Almost Getting Suspended from CMU
A story of the time I got a disciplinary hearing after hacking into CMU's dining system.
I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University last semester. It’s a modest school in the rust belt city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The CS department is renowned, and its PhDs are coveted.
Pittsburgh is a city past its prime, with abandoned steel mills as quaint witnesses to an older time. It's citizens are resilient, enduring the constant rain and wind, trying their best to navigate life between Steelers' losses. Carnegie Mellon was founded by Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie was a philanthropist, but also a terrible employer. And his employees were the type to be driven more by sheer necessity than ambition (to be fair, they were factory workers).
Similarly, CMU students are driven not by dreams of passion or higher aspirations, but by the need to secure a job. CMU is a bubble in Pittsburgh, but it is still quite intertwined with the culture of the city. This has always been an issue I've taken with the university. It is fine to be a pipeline to industry, but should there not be a grander goal, a better vision we strive towards together?
For that reason, I was always passionate about improving the university however I could. One issue I tackled stemmed from the university’s dining policy. We had 'blocks' to spend at various dining locations—an assortment of third-party restaurants and a CMU-affiliated vendor (more on them later). Freshmen are forced to buy a dining plan, costing up to $4,000 a semester or $8,000 a year. For reference, the green plan works out to about $13 per block, including a side, a drink, and an entree. Most students don’t eat this much, leaving them with around 100 extra blocks by the semester's end. These blocks don’t roll over; they disappear. That’s almost $1300 wasted per student. Entrees alone, a la carte (without blocks), were about $8 each. This forced necessity frustrated everyone.
Plus, our food sucked. Our partnered vendor, Chartwells, is literally contracted to serve prison food. I've learned that painfully underseasoned meals seems to be what awaits me if I ever land in prison. Every semester, students in public policy writing classes try to address this issue, but no solutions are ever implemented.
I decided to fix it. We already had an informal market where freshman sold their blocks to upperclassmen on a Discord server. Why not automate that? I built a preliminary app over the weekend: upperclassmen request a block, freshmen nearby get a push notification—simple.
I wasn't done (when are we ever?), I wanted to sell all remaining blocks, automatically. I discovered restaurants made about, say, $8 per block used. This was an arbitrage opportunity. I devised a simple split: a freshman with 100 blocks leftover would earn $400, the restaurant $300, and I’d take $100. Win-win-win. Now, this required getting access to the API. Easily reverse engineered. Now, I needed a restaurant to work with. I went to every restaurant and asked. None would participate. Except one. The owner just smirked and said fuck it why not (paraphrased, but that's what he meant).
Now there were a maximum number of blocks usable daily, so I had to act fast, to make sure there were enough days leftover in the semester to accomodate all the blocks people would sell. Not a problem, I built the system in a day. Students could now select how many blocks they wanted to sell, enter their student ID online, and get money instantly.
To launch, I snuck into dorms to put up posters and convinced RAs to spread the word. The launch was great; in one dorm almost every single person signed up. I became something of a folk hero. Whispers in the corridors, nods in the dining halls. Nah, I'm kidding. I wish though.
Then, the next day, I almost got expelled. They asked me to shut down the project immediately and I had to have a hearing. Okay, to be fair, I did ask if it was allowed beforehand. I was told no and I still did it. This is why you ask for forgiveness after the fact. They spoke of rules and decorum; I spoke of what could be. But, end of story, I shut it down. I swear I would've expelled myself if I could have out of spite, but I was a first-generation college student; I wanted to graduate to make my parents proud. There you go mom and dad.
The aftermath was even more glorious. I posted about it on Reddit here, and it became the all-time most upvoted post on the CMU subreddit. It spread to UPitt, our neighboring college, and went viral elsewhere as well. People discussed it in classes. It sparked debates about administration, dining, housing, tuition, and more. This is good, debate is good!
It was great. I loved hearing people talk about it in my classes. Shoot, some ideas were brilliant on their own. Why not have campuses offer free food, like Google?
TL;DR I was bored, I almost helped liquidate $180,000 in dining block funds on the first day of launch, I almost got suspended, and then it was over just like that. It happened suddenly, and then not at all. Just like many things in life. I appreciated it while it lasted. I think there's a lesson in that.
Looking back, the lines between innovator and saboteur blurred. Had I really wanted to serve the students or had I disrupted things for the thrill of it? The truth, as it often is, was somewhere in the middle :).
Until an asteroid,
boon
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P.S. the main reason universities don't let you do this is because unused meal blocks are part of the school's dining budget every year. Hmph.
Give me half the budget and I could make a dining program twice as good.