By Advaith Sridhar
Before I joined Carnegie Mellon, I was in awe of its elite reputation. Now, as I graduate this week, I can look back and appreciate the sacrifices that I made along the way. Carnegie Mellon’s motto — “my heart is in the work” — begins to capture the effort that is needed to survive here. However, it is not enough — in my parting words of wisdom, I humbly suggest that every incoming student be willing to place many more organs on the line besides the heart, in order to meet Carnegie Mellon’s high bar.
Of course, the first and most obvious organ that must go is the kidney. A good kidney can easily fetch up to $5,000 in the market. An average student would require 13 such kidneys to fund one year of education (~$64,000) at Carnegie Mellon, and should therefore acquire as many as possible from family members before arriving.
For those worried about your family’s nephrological deficiencies, don’t fear. Carnegie Mellon’s official saving strategies guide provides valuable financial planning recommendations such as “Split or share meals with friends” and “Don’t shop more than once a week.” Doing this can have an incredible impact — sacrificing your stomach by skipping a few dinners can save you around $20 per week. This totals to $650 per academic year — insignificant compared to tuition of course, but just enough to pay your additional “first year experience fee.”
As you prepare to hand over your organs to the institute, it’s important to remember that you must not hesitate. After all, the university needs money to pay salaries — the president’s salary increases 19 percent every year, and Carnegie Mellon spends a huge amount of money on administration. Spending on administration expenses is seven times what it was 20 years ago, but the number of students has only increased by a modest one and a half times in the same period. This is clearly a call to arms! Hand over your arms as well to the university; it costs an arm and a leg to grow admin staff the way our university has. Soon, we could hit a glorious milestone by 2034 — a personal admin staff for every student in the university [Figure 1].
Figure 1: By the year 2034, every CMU student will have their own personal admin staff
For those of you who may struggle to provide your pound of flesh, rest assured that you are in good hands. Carnegie Mellon understands the importance of student health — so much so that it is shelling out $105 million on a new health and wellness building. This giant tower will help students establish “a lifetime of physical, spiritual and emotional health” — surely a few organs can be given up in exchange for this? Figure 2 explores some other inferior options that Carnegie Mellon thankfully did not take to improve student health.
Figure 2: Some ways to improve student wellbeing, and their costs
And remember, doing all the above just gets you started. The best students sell the whole body. Use your voice to call alumni for donations — it’s one of the university’s best paid on-campus jobs. Be deaf to the pleas of doctoral students protesting unlivable wages. Turn a blind eye when you realize that the most of the university’s research funding comes from the Department of Defense. And lastly, switch off your brain, so you may forget the mission that this university was founded with — Andrew Carnegie’s dream of providing free education to deserving children of poor working class communities.
And perhaps then, will you be able to truly put your heart in the work.