Tepper School Offers Hope During a Hopeless Time

It was a regular Saturday morning in Pittsburgh. Students were making their way across each of the city’s campuses, laughing and talking with their friends, planning what they would be wearing for the Halloween parties coming up. Others were in their rooms, like myself, catching up on all the sleep they lost throughout the week. Everything seemed to be normal and good in the city — until it wasn’t.

When I woke up on Saturday, I saw my phone filled with CMU-Alert Texts: CMU on lockdown, shelter inside; there is an active shooting near campus, please stay inside until further notice. Then came the CNN notification: live shooting in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Suddenly, this regular Saturday morning didn’t seem so regular anymore; it would become a Saturday etched into history as the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history.

At a time like this, the most important thing is to remember that at the end of the day, we are all a community. It is important to remember that we need to put aside our differences and our desire to stand out, and come together as a community to ensure that something like this can never happen again. There were many ways that this idea was articulated across all of Pittsburgh: every professor was addressing the events of the weekend and reminding students of their support staff on campus, Soldiers and Sailors held an evening vigil for the community to come together and mourn, and individual campuses sought to do activities as well in order to make a difference.

The Tepper School of Business held one of these activities: Monday morning at the Tazza D’Oro in the business school there was a time for everyone to gather and come together and unify against the tragic events. The goal was for the event to be a safe haven for people to be near each other and help each other cope with what had happened, and many people attended to offer their shoulders to share the heavy load of the community. The following is the message that was at the Tepper Quad, posted across social media as well to raise awareness:

The Tepper Quad is offering hope during a hopeless time in an effort to remind everyone that we are never alone. We are a community.

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Meet Wadhwa | Undergraduate Business 2022

Meet joined the Tepper School of Business in 2018, an Undergraduate Business Administration student, double majoring in Statistics, with a minor in Psychology, from Edison, New Jersey. When Meet is not studying, he spends his time playing basketball, hiking, or hanging out with his friends. He is also a member of Fresh Check Day, 180 Degrees Consulting, and plays IM basketball. He will be joining the hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, upon graduation as a Trading Associate.

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