Welcome

I'm Ciera, born and raised in California. Now I live in Pittsburgh. This blog is a place for my ramblings on living in "the 'burgh". It might help a little to know where I'm coming from.

I don't think I realized how much of a Cali girl I was until I moved to Pittsburgh. I can't surf, I hate skiing, and I think LA is disgusting. I never really thought about being raised in a "California culture". I'm a pretty average Californian, actually. I'm ethnically a mutt, though I am Armenian on my mother's side and third generation born in the US. I'm politically liberal, but really just left of center in California. I was raised in the Central Valley, and my extended family still raises grapes (for raisins) and now almonds (a recent change). I went to school at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, on the central coast. I graduated in 2005 with a degree in Software Engineering.

My fiance and I received job offers from Google, in Mountain View. However, we also were accepted to Carnegie Mellon University, the best school in our field. As this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we packed our bags (and the turtle!) and headed cross-country to Pennsylvania.

Saul has graduated with his Masters in Software Engineering and is working at the new Google Pittsburgh office. I'm still at CMU, working towards my PhD in Software Engineering. We recently bought a home here since it will be several more years. We live here with our cat (Puppy) and our turtle (Terabyte).

In the last year and a half, we have created many long rants about Pittsburgh and life here. If you are planning to move here, please do not let this turn you away! I really enjoy my CMU colleagues, and we do have fun. It's just an interesting experience, and it probably isn't as drastic if you're from another part of the country.

If you're a prospective student in the School of Computer Science and are concerned about moving here, please feel free to email me at cchristo [at] cs [dot] cmu [dot] edu. It's probably not as bad as this blog makes it out to be.