“I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

That’s a quote from the season finale of the Office when Andy Bernard, one of the characters, shares his reflections about his time at the company, Dunder Mifflin. For him, he shares that throughout his life he had always looked (and yearned) for his past – when he first came into the company, yearning for his alma mater and later when he went onto showbiz yearning for his time at Dunder Mifflin. Yet it seems to be only after he had left those positions before yearning for them. This quote really resonated with me over the past couple of days as I’m back home after a fun-filled, busy senior week and Commencement weekend. (Crazy how it’s been almost a week since President Jahanian had officially conferred the nearly 5600 undergraduate degrees to the Class of 2019.) While I feel I had genuinely appreciated each of my moments as a student over the past four years (different from Andy where he hadn’t really made the most of his moments), it’s still been a week of slow reflections, scrolling through all the graduation posts on Facebook and Instagram and taking a trip down memory lane. And throughout this past week there’s also been some soul searching (and job searching too) – thinking about what my future away from my CMU and Pittsburgh home would look like. Who to stay in touch with, and how that’ll work, now that I can’t necessarily just call someone up to grab a coffee at Tazza or brunch at Pamela’s (though I firmly tell myself this isn’t goodbye to Tazza or Pamela’s), or also just in general the question of how to be a real adult? I’m not going to go too deep into the reflections (though for those interested feel free to check out my personal blog – link below), but one thing I do like to close out with is that I’d like to express my true gratitude and appreciation for the friends, faculty, staff, and the Pittsburgh community for the opportunities and support over the past four years. I am firm believer that everything happens for a reason and also that one’s successes (and failures) are not a result of only one person, but of many, which is why it is of utmost importance to keep that gratitude in mind. For one person’s fortune is everyone’s fortune. And finally, as I’ve been telling myself countless times, I believe it’s not necessarily goodbye but that with fate, we may meet and cross paths again. So thanks again for the continued support and following of my posts for the past couple of years.

Signing off as an undergrad but signing on as an alum,

Eric Huang

#foreverTartan #plaid #cmugrad #tepperEcon #pittsburgh #lifeattepper #lifeatcmu

Graduating from both Dietrich and Tepper as an Economics major!

Feel free to read more of my reflections here, and feel free to check out the rest of my personal blog that I started a couple months ago as inspired by many things one of which my experience as Tepper blogger.

Special shoutout to Doug McIntyre in Tepper Marketing and Communications, who’s in charge of the blog, for the never-ending support. And also for helping to proofread some of the past posts too xD