Some people spend their whole lives living in Pittsburgh. We grow up looking at the Cathedral of Learning as almost as symbolic of Pitt as Roc. Some of us have parents who were alumni and were born bleeding blue and gold and fist pumping while humming the tune of “Sweet Caroline.” But how did people who didn’t get thrown into the Zoo at birth end up here?
A lot of people didn’t even have to leave their home state to come to Pitt. Alicia is from Philadelphia, and she was choosing between Boston University and Pitt (the best school in Pennsylvania). Good for Pitt that it’s pretty affordable. We’ve also got a way better city with some of the best people around. We all love the small-town feel of Oakland in this city.
Bekah lived in the Lone Star State, and she wanted to go far away from home because who wants to live 20 minutes from their parents forever? She came up to Pittsburgh one time to see family and took a trip to Pitt. She loved the campus and the atmosphere, but she had one more school to explore: West Virginia Ewwniversity. Surprise, surprise, Pitt is better. She came to visit her family, and she left with her future all planned out.
Some people come to Pittsburgh for family, others come for our season-winning sports teams. What city can say they’ve had a Super Bowl and a Stanley Cup victory in the same year or a Super Bowl win the same year as a World Series win? I’m thinking the city of champions – that’s right, Pittsburgh! Well, Katie was smart enough to realize her love of the Pittsburgh Penguins early on, even though she is originally from New York. She came to watch a game, fell in love with Pitt, and the rest is history.
Some people cross states, others cross oceans to come to this great school. Mario, from Italy, is a junior who is pre-med. Mario understood early on in high school that he didn’t like the idea of college in Italy because it seemed kind of like community college, and let’s face it, who wants their college stories to start out with, “Oh yeah, after I left school, my parents and I…” Once he ruled out the option to go to school near home, he started to look in the States. Since Pitt has such an awesome medical school, it was one of the first ones that showed up in his Google search for medical schools in the U.S.
Pitt is such a diverse school with so many great stories of how students ended up here. No matter if you ended up at Pitt from going with your parents to football games in your blue and gold cheerleading uniform at three years old or if you discovered Pitt a month before you got on a plane to cross the ocean to come here, we all have a great story because it’s the tale of how we succeeded and got to one of the best universities in the United States.