What PittStart won’t tell you: Advice from the class of 2015

Not long after Samantha Nuttall got to Pitt as a freshman, a bus driver told her and one of her friends they were on the wrong bus — in the middle of a neighborhood, far from Oakland.

The pair “got off the bus in the middle of some suburb to wait for some bus to take us back to Oakland,” Nuttall said. “It was horrible.”

College may seem equally exciting and daunting, but Nuttall, a 2015 Pitt graduate, made it through to the other side and now knows the ins and outs of Pitt life. Like many former students, there are some things she didn’t learn at PittStart that she wishes she would have, such as learning how to navigate Pittsburgh on the Port Authority buses.

Nuttall and her friend had been trying to get to the Wal-Mart at the Waterfront to buy supplies for their dorm room but got on the wrong bus. 

“We had used the buses maybe twice by this point,” Nuttall, a previous anthropology and acting major, said. “From all that, I learned to ask the bus driver where the bus is going before you get on the bus, not after,” she said.

Joseph Kozak, also a 2015 Pitt graduate who majored in physics engineering and is now in an engineering master’s program at Pitt, offered some advice from inside the classroom.

Kozak said he would have benefitted from someone telling him to check all pages of a test before turning it in. This piece of advice might seem minor, but would have made a big difference for his freshman year grades.

After finishing an exam, Kozak shared his thoughts on the test with a friend while walking to the Carnegie Library.

“And I mentioned how strange it was we didn’t have a question on a particular topic,” Kozak said. 

To Kozak’s dismay, his friend informed him that there were questions based on of every topic covered in the class. He had forgotten to answer an entire problem on the back of the last page, worth one fifth of the exam.

“My friend consoled me as he told me there was a fifth question,”  Kozak said. “Since that day I check the back of every exam, just in case.”

For Haley Chizever, a 2015 Pitt graduate who majored in psychology and Jewish Studies, she found embarking on adventures outside of Oakland and buckling down for stressful sessions in Hillman Library are better with a friend or two.

While many students expect to make friends with others on their residence hall floors, Chizever said freshmen don’t have to be friends with the first people they meet.

“Some people really do find that their best friends are also their neighbors, but not everyone clicks with their floor. And that’s OK,” Chizever said. 

After she became close with someone, she said, she would meet that person’s friends and the group of them would all hang out together.

“If you’re friends with someone, you already like them, so odds are you’ll like the other people they are friends with,” Chizever said.

Nuttall’s last piece of advice was to help students push through late night Hillman study sessions.

“Yes, you can order pizza to the library,” Nuttall said.