Carnegie Institute of Technology

Abstract

College for me was different from the experience for many other students because I was a “townie.” I lived at home, though most students lived in dormitories. As a consequence, I did not develop many new friends in college, though some from my high school days were also in my class. Pittsburgh was very different then from the clean city of today, and the education of an engineer at Carnegie Institute of Technology—now Carnegie Mellon University— was different too. Some of this may be worth recalling for reality rather than nostalgia.

In my freshman year the course in engineering drawing and descriptive geometry met nine hours a week and had plenty of outside work as well. We learned about hardness of pencils, how to use sandpaper to make leads into points or wedges, and gained skill with T-square, ruler, engineer’s triangles, steel drawing tools, and some students, but not I, became skilled with India ink. No one ever called me neat in my work, not even my mother or my wife, and these instructors prized neatness.