About Us

The mission of CMU Shotokan Karate is to provide training opportunities for students learning karate-do. Karate is a martial art, or fighting method, involving a variety of techniques, including blocks, strikes, evasions, throws, and joint manipulations. The word karate is a combination of two Japanese characters: kara, meaning empty, and te, meaning hand. Thus, karate means "empty hand." Adding the suffix "-do", meaning "way," i.e., karate-do, implies karate as a total way of life that goes well beyond the self-defense applications. In traditional karate-do, we always keep in mind that the true opponent is oneself. The club has existed at Carnegie Mellon since 1966. Our objectives are to: 1) provide excellent karate instruction to the community; 2) encourage students to make progress through continuous testing; 3) produce new generation of black-belt karate instructors. Our senior dojo leader (Bruce Schmidt) has been training at CMU since 1975. We intend to continue this rich tradition of karate training at Carnegie Mellon.