The first person to pump you up for Carnival was not your freshman RA, the sophomore boys you met at an orientation party or even the commenter on Carnegie Mellon’s CollegeProwler page. You started ticking down the days to CMU’s one-hundred year tradition halfway through your first trip to campus when your tour guide enticed you with the three B’s: BBQ, Buggy and Booth.
Andrea Slamkowski is an Andrew Ambassador, one of these guides motivating prospective students each day to not only come to Carnegie Mellon, but to Pittsburgh. She says, “You’re not just selling the school, but the city.”
While Carnegie Mellon attracts the best and the brightest, so does NYU, USC, and other top-notch universities. It’s one thing to sell academics, but it’s another to sell a lifestyle when the competitors are located in seemingly more enticing cities.
Carnival fills that gap. As a tour guide, Andrea takes on the responsibility of not only relaying what makes our school unique, but also persuading prospective students to see the CMU spark that we see.
We all know that CMU culture is synonymous to stress culture, but we also know that, even if it’s only for a few days a year, “fun” is not too foreign of a term. Andrea engrains the mentality that CMU is not “all work no play” into prospective students, breaking barriers from the start that we are more than our QPA.
“It’s tricky because all these students come on MLK day or Presidents weekend when they have off school and clearly we don’t.” Sure, they may have the weekend, but each spring, we get two days off of school to race each other in man-made carts, consume all the burgers and hot dogs sizzling on side street cookouts, and throw ourselves into building two story themed structures.
Andrea attests for booth from experience. As a sorority woman, she has committed to helping her organization build booths since freshman year. Three years later, she has earned equitable minors in construction and information technology. She never expected to learn how to cut wood, use a drill or wire electricity, but as a devoted booth-goer, she has gained several manual skills she would have never picked up otherwise.
While she may be able to convince incoming students to come to CMU so they too can learn how to use a jigsaw that is only an added bonus compared to the quirky traditions and authenticity of our carnival.