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The “busy” culture is following me
As some of my followers may know, I completed my undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon, finishing up at the end of 2018. Less than a year later, I moved to Knoxville and began my doctoral study at the University of Tennessee.
Even though I lived on Carnegie Mellon’s campus for seven semesters, some aspects of the culture on campus were only truly illuminated once I moved to Knoxville and experienced something different. Only then was I able to notice some of the potential problems with Carnegie Mellon’s campus culture.
From here on out I’m going to nickname it the “busy culture.” Why is that? One simple reason: whenever I ran into a friend on campus and asked how they were doing, I invariably got the response “busy.” Sometimes this was supplemented with an explanation of what was making them so busy, or how little sleep they had gotten because they were up all night finishing a programming assignment for course XXXXX (people often referred to courses by their course numbers, rather than the course’s name). It almost turned into a bragging contest where the winner was the person who was the most overworked and sleep-deprived. Despite Carnegie Mellon’s reputation as being a very intensive and stress-inducing university, this line of conversation didn’t strike me as abnormal until I moved to Knoxville.