<p>c_kate…I love your stories…you and friends should put together a little booklet of advice (like that naked roomate book but more specific to CMU/pittsburgh–what to avoid or seek out in terms of food, housing, courses, laundry facilities etc) and market it to frosh and parents… I used to travel I-95 so much to and from my home that as a joke we started a set of notes on truck stops/rest areas on I 95 from Mason Dixon line down to the tip of florida…etc. with special attention to rating the quality of women’s bathrooms, food, gas availabilty (many gas stations used to close at 6 pm in those days), alchohol laws and enforcement, location of speed traps in Georgia, the truth about South of the Border, etc… We had a little booklet made up (xeroxed and stapled) and sold it as a fundraiser before spring break our Junior and Senior years…back then everyone drove to Myrtle Beach SC or even as far as Daytona so the booklet sold like hotcakes. Think what you could raise for the organization of choice during orientation with your must-have-insiders-guide to CMU!</p>
<h1>17.</h1>
<p>Helicoptering p. :)</p>
<p>I only helicoptered once. Graduation. Didn’t need a car and hotels were booked. Yes it was, more than the standard, eeeewwww</p>
<p>Ahaha, that’d be really fun to do. 
With any luck next year I will be a Student Ambassador as my work-study job (they penciled me in for an August interview!) and then I’ll get to give tours and write one of the CMU blogs. That’d be a way to write bits of advice down for other students, I suppose.</p>
<p>Also, when one of my roommates was leaving the school, her uptight wealthy mother decided to stay in our dorm room while she was helping her ship things back home. This girl had been very rude, snotty, and generally a brat to all of us-- she had been very upset when we wouldn’t all pitch in and get her a $200 shirt from J. Crew that she wanted for her birthday, for example. Her mother kept trying to get us to be her friend (took us out to breakfast with this girl, etc, etc). That was awkward.</p>
<p>Even though my son decided to go elsewhere, I am really learning alot from this thread! Thanks for all the advice!</p>
<p>Haha, kate, there was a guy on my hall that was an outcast in a similar way. He had a horrible attitude, never bathed/showered, and was in general a giant jerk. His parents called the RA and demanded we all throw him a birthday party.</p>
<p>You can imagine how well that went.</p>
<p>Eek, I know kids like that too. That’s more like an Arrogant CS Nerd Complex. Other variants of this complex include the “I got bullied by jocks in high school and now I seek to lord my angry intellectualism over everyone as a form of revenge, even people who are really just trying to get by” attitude. </p>
<p>I kinda feel bad for kids like that because they usually do come from a place where they were treated like scum. Then they went to college and figured, “i’m so smart, I’ll be like the smartest person there.” Then they discovered that they weren’t, but still chose to act that way.</p>
<p>woot, Arrogant CS Nerd Complex. So special we deserve capitals.</p>
<p>and uhh… beds can be shared for many reasons. There were a handful of situations (all quite hilarious, if not disturbing) where friends of mine came back to their rooms and found somebody else sleeping in their bed. In one particularly comical case, this guy woke up in the middle of the night only to see that another of my friends had, for the lack of a better way to describe it, found his way back to the WRONG room, and climbed into what he thought was his bunk bed, despite it already being occupied. Well, when the real owner woke up he was so startled that he fell off the bunk bed, landing on his chair and breaking it.</p>
<p>@RacinReaver The kid really should have just been more proactive… I was on house council and when my birthday rolled around, I used dorm funds to buy my cake and throw my own birthday party… disguised as an “end of finals celebration”, of course.</p>
<p>oh, and make your kid’s life easy and get him Purex 3 in one detergent. it really should be 4 in one because when i opened the pack it served as an air freshener as well :D</p>