ETC’s Class of 2028 Begins With An Adventure

Every year, Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) takes its first-year students on the Adventure Module: a two-day team-building experience designed to help the new class learn more about each other and the industry they’re entering.

This year, our first-year students loaded up on buses and left the ETC on Friday, Aug. 28th. Their destination? The new Netflix House at the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia. Netflix House is one of the company’s new location-based entertainment venues. There, new ETC students got a chance to try out the kind of immersive experiences they’ll learn to make over the next two years.

Along the way, the class stopped for dinner at Tröegs Brewing Company before continuing east to the hotel they spent the night in. The next day, students headed to the Mall ready to explore Netflix House and test out the different Netflix-designed experiences based on some of their most popular franchises.

“I’m a big fan of ‘Stranger Things’ so getting to experience something inspired by it in such an immersive way was really fun and memorable for me,” said first-year student Eric Yang.

After some free time to explore, the first-year students wrapped up the trip with games and dinner at Dave & Buster’s before boarding the bus back to Pittsburgh. They returned later that night ready to take on their first semester at the ETC and, most importantly, to do it together.

“One of my favorite parts of the trip was sharing a room with Hazel [Han, another first-year], who I had literally just met,” first-year Rae Zhang said. “We ended up getting along really well and had so much fun together, which honestly made the whole trip even better.”