There once was a student who lived in a mitten...Depending on where you’re coming from, it’s possible that Mt. Pleasant might feel like a bustling suburb or it might feel like the middle of nowhere. The truth is, it’s both! Drive out of town in any direction and you will be met with fields and trees for many miles before finding another town. However, look around Mt. Pleasant and you will find a quaint downtown to take you back in time as well as most of the comforts and traffic of modern suburban life. Regardless of where you come from, there are lots of important things to know about Mt. Pleasant and CMU to survive, from restaurants to walking trails to where to buy a parking permit.
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Use Your Hand |
First, a note to those few students coming from beyond Michigan: most CMU students and even grad students are from Michigan. This means that, in conversation when hometowns come up, many of your peers will do something that, from experience, I can tell you is extremely confusing to newcomers. They will raise their right hand and point to a place on their palm. Although coming from Chicago I can tell you that this looks like a strange alien greeting, what they are doing is capitalizing on the fact that Michigan happens to be shaped like a hand and pointing to the place on their hand that is the approximate position of their hometown on a map. For the record, if you point right smack in the middle you will not be too far off from pointing at Mt. Pleasant. Eventually you will get used to this and you might even begin to recognize where certain other cities are (after six years in Mt. Pleasant I’m beginning to feel like a Michigander), but it’s good to know ahead of time that you will encounter the hand map more often than you would suspect.
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Half the Town |
Now that you’re prepared for pointing out the position of your new home on the mitten, you should learn about actually living there. First some numbers:
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Samantha Miller is graduating from CMU’s English Department with a Masters in English Language and Literature, Children’s and Young Adult Literature concentration. She is originally from the Chicago suburbs but has lived in Mount Pleasant for six years and earned her BA from CMU in 2014 with a major in sociology and a minor in journalism. Miller enjoys studying popular culture and is a raging foodie.
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