it a lot more than I probably should have as well. I guess I had a ‘take your best shot’ kind of attitude by that point.
 This past week was opening week for the Pirates' 2009 season at PNC Park. In my opinion, the whole week ought to be a holiday. I ended up going to three games last week and I got pictures from each game. I sat in three different locations, so you can get a pretty good idea of just how great of a view you get from anywhere in PNC Park. According to several sources, PNC Park is America's most beautiful ballpark.
I went to my very first opening day last Monday with my Dad (sorry to my Pricing instructor, the opportunity was enough for me to skip class). The game was a sellout, I think that it may have been the largest opening day crowd at PNC Park. The Pirates gave away magnetic schedules and baseball hats to each fan in attendance and also collected money to benefit the families of the three fallen police officers from the tragic shooting that took place a couple of weeks ago. The Pirates wore PPD hats for the entire game, and the Astros wore them for batting practice. We ended up winning the game on the strength of Zach Duke's complete game shutout, a first since the 1970s.
Check out the pictures below for a shot of the view from the box seats down the firstbase line and of the standing room only section in the leftfield rotunda (proof that people actually care about baseball in Pittsburgh, to anyone who doubts me).
 Wednesday night was "Buc Night", which featured $1 tickets, hot dogs, popcorn, and pop. A few friends of mine from work and I went to the game, a forgettable loss to the Astros. The deal, however, was among the best I've ever had for a sporting event. The lines for food, among the worst. Below are a few pictures I took at the game. The first is of the view of the game from the grandstand behind homeplate, in my opinion the best view to watch a baseball game in PNC Park. The next two are of the skyline, one before nightfall and the other after.
 Finally, I went to the Saturday game with my friend Rob, who was visiting for Carnival weekend. We saw another Pirate's shutout and an offensive explosion fueled by Craig Monroe's pair of three run homeruns. Both landed within feet of each other in the Braves' bullpen. The game promotion was a Ryan Doumit bobblehead featuring the new black jersey. Below are a pair of pictures from the game. The first has the fieldview form the centerfield outfield box seats, which is a nice change of place location to view a game from. It is nice because the outfielders are right there and often times toss balls into the stands. The second picture is of Cheese Chester, Jalapeno Hanna, Sauerkraut Saul and Oliver Onion of the "Great Pittsburgh Pierogi N'At". People dress up as pierogis and race around the outfield during an inning break, we keep standings for the season... yeah, that's how we roll in Pittsburgh.
 Scotch'n'Soda's Carnival production this year was Me and My Girl, a comedy set in Britain. The story follows a commoner who finds out that he is the bastard child of a now deceased Earl and, thus, is the new Earl. The trials and tribulations of fitting into his new aristocratic life make for a series of entertaining sequences.
My friend Scott played the lead of the show and another pair of friends, Alex and Shannon, directed it. The show itself featured a couple of firsts for my Scotch'n'Soda viewing experiences. The set was a two story set featuring an upstairs hallway connected to a downstairs room by a pair of staircases. This was the first multi level set I have seen from Scotch'n'Soda and was, in my opinion, the most complex background that I've seen from a student production. The show also featured several extensive tap dance sequences, another S'n'S first for me. Poor Scott looked pretty exhausted by the end of the show.
The show also featured the second series of surveys for my Marketing Research team's semester project. We ran a similar survey during the earlier show in the semester, A Few Good Men. We're looking to see what kind of people are coming to Scotch'n'Soda shows and what they like about the shows so that we can develop a more structured marketing plan for the organization in the future. The first show yielded about 110 respondents, but I'm pretty sure that we got that many on the first night of this show. Tuesday night is going to be a long night of coding data...
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