Back in 1900 Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Technical Schools for the working-class children of Pittsburgh, and you are on the campus of what became Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie wanted to give the sons and daughters of steelworkers the practical technical education that would allow them to rise in the industrial economy. The school opened with departments in industrial arts, decorative arts, home economics, and science.
It became Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in 1967 to become Carnegie Mellon University, now one of the world's leading research universities in computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering. The robotics institute here, founded in 1979, has been the world center for autonomous systems research for four decades, and the AI research conducted on this campus helped establish Pittsburgh as a hub for autonomous vehicle development. The drama department has trained generations of leading actors and directors, including Ted Danson and Holly Hunter.
Carnegie's vision of practical education for working-class children produced a university that now shapes the technological future. There is poetry in that: the steel man's school now builds the robots that are redefining what labor means in the next century.