Things your Guidance Counselor Maybe Didn't Drill into You.

I got the exciting news today that the son of my wife's daughter (which modulo the complications of 2nd marriages would make him my Grandson) has been accepted to the University of West Florida. He lives in Florida and I'm up north on Long Island (New York), so I confess to not having ever met the young man nor even knowing about the University of West Florida. But, as usual, Google is my friend when it comes to learning about places not familiar to me. Having now read a bit about the school, I whole-heartedly endorse his choice of college. Wikipedia had nice things to say about the place and it even fared well in the US News tabulation of colleges. But not actually knowing the plans of the gonna-be Freshman, I've got a few things to pass along to him as guidance.

First Things First

College is an important time when many things are going to be going on in your life. It's an investment in your future, but it comes at a cost. There's the obvious expenses like tuition and fees and books and supplies, but there's also an "opportunity" cost. You've elected to defer getting seriously started on your adult life for the number of years that you'll be tied up pursuing a degree. You've picked a 4 year school, so nominally, the long march to a degree should take you about 4 years. If you manage your time properly, and meet the requirements listed in the catalog, then in about 4 years time, you should indeed be graduating and moving on to the next stage of your adult life. If you do it wrong, 4 years will slip into 5 years and perhaps even longer. The price tag on your college education will continue to mount up, but the prize at the end is still that same degree. My point is, your first priority should be to stay on track to completing your degree. Some of the degree requirements may be quite frustrating, but on the bright side, the rules are at least clearly spelled out in the catalog. I assure you that later in life you will have to work your way through many situations where the prerequisites and the completion requirements are not spelled out with anything close to the clarity of your college degree.

Note that I said completing your degree is your top priority. By no means did I say it was your only priority. Not so clearly spelled out in the catalog is that your college years are when you seek out what it is that really interests you. You have to discover the degree program and subject "major" that you have a passion for - Something that you'd hope to be doing for the rest of your life, whether or not it was attached to a paying job. Make no mistake about it, to keep body and soul together you will need to find and work a paying job after graduation. Food, clothing, shelter, medical care, cell phone service, high speed internet - none of those are "free of charge", so you will need a job to earn a living. But if you force yourself into a particular career (perhaps "plastics") because you heard that it pays well, yet find that it isn't something that you enjoy, then you've made a grave error in planning your path through college. College is like 4 years, but your career is then the rest of your life, hopefully decades.

But wait! There's more!

Besides picking the right course of study and completing the degree requirements, there's an important social side to college. All work and no play doesn't make for a good, complete, college experience. You'll meet a lot of interesting people during your years in college. Some will be greatly challenging to your intellect. Some will be great fun for parties. Some may be strongly negative influences on your life. With luck, you'll even meet someone who you'll deeply love, someone who makes you a better, happier, person. You need to sort out who is who while not getting too distracted from your top priority.

The good news is that you aren't left entirely on your own to navigate this complex mine field. The same social structures that helped you get through life this far, your family, your church, your childhood friends, and so forth, are still places to turn to when you need guidance. The Internet and so forth makes it relatively easy to keep in touch with your old social supports, even if you are physically separated from them by many miles. Time spent socializing on the Internet is yet another "distraction" from your top priority, but keeping in touch with your roots may have real value to you. So make a conscious effort to spend your time wisely.

School Supplies

Next, a few words about school supplies. If you use a smart phone instead of paper products for these, that's fine, but make sure you have things configured so your information is safely backed up outside of the phone. Phones die or get stolen and you don't want to lose your information. What information? That brings us to the first couple of items on this list:

Calendar - You'll be needing a calendar to remember places you have to be at a specific date and time. In high school life is simple enough that perhaps you are used to tracking such commitments in your head with the backup coverage of reminders from your Mom. In college, your calendar can get a lot more crowded than that.

