The Tartan

What does it mean to be a student at Carnegie Mellon? Pulling all-nighters? Never leaving campus? A passion for bagpipes? This week, we set out to understand what exactly it means to #turntartan on today’s campus. 

Primarily, to be a Tartan means your heart is in the work whether you want it to be or not. We recognize that there is a large culture of pride in how little we take care of ourselves and lack of sleep. However, beyond the “academic weapon” “grindset” mentality, it seems the only other thing that we can agree on is that a large part of our student body hates nothing more than going here. 

Looking back, we remembered how exciting it was to find out we would be attending Carnegie Mellon, only to be met with the realization that once on campus, we were more likely to find students who loathed Tartanhood than loved it. The question we ask today is: Why? The only people on campus who seem to voice their school pride are members of The Kiltie Marching Band and cheer teams. 

As an entity, EdBoard is largely composed of people who enjoy going to this school. However, the majority of us bow to Dietrich and lack an understanding of what it means to be a CIT or SCS student. The schools on campus have an incredibly insular feel and the only means that students have to make cross-school connections is through participating in Greek life or other activities and programs.

Looking at other colleges and universities across the country, it’s hard not to compare and notice a large sense of lacking on the side of Carnegie Mellon. We don’t have a large sports culture on campus that drives the tradition of schools Notre Dame, University of Texas, and USC. If you were to ask the archetypal Carnegie Mellon student if they wanted to catch a football game? They would probably say no and opt to work instead. Our hearts are in the work, not in the tailgate. 

Many EdBoard members cited “Mean Girls 2” as a seminal classic that every Tartan should watch. The film follows a student with a single dream — to turn Tartan. UChicago has “When Harry Met Sally,” and here at Carnegie Mellon we have “Mean Girls 2.” Maybe students wouldn’t feel such downtrodden apathy for our school if Carnegie Mellon meant more to the world beyond the campus than “Mean Girls 2.”

But were things always this way? One member of EdBoard cited that he felt as though the COVID-19 pandemic had made a huge impact on the campus culture that we haven’t quite recovered from yet. Club memberships went down and it became hard to get people to engage in campus happenings. Like any other campus, we too had hijinks akin to “Animal House” with a large culture of steam tunneling and even a few cases of Cut-streaking. We believe that this needs to return. It’s impossible to turn around the plethora of hate that people feel for this institution and towards themselves for committing to this school, so why not direct this into a less grim energy and channel it into a rambunctious remarketing of what it means to be a student at Carnegie Mellon?

Many of us here are nerds. That is a fact. But no one likes a nerd without a dream. We need to be the type of nerds who can pull off pranks like putting a horse in Farnams office just because we are smart enough to pull it off without getting caught. In 1997, a Cornell student pulled off a prank where they put a pumpkin on top of a 173 foot tower where it couldn’t be removed. We have a huge phallic tower in the middle of the Cut that is begging to be vandalized. As Tartans, we must do better.  The fact of the matter is that campus culture is going to stay largely the same until the collective feels compelled to do something about it. We on EdBoard urge you to cheer a little louder for the buggy races, learn the fight song (which we do have), and give President Jahanian a hug every time you see him on campus. It’s a Tartan tradition and it’s up to us to uphold it!