I am delighted that so many CMU students of my acquaintance are frustrated at CMU-Pittsburgh emotional distance from CMU-Qatar. But it came to me: the expectation that everyone of our around 6000 undergrads here would have a relationship with the 350-ish undergrads there is a little silly.
Below are 10 communities who I believe include more than 350 people at CMU with which whom I think most CMU students have no deep relationships. I am mostly guessing at the numbers, because like most CMU students, I have few connections to these groups:
- Graduate students
- Scotch’N’Soda alums
- Athletes
- Dancers for Dancers’ Symposium
- ECE Majors
- Drama Majors
- Music Majors
- Biology Majors
- Chemistry Majors
- Post-Docs
The most ridiculous group with whom most undergraduates share no meaningful connection is graduate students–at CMU there are around 4000 of them. If Pittsburgh undergrads have so little connection to a group which is more than 10 times larger than the CMU undergrad population in Doha, it is a miracle that any of them feel connected to our fellow undergrads in Qatar.
I guess cultural disconnects stem from many sources.
Inspirational Quote:
“The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in the uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses—pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.”—Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