Address Book - You'll be meeting a lot of people at school. Professors, teaching assistants, lab partners, that hot girl in your Psych class. Take a few moments to jot down their name and contact info in a location where you'll be able to find it later. Loose scraps of paper jammed into your pocket or wallet isn't going to be useful to you in a week when it's faded and crumbled and perhaps even run through the laundry.

Alarm Clock - A smart phone can sound reminders through-out the day, but if you are as sound a sleeper as I am, you'll need a loud, persistent alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning. I suggest a plug-in model, perhaps even a clock-radio, with a backup battery so it doesn't lose the time or settings across brief power outages. The easier it is to set the alarm time, the better. At the very least, look for an "up" and "down" option on the setting buttons. My favorite clock radio had an actual keypad for direct entry of the time, but I'm not sure that that model is on the market any longer. Do remember to buy appropriate batteries for that backup battery feature. And take some care in picking the location for the clock. The night stand next to your bed has the advantage of being right by your ear, but the drawback of putting the snooze button within arm's reach. I find what works for me is to keep the clock on the dresser where I have to get out of bed and walk across the room to turn it off or hit snooze.

Bank Account - You've got to shop around. College is a time where you'll spend your days somewhere between destitute and flat-broke. Every once in a while, you'll receive some money - perhaps a check for your birthday or for Christmas. Nothing will make that money vanish faster than cashing the check and putting the cash in your wallet. You need to set up a bank account for yourself. You probably should find out what banks (or credit unions) have ATM's on or near campus. Banks near colleges often offer accounts structured to attract students: Low fees, low minimum balance, but probably no interest on your deposit. A debit card is almost as easy to use to drain your account as was cash in your wallet, but at least the debit card gives you a statement so you can see where the money went. If they offer you a credit card, you probably should say "no". It is a lot easier to get into credit card debt than it is to get out of it. A debit card inherently caps your spending at how much you have. Living within your means can be tough, but I strongly recommend it.

Fire-resistant lock box - You need to start being responsible for your own life-documents. Birth certificate, social security card, perhaps even a passport. You don't really need a safety-deposit box for these items, or even a secure safe, but you shouldn't be just tossing them into your dresser drawer under the socks either. Visit Walmart or some such store to find a fire-resistant lock box that you can stash in the back of your closet to hold these hard to replace documents. Note that fire-resistant boxes tend to have water entrapped in the walls of the box, which converts to steam in the event of a fire. The physics of boiling keeps the papers inside the box from reaching the ignition point for paper (until the water boils away). The temperature and humidity in the box is meant to be safe for paper, but not for computer media, so such a box isn't a good place to store backups of your data.

File Folders - For all the years of people talking about "paperless offices" and "paperless classrooms", I think you'll be surprised at how much paper comes into your life every day as a college student. The papers are worthless to you unless you can retrieve them when you need them. As a start on getting them organized, I therefore suggest an investment in file folders. If you don't have a place to stash the folders, then an additional expense to anticipate for you is a small file cabinet. (I recently picked up a flimsy 2-drawer metal file cabinet at Walmart for just over $30). How to organize the papers is a whole other essay that I'm not planning to write here. Cheap 3-ring binders and a 3-hole paper punch can be an alternative to the file cabinet to the extent your papers are 8.5"x11". Keep an eye on the back-to-school sales that come up every year as September approaches. Loose-leaf paper and manila notebook divider sheets can be mighty handy. If you use pencil to label the folders and divider sheets, you'll be able to erase and re-use them as the topics to organize shift as time marches on.

Book Shelf - College brings you more (and heavier) text books than you want to haul around in your back-pack every day. And college doesn't come with a hall-locker for you to stash the books you don't need right now. Make sure that no matter where you plan to live, that your room has a bookshelf where you can store your reference books, text books, note books, etc., etc. in a neat and accessible manner.

Desk - In high school the kitchen table or maybe even your lap sufficed as your work place for your writing assignments. In college, you really ought to have a real desk for yourself. Several stacks of cinder blocks and a slab door can make a serviceable desk for little money. Do remember your budget needs to cover a reasonable desk chair too. A suitable computer and some provision for Internet access are key parts of a modern student's desk these days, so that needs to be included in your planning.

