First month in Pittsburgh!

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been over a month since I came to Carnegie Mellon University. It’s been a pretty wild ride--I barely know where to start!

Coming all the way across the country to Pittsburgh means I’ve got a whole lot of new places to explore! Here’s map of some of the places I’ve gone to so far (marked with hearts <3 ):

Cathedral of Learning:

The Cathedral of Learning (lovingly called ‘Cathy’ by those who know her :) ) is a huge cathedral a short walk away from CMU. It has 42 floors and the public can access all the way up to the 36th floor. A bunch of friends and I took a late night trip to the 36th floor so we could look down at CMU. After walking all throughout the CMU campus for the past month, it was super interesting to see it from a bird's-eye view.

Carnegie Music Hall:

I went with a couple of friends from SCS to see the Dean of SCS, Andrew Moore interview the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. The building was absolutely gorgeous with such intricate designs. I agreed with Wozniak’s message of simply aiming to be a nice person in life and really enjoyed hearing Moore’s insightful questions and comments. We also got to hear a cool introduction speech by the mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto.

Duquesne Incline:

If I had to pick one thing that someone visiting Pittsburgh should do, it would be going up the Duquesne Incline. I went with some floormates in the night and saw these gorgeous views, and I’m surely going to go again in the daytime for another breathtaking view. You can see all three of the rivers around Pittsburgh come to their meeting point at Point State Park. On top of that, there was a Pens game (I recently found out Pens means Penguins--not Pennsylvania :P) so we got to see fireworks as well!

The Fence:

Painting The Fence is an interesting tradition at CMU, which you can read more about here and here. But in a nutshell, clubs and organizations can paint The Fence to advertise their message to the school. There are a few restrictions to make it challenging--you can’t use spray paint, you can only paint it after midnight, and you must guard it through the night to ensure another organization doesn’t paint over your message too soon. My dorm community, Morewood, has yellow as our theme color, so I had a lot of fun painting the fence bright yellow with my dorm-mates.

Botanical Gardens:

The Botanical Gardens are a gorgeous exhibit full of different flora along with glasswork. It really amazes me how someone was able to come up with the idea of combining all these flowers with glass sculptures. The result is really beautiful. Also, there was an exhibit with sounds created by CMU students!

PNC Stadium:

I was lucky enough to get front row seats with my aunt and uncle to attend a Pirates Game at PNC Stadium. It was so amazing to actually be so close to the players. At one point I was just 10 feet away from Joshua Bell while I was wearing his very T-shirt!  

On top of that, my parents watched the game on TV and were actually able to spot us in the audience!

There are a whole bunch of things I haven’t included in this list like: going to Pamela’s Diner--a world-famous Pittsburgh-only diner, and visiting two of the Carnegie Museums--the art museum and the natural history museum, but there’s just so much to do and explore!