Thank you, CIA

Disclaimer: this has nothing to do with the Central Intelligence Agency, and everything to do with the Carnegie Involvement Association. Join if you still have the chance.

If you told me five years ago that I would spend a solid chunk of my college weekends waking up at 4 AM, voluntarily? I would laugh out loud. And yet here we are, five years later. It definitely happened. It's a little surreal to look back and remember.

There's no way that I liked the color yellow this much before coming to CMU. If you look at my transcript, you might spot a suspicious lack of classes on Friday mornings (too busy pancaking), along with a variety of dropped classes plus one (1) final grade of Withdraw (too busy in the garage). The garage phone number is still burned into my memory, even though I got card access during my freshman year.

The buggy experiences span across all of my senses. I know what it feels like to pull a carbon fiber splinter out of my thumb, hay out of my pockets, that groggy post-rolls feeling, tingly arms after a long sanding session, the strain in my vocal cords while explaining buggy to the hundredth person that day, and the thigh-burning presence of a driver on my back mid-squat. The sharpness of acetone, the bite of Fuddle's horseradish dip, the WD-40 that lingers no matter how much you wash your hands, the complex flavors of the chili-cheese Frito pancake (shoutout also to the second-best, spam), and the shocking sweetness of Loctite. Hearing the whirrs and whines and bangs of the garage, that ridiculous countdown that somehow became normal (3-2-1 and ready-set-go?), the rattle of another piece of hardware you dropped in the bowels of a buggy, the boop-boop of Zello, and the sultry sounds of a man who flew to Japan to sing ABBA in a big cold river. I can still see the catchers reach out from the pushbar camera's view, the garage in its various rearrangements over the years, that goddamned fish, staring at the bylaws PDF cover-to-cover (? I hardly know her!), and the view from behind our little table covered in bottles in the basement of the CIA house.

I learned how to cut in when the same few people (you know who you are) argue back-and-forth for what feels like forever even though they already agree on 99% of what they're saying.

I learned that 30+ flights of stairs sounds impossible but every step along the way isn't too bad, and that the view from the top of the Cathedral is worth the sweat.

I learned every checkbox on those safety sheets by heart, and I learned how embarrassing it is to send someone to the garage to grab a hacksaw, to cut off part of the (REDACTED) in Posner before rolls started. Because that wasn't a checkbox on the safety sheet.

I could fill a book with the good times and crazy stories, but - like the Pittsburgh weather - there were more stormy periods than I'd prefer. My time in CIA is littered with small regrets and also the larger ones: careless mistakes, trying to do everything alone, failing drops, asking for too much, asking for too little, being too harsh. It would be nice to go back and do a few things differently.

Above all, I am thankful for the people I met and the community we managed to build together. Back in my day, it was not uncommon to mechanic multiple buggies, drop them at hill 2, and then run down for a 4-5 double. Over the years I had to switch and just push full-time since there were already too many mechanics in the tent! We went from the heroic feats of a head mechanic powered by Mountain Dew instead of sleep, to a veritable council of competent and dedicated mechanics making big plans, fixing processes, and getting things done together (and often still, alone).

We put together a bunch of (beautiful! fast! exciting!) buggies over the years, and yet the most important buggies were the friendships we built along the way. Not everyone who joined the team stuck around, but I cherish all of the time we had together. There's something about this buggy thing, the late nights and early mornings and countless hours, that encourages us to open up and reveal who we really are. And it turns out that every single person in CIA is completely weird, especially the ones who seem normal. There are no exceptions. These weirdos are some of my closest friends and I hope they stay that way for life.

Moving on from the activity that consumed my entire college life is a little hard, to say the least. At my last raceday (though I didn't know it would be at the time), I pushed Hill 2. After you pass the stop sign, the hill slopes downwards, the buggy accelerates, and you give her the biggest shove while you still have the chance. Then there's nothing left to do, except jog back to watch the jumbotron and trust your teammates. It's a relay. So I guess it's time to push off.

I recently saw a message in our Slack referring to "old people" and I kind of laughed before realizing, wow, they really are the old people now. When I hear that I think of a bunch of amazing people that the younger folks might not ever meet, who graduated in the years above me. I can only hope to be an old person for the current set of students. It's inspiring to see the next generation of CIA pick up the torch, to watch them take on greater responsibility and bring new ideas and grow into better leaders than I ever was. I hope that as they see behind the scenes they don't get disillusioned - that instead they get motivated and put in the work to make CIA special for everyone else. No slacking: you can get over the phase of angsty not-believing-in-Santa, and skip straight to the part where you grow up and become Santa.

Right now, the future of buggy seems a little uncertain. Raceday 2020, the hundredth anniversary of the first Raceday, was canceled due to that whole global pandemic thing. Rolls and Raceday for 2021 are questionable as well. It was frustrating: just when we'd gotten Kingfisher out, just when we were picking up talent and skill and momentum in what was looking like the most competitive shot we had to win it all since my first year. I was more than a little emotional behind the mask when I locked up the garage back in March, knowing it might be the last time.

But as Jean would say, "It's fucked, but it's okay". I have confidence in the young leadership of CIA, who have been planning for the year ahead in the face of uncertainty and are, right now, running an unprecedented recruitment season over Zoom. 2020 was an unexpected setback: a stop in the chute. But if buggy has taught me anything, it's that it only takes a bump to start making progress uphill.