Comfie chair and reading light - A startling amount of your college life will be spent on reading. If your habit has been to sit down in the living room with the television on while you read, now is the time to change that habit. It'd be unsporting to tell your family that they aren't to watch television until you graduate. You need a comfortable chair in a quiet place, away from the television, and with a good reading lamp. There are lots of ways to stretch your budget when looking for such items. Some of my college buddies solved the problem by pretty much living in the college library for all their waking hours except for class and meal times. Explore your campus library and find what provisions they have for quiet study space for undergraduates. That wasn't the way that I did it, but I know it can work.

Dorm or commuter student

I see UWF has large dormitories to accommodate students living on campus. They allow Freshmen to park on campus, which implies to me that not everyone is living on campus, some are presumably commuting to school. Home for you is in the Florida Pan-Handle, so I'm guessing that commuting is an option for you. Living at home and commuting to school can be a big cash saving for you. You can forage for food in the kitchen, and your Mom's washer and dryer probably doesn't insist you insert a bunch of quarters for each load. Nevertheless, I urge you to consider living on campus. I believe that moving out of the house is a big step in growing up, and college, if nothing else, is about growing up. Dorm room, meal plan, laundry expenses, ... No doubt living on campus isn't "free", but if you consider the groceries your Mom won't need to buy at home, the gas and car expense that you won't have if you aren't commuting to school each day, maybe you'll be able to manage to live modestly on campus. I think you'll find yourself much more inclined to take advantage of the campus library and of events at school if you are right there.

I can pretty much guarantee that your first trips home after you've been away at school will not be entirely comfortable for you. Quite likely you'll discover that your family and old friends somehow haven't been aware of the way you've grown up while your were away from home. Don't let that disconnect ruin your visit home. If nothing else, it'll help you appreciate the wisdom of that old adage "You can't go home again".

Your Health

Some fraction of kids go away to college and come back dead. The newspapers love to jump on such stories because the news is so universally distressing to parents. Have fun in college, but take care of yourself. Impaired judgement from chemically enhanced fun can lead to tragedy.

There are plenty of other ways to ruin your health, though some of them take time. Lack of sleep, for example. Your alarm clock may faithfully remind you when it is time to get up, but it is up to your own self-discipline to remind yourself when it is time to get some sleep. There will certainly be nights when you are cramming for exams or whatever and absolutely have to cheat yourself out of some sleep time, but I assure you that if you make a habit of that, you'll soon find yourself working much less effectively at your college priorities.

Nutrition is another oft-neglected facet of good health among college students. Pizza and coca-cola are a tasty combination, but not a good choice for breakfast. You really need to make an effort to maintain a reasonably balanced diet. Some oranges for vitamin C, milk for healthy bones, all those things they taught you in health class. Somewhere on campus there's a reasonably accurate scale where you can pop by once in a while to keep tabs on your weight. Perhaps somewhere near the gym? Balancing your calorie intake to your level of physical activity is another important part of a healthy diet. (There are free smart phone apps that make it easy to keep track of your weight over time, producing easy to read graphs of your progress or backsliding). Speaking of physical activity, I'll wager that the outdoor weather in Florida is a lot more hospitable to getting out and about than the gloomy slush that was much of the school year up in Ithaca, NY. Ithication we called it. Like precipitation, but greyer and less comfortable.

You're old enough that I'll not subject you to yet another lecture about the dangers of sex. An incurable STD can certainly take a lot of the fun out of college. An unplanned pregnancy can throw quite the monkey wrench into your graduation plans. So have fun in college, but remember there's no "reset" button like in video games, no rehearsals, just one pass through life so make the best of it.

