How to Find Your People at Carnegie Mellon

Hey, I’m Elliot, a second-year undergraduate studying civil engineering. When I first came to CMU, I was very determined to give myself a social life faster than in high school, where it unfortunately took me about two years before I made any friends. The way that I went about doing this was rather fitting for a STEM student: an experiment.

For my entire first semester, every Friday and Saturday I would not be in my room until at least 11 p.m., and I also would try to find something new to do for each of these nights, since I knew the first people I would meet weren’t necessarily going to be the people I stuck with.

Luckily, these goals were surprisingly not very difficult, because there are so many student organizations here at CMU along with events nearby in Pittsburgh. The sheer amount of events going on made me sometimes end up in some interesting scenarios that, although maybe weren’t accomplishing my social goals very well, were quite memorable in other ways. Twice, I ended up in the middle of the forest. One of those times, I was six miles away from my residence hall, and it was late enough that Pittsburgh’s buses weren’t active, so I had to walk all the way back. Another time, I ended up on the fifth-level basement of Doherty Hall, one of the academic buildings on campus.

Despite these weirder experiences, my experiment worked well. I spent one weekend participating in a debate tournament with CMU’s parliamentary debate team, where I met other students here interested in debate, along with students from other universities, which was super awesome. I became a member of the CMU radio station and participated in one of their events, which exposed me to a really cool community on campus. I was a contestant on two seasons of CMU’s Scotty Survivor competition, and had tons of cool social experiences there. Probably the most significant thing my experiment did was make me aware of the CMU KGB, which has no relation to the Russian organization — someone just thought it’d be a funny name 40 years ago! CMU KGB puts on fun social events like a once-per-semester massive game of Capture the Flag with special Mario Kart-style power-ups, along with building a Booth every Spring Carnival. There, I was able to meet tons of people who also wanted to just be in a fun social environment.

No matter which interests you’re personally drawn to, one of the biggest lessons I learned from my weekend experiment was that the best way to get involved socially and find people to hang out with is through clubs and organizations. In high school, classes can often be more social and clubs not as common, but since you might be in a lecture where you’re not talking much to the other students around you, your best bet is to look on TartanConnect or go to the Club Fair and find some really cool organizations with like-minded people.