2025 was my twentieth high school reunion. While I didn’t mark this by attending any sort of awkward excuse for a party or in fact seeing any of my old classmates whatsoever, I can’t help but acknowledge that May of 2025 kicked off a whole lot of twentieth anniversaries in my life. Once high school was over, a lot of big things started happening quickly; as you may guess from some of the fiction I write, college was a really formative time in my life. I marked the twentieth anniversary of my gaming group back in September of 2025, but April of 2026, last week specifically, was the twentieth anniversary of attending a Carnegie Mellon Spring Carnival.

I typically ask for very little grace when it comes to outright nostalgia; I try to think about high school as little as possible and my time at CMU was, though certainly important to me, mostly remembered as the swirling cauldron that popped some version of me out around 2011. But every April, the university held a long weekend of festivities that, in one form or another, I will remember for the rest of my life. It wasn’t only the literal four day weekend of Carnival itself, or how it always kicked off the spiraling denouement of the semester that went Carnival, my birthday, then finals. Because of what we did during Carnival, we spent, at some level, essentially the whole year preparing.

Now if you’re a CMU alum you already know what I’m talking about, whether or not you actually care or cared about it as much as I do (or did?). But let me back up and provide some context. I was in a fraternity in college, and at Carnegie Mellon fraternities and sororities had an underlying expectation to participate in ‘The Big Three’, three campus events that underpinned the Greek community’s connection to campus life and contributions to the broader student body. In one case this was literal; the first of the Big Three (and the one that isn’t relevant to the rest of this writing) is Greek Sing, a charity event where organizations, either paired up or alone, put on a 13 minute musical revue, are judged by volunteer faculty judges, and raise money, usually well into the tens of thousands of dollars, for an organization selected by the organizing committee. The other two events, known colloquially as Booth and Buggy, are centerpieces of Spring Carnival, and every year I was involved in both of them.

It’s pretty hard to explain either Booth or Buggy to someone who didn’t go to Carnegie Mellon. The short version is that nerds, when faced with free time, will try to get rid of as much of it as possible. This was shockingly still a phenomenon at a school where I conservatively worked 80-100 hours a week as an engineering/policy double major, but yet both myself, my fraternity brothers, and about a dozen other organizations both Greek and not leaned into both of these activities each year to incredible results. First, Booth. The centerpiece of CMU’s Spring Carnival is a student-run midway that’s open to the public. Organizations each make a carnival booth which must have a carnival game, and there is a competition to see who makes the best one. ‘Carnival Booth’ is underselling what we did (and current students still do). My junior year, our carnival game was a moon landing simulator, complete with full motion video and (I think) three mini-games. My sophomore year, the entire booth was a giant pinball machine…the game was that the giant pinball machine actually worked, scoreboard and all. Of course there is a range of booths on the midway, based on each organization’s size and budget, but the competitive booths, the ones trying to win, were always incredible.

Buggy is quite a bit weirder than Booth, in a way. CMU Buggy is a gravity-powered vehicle race on a road course that runs along the periphery of campus, divided into one downhill and two uphill sections. Each organization must design a human piloted vehicle to navigate this course as quickly as possible. What that means nowadays is that a ‘buggy’ is a carbon fiber monocoque vehicle just large enough to fit the smallest driver the organization can recruit (usually underclassmen women between four foot eight and four foot ten). The carbon fiber layup is done in-house, the steering mechanisms are custom, and the rolling stock are taken from high-performance kick and e-scooters with custom formulated tire rubber replacing whatever the wheels came with for their original purpose. It is an incredible amount of engineering and yeah, mostly done in students’ free time. I chaired our buggy team just as we were trying to refine a buggy build process, as my fraternity had never built a buggy from scratch at the point I joined. By the time I graduated we built our first true monocoque buggy, and the fraternity deciding to discontinue the buggy program shortly after I graduated was one reason I never ended up donating any money to the house as an alumnus (not the only one, but it was the most important one in my head around age 24 or 25 when ‘donating to your fraternity’ seems like a meaningful financial decision). I learned how to lay up fiberglass and carbon fiber, how to use body filler and design Ackermann steering geometry, and how to do a bit of project management and run a design process. More importantly, I learned how much of life comes down to showing up, especially when I had to deal with people who didn’t.

So yeah, four Spring Carnivals during my undergrad were, both in that four-day span and around it, really goddamn important to me. So I kept coming back. Starting in 2010 (not that it was hard, I was still living in Pittsburgh and enrolled at CMU) and going through 2014, I went back every year. Then I went back in 2019 for my tenth reunion and, whether by virtue of being over 30, the fact that the entire Carnival midway had been moved due to the new business school building, or simply not knowing as many people as I did the previous five times, everything kind of fell flat. That’s always the hazard of nostalgia, and everything will change…it’s just a question of whether or not it’s changing slowly enough for you to accept it.

There was one more thing that happened every Carnival, and in a way this one thing was the whole reason I even observed the notion of the twentieth anniversary of my first Spring Carnival. As evidenced by my own returns, Spring Carnival was the de facto reunion weekend for Carnegie Mellon (they only moved the actual reunions from Homecoming to Carnival while I was there, which still seems incredible to me), and our house was full of alums from every era of the house (the chapter formed in 1987 so that’s perhaps not that wild, especially back in 2005, but even so). I remember meeting so many people who had passed through that house, passed through all the different experiences I was in the process of having, and they brought back news from the other side. When you’re 18 or 19, and especially when one of your early adolescent memories of a friend leaving home was a very bad one, this was so important.

The funny thing is, looking back on Spring Carnival versus my gaming group, one clearly stayed in the past. I’m still gaming with four people from that gaming group at CMU, including two of the founding members. While I kept up with people more regularly when I was younger, going to a number of fraternity weddings between the ages of 25 and 30, nowadays I keep up with basically no one who was a brother or a friend of the house while I was in undergrad. Those connections did not hold; we were pulled together by religious affinity, something I have distanced myself from a bit since college, and something fairly ineffable in the form of ‘house culture’, a bond that, while real at the time, clearly had less staying power than the humble tabletop roleplaying game.

In some ways, my fraternity experiences and Spring Carnival experiences sit in contrast to my college TTRPG experiences. Studying to be an engineer and then also committing myself to an intensity of campus culture shaped me as a person. Twenty years later, though, what we did and what we built is what sticks in my mind. With my gaming friends, I found a room of boon companions, and that is still true for essentially everyone there whether they still play with us or not. They were not the best games I ever played or ran, we were young and all of us kept getting better. But who was in the room mattered. That’s not to say who my brothers are didn’t matter, and not to say that we weren’t shaped by what and how we played. But overall, looking back, when it came to my time in the fraternity I got experiences, skills and tempering as a person. When it came to my time gaming in college, that’s where I got the lifelong friends. And I suppose, twenty years on, that’s why I still go to Delaware every year but not Pittsburgh. I do expect I’ll go back in 2029, though, for my 20th reunion. There’s something to be said about seeing how the next generation is going to be tempered and shaped by the same experiences that were formative to me. And maybe, just maybe, I can offer the sort of connection that was offered to me when I was there back in April of 2006.