The Requirements for Graduating are in the Catalog

I mentioned up above how you have to consciously pick your path to graduation. You need to find a "major" that really excites you. One of the things I like about UWF is they have a wide variety of options open to you. Teaching, nursing, biology, social work, engineering. My "thing" is computer software, but that isn't exciting to everyone. I'm not going to be that guy whispering "plastics!" in your ear. You'll have to find your own way.

Do your best to plan ahead. There can be long strings of pre-requisites to work through for some majors, so if you don't make yourself aware of those soon enough that 4 year diploma can start slip-sliding off into the future by years. Try to fit some courses into your schedule that'll give you a taste of something completely different from where you think you are going. Be brave enough to change direction if you find where you thought you wanted to go wasn't as interesting as you thought it was going to be. But if you find yourself having to repeatedly change your mind and your direction, do find yourself a trusted advisor who can help you work through why that keeps happening to you.

There's more to college than passing classes and graduating

There are many more things happening at your college than just your classes. Take advantage of your being on campus by paying attention to what else is going on and attend some of those events. Back in my college years, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the walls and hallways of campus tended to get plastered with posters announcing "events". It is possible that the Web has completely replaced those flyers, but I doubt it. Don't blindly rush past announcements of symposia and events on campus.

Happy Trails!

You certainly saw quite a fuss today over your getting into college. Just imagine the excitement in your family when you graduate. I'm wishing you the best for your college years. If I've given you any surprises here or left you with any questions, do feel free to contact me and we can talk.

Do well!

References

Most all of your college papers will be in for severe criticism if they don't include suitable references at the end. So, I close with a few references here for this article.

There's a pretty good book called "How Children Succeed" by Paul Tough. If you don't want to take the time to read the whole book, a possible short cut is to read my book-report on my blog from back when I read the book.

I hate to admit it, but there's an awful lot of wisdom (as well as laughs) about the real world of corporate employment to be found in the Dilbert comic strip by Scott Adams. For example (Dilbert, 02/18/2014:

Click on the dated link above the comic to see the missing punchline in the 3rd frame. Then you can use your browser's "back" button to return here.

Back in January, 2013, I posted "Advice to Undergraduates". It's basically a link to 3 other articles that I enjoyed. It may be a bit too computer-science-centric for general audiences, I still enjoy reading the linked articles there.

"Education" is a recurring topic on my blog and I won't puff up this references section with links to all the related articles. But I would like to point out the TED Talk linked to my May 2013 article "Education's Future: 'Go Do Something Interesting'"

If my repeated mention of "plastics" makes no sense to you, use your Netflix subscription to hurry up and rent a copy of 1967's movie "The Graduate".

These references would be far from complete if I didn't also include a link to Dave Barry's 2004 "Commencement Address".
Revised 3/31/2014 - Edited to fix a couple of minor typos.
Revised 04/20/2015 - Revised because Dilbert URL's changed around so link to "sleep" comic broke. I fixed it.
Revised 09/16/2019 - Revised because URL to Dave Barry's commencement speech broke. I fixed it.

Education Automation - R. Buckminster Fuller

A few months ago, in response to one of my "education" tagged blog posts, an old friend from high school contacted me via Facebook and suggested that I really should take a look at the book "Education Automation" by R. Buckminster Fuller, the famous architect. The book was published way back in 1961 and for someone without access to Doc Brown's DeLorean, it had remarkable foresight. He basically predicted the Internet, though he called it 2-way television.

The Book

The book is a slim paperback volume, only 88 pages long. It was put together at a time when Southern Illinois University was undergoing major expansion in 1961 - a transition from being a state teacher's college to being a full-fledged university. Fuller had been invited to give a talk to the committee planning the new campus. The book doesn't quite read like it is a transcript of his talk. I believe it is more like a report by Fuller of what he said.

I have to give credit to the Westbury Public Library for finding a copy of this book for me to read. They borrowed it from the library of Hartwick College way off in Oneonta, NY, about a 200 mile drive upstate from Westbury. I was tickled to notice the 1961 price of the book printed on the book's cover: $1.95. If you convert that into how many gallons of gasoline you could get for $1.95 in 1961, and then figure out what the contemporary price for that many gallons of gasoline would be, I suspect the $1.95 maps to a pretty good approximation of what a slim academic book would cost these days. The years have not been kind to the purchasing power of a dollar.

