When Alyssa Reuter had to choose a college, she wanted one that offered programs in computer science and the arts. “The one school that was strong in both was Carnegie Mellon,” she says.

But how could she combine her two passions? Getting undergraduate degrees from both SCS and the College of Fine Arts—a double major—would have meant an extremely heavy workload, because the majors don’t have many overlapping courses.

As it turns out, Reuter wasn’t the only student asking to combine the disciplines into one undergraduate degree, says Franco Sciannameo, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Bachelor of Humanities and Arts (BHA) and Bachelor of Science and Arts (BSA) programs—joint efforts between CFA, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Mellon College of Science.

Students were literally “knocking on my door,” Sciannameo says. From game design and computer animation to computer music and robotic art, technology and the arts are no longer separable, he says. More >

Maxine Eskenazi knows how much can depend on the meaning of a single word. While she was living in France, her French mother-in-law sent one of her American aunts a gift of delicate chiffon fabric. But the French have a different name for the sheer material—mousseline—while “chiffon” means “rag.” Eskenazi’s mother-in-law received, therefore, a well-intentioned note thanking her for the “nice rags.”
Such incidents, along with Eskenazi’s experiences teaching English in France, instilled in her a lifelong appreciation for the intricacies of language learning. More > (PDF p. 15)

Kent Harries is bouncing around in a Jeep in the remote Darjeeling region of India when suddenly his life flashes before his eyes. A large military truck is coming the other way down the one-lane road, and he knows it’s not getting out of the way. He and student Derek Mitch hang on as the Jeep driver veers out of the truck’s path, narrowly averting disaster. More > (PDF p. 7)

Si Yang Ng was thrilled with the guest lecturer in his improv class—a well-known motion picture actor. Ng willingly participated at every opportunity, which didn’t go unnoticed. “You’re from Asia, but you speak up quite openly,” the movie star said to Ng. “Can you tell me why I’m having so much trouble getting Asians to speak up in my improv classes?” More >

Cynthia Sherry is having dinner with seven gentlemen at a Dallas restaurant. All of them are radiologists, and Sherry is about to become the first female partner of the practice. During the meal, one partner says to her, “I’ll bet you’ve never been to dinner with seven men before.” If the radiologists think Sherry is uncomfortable with the numbers, they’re wrong. More >

Oil erupts from the ground with a whoosh! Dirt-poor Jett Rink (James Dean, in Giant, his last film role) staggers backward, arms outstretched, letting the “black gold” rain down on him.

Watching this movie as a child in Cairo, Egypt, Mahmoud Dabbous was enamored not only with the excitement of striking oil but also with the American geography and way of life it depicted.

He went on to found the Improved Petroleum Recovery (IPR) Group of Companies, of which he is president and chief executive officer. More (Large PDF) >

National studies may show that high school students are losing interest in science, but don’t tell Andrew Hrykowian. As a sophomore at Greater Latrobe Senior High School, he began research that would lead to his discovery of a new bacteria-eating virus, which he named “catera” after a friend’s dog. More >

In the remote Ghanaian village of Jukwa last summer, Kahleb Graham and fellow Pitt students helped to build a library—despite swarms of biting insects, dubious plumbing, termites that marched across their books and papers, even malaria. More >

How did Alice Scales get from a cotton farm in Mississippi to Pitt, where today she is a nationally recognized authority on reading/literacy education? More >

“The scientific community has sometimes presented itself as being elite or quirky and not accessible to the breadth of innovative and creative students who might be well suited to scientific pursuit,” Pitt professor Graham Hatfull said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Feb. 21. “The advance of science is well served by the diversity of those who contribute to it. It is not just for the elite, for the ‘men in white coats,’ or the social oddballs. It is a pursuit that almost every person can contribute to.” More >