I was chatting with our news writer Mark Wilcox while putting together some of today’s issue, and somehow we got to talking odd buildings. We came to talking about National Mine’s basketball team, which played essentially on a stage with a net around it to keep the ball out of the crowd. Different!

While I couldn’t find an image of that, it did get me to thinking of how we ever could have done some things in the past. Wait, you mean there was a Tech before the SDC? It was just the Van Pelt and not Van Pelt and Opie Library once upon a time?

In anticipation of coming to Alumni Reunion in just a few weeks (!), what’s something you remember well that a student today won’t experience?

As an aside for me, I think of my first year as an undergraduate at Monmouth College. The buildings were showing some age by the time I got there, my favorite being built in 1909. There was one computer in the whole building, and the radio station still ran off of carts and records, and we were figuring out how to get CDs to work with the old board correctly. That was in 1995.

What was also nice was that the classrooms were such a constructive space. Communication and theatre shared most of the top floor, and the furniture varied from twenty to sixty years old.

But the best part was that there were two classrooms where you could crawl out the window and be atop the entrance—and it was the kind of building only a liberal arts college could have, with huge columns and bits of marble here and there. And on a clear night, there was nothing quite like sitting atop that building, seeing bits of campus come to life or head to bed. I loved it.

I went back a couple of years ago when I applied for a faculty position there. The classrooms are computerized and the windows to get on the roof are gone. Most of the campus has been rebuilt, too, with new buildings everywhere, loads of technology, and otherwise a beautiful experience.

But it just isn’t the same.