There are plenty of smells of age to be found in the book such as frequent mention of "men" where a more contemporary book would surely have said "people". And, I was surprised at how high an opinion Fuller seems to have of himself. I expect a tad more humility from great men of the past.

What did he call for?

Fuller foresaw a future in which "earning a living" was no longer required. He expected that change was going to arrive within 10 years of the time he was speaking in 1961. He expected that the only lasting world industry would be education. He anticipated that scholars would stay for years and years at the universities, "for the rest of their lives", "developing more and more knowledge about the whole experience of man".

One somewhat off-the-wall suggestion from Fuller is that a 200 foot diameter (or larger) geodesic dome be suspended 100 feet above the campus and be covered with light bulbs on the entire interior and exterior surface, each bulb under the control of a computer, so the 'Geoscope' would be a gigantic display screen. "It will make possible communication of phenomena that are not at present communicable to man's conceptual understanding." I've seen enough movies to have my doubts about any good coming from a large screen for mass viewing. Brings to mind Apple's 1984 commercial.

He clearly suggested that the university acquire as much land as it can. But forget about any permanent structure anchored to whatever the shape is of today's curriculum. Everything should be dynamic. e.g. bring in a geodesic dome via heavy-lift helicopter to serve as an auditorium whenever you need another big auditorium. Or just build a gigantic half-mile wide geodesic dome to enclose the entire campus and give people large clear spaces to do their work. "Don't waste dollars on great, heavy stone masonry and any kind of Georgian architecture."

What did he get wrong?

From my 21st century perspective, he did get some things wrong. He still seems to expect that education is something that is done by herding large groups of students into giant auditoriums. Current consensus seems to be that the Internet particularly obsoletes the large-to-the-point-of-student-anonymity lectures, replacing them with on-demand viewing of pre-recorded lectures. (e.g. MOOC's).

I wish I knew more about what they actually did there at SIU after the planning sessions. I Google searched for images of the Southern Illinois University campus and only found a few pictures, none of which seem anything like Fuller's suggestions. I'm slightly more familiar with a more recently developed college campus, Liberty University. Though I have never set foot on Liberty University's campus, we received a magazine from them a few months ago detailing their campus expansion projects. From what I can see, Liberty University initially built large warehousey "temporary" buildings, but then in more recent years has been replacing those buildings with new prettier more permanent structures.

Fuller's 1961 advice was to build with the inspiration of circus tents, not wasting money on, e.g., Georgian architectural detailing. From what I can see of the continuing development of Liberty University, they initially erected structures that were slightly more solid then circus tents, but without significant ornamentation, but more recent structures are in a style that would be fitting for colonial Williamsburg, with lots of brick and big decorative columns and with large windows consisting of many small panes. It would seem that Fuller was overlooking the role of campus buildings in inspiring pride in alumni as a stimulus to continuing generous donations. In the book, he made little mention of budget constraints. He also, despite his own involvement in campus athletics (he'd been a football quarterback in his high school years), seemed to pay no attention to the huge investments large schools seem to make in sports facilities.

I noticed that Fuller's advice seemed to pay no attention to matters of infrastructure: e.g. bathrooms and parking and/or provisions for on-campus transportation. Research labs need plumbing, fume hoods, marker boards, bookshelves (at least they still need those today), desks, chairs, network access, electricity, heating, lighting and air conditioning. Much more than just the generous amounts of space Fuller advised should be acquired and enclosed.

He had a curious fixation on a proposal for a large domed display screen that could be used to display images, charts and graphs to help the people on campus to attain a commonality in their point of view. I wonder if Leo Villareal would give any credit to Fuller for Villareal's "Cosmos" installation on the Cornell U. Johnson Art Museum. