Cy Gavin

Yeah.

And that motivating drive for so many of the people I went to school with, if not all of them, made them spend huge amounts of money for student projects that looked like museum kind of incredible things they were making, and then they immediately stopped making work as soon as they graduated.

What I struggled with in that situation in undergraduate studies was that it was this kind of feedback loop where...

people were really like only interested in having a career.

And so what was wonderful about being at Carnegie Mellon was that it was a university where I could take classes in other departments.

And they actually force a sort of interdisciplinary relationship you have to choose if you're going to go to humanities and partner with them or science.

And I actually went with humanities.

when I was thinking about going to a graduate program, it was important to me to be like, I want to have access to other kinds of coursework that will actually like not just be talking about what shows are happening wherever and, or what some theorists wrote about, whatever, like actually to have access to like, as I, when I was at school, I studied with Kelly Jones, who was like an enormously influential person and,

to me and also studied in anthropology department.

And that enriched that experience immensely.

And yeah, like it made me have a kind of multidimensional time there that I think many people, you wouldn't have actually, you would not have that if you just had the coursework of your department.

Hugely.

I mean, enormously.

So all you had to do was like really write a professor.

And that was as simple as getting a course catalog and seeing what looked interesting.

Their email would be there.

And then because you're a grad student and they're not going to kick you out, you just write them and say, is it possible that I can...

Being in a class is a sort of pass-fail thing.

And they could say no.

They usually said yes because they wanted different points of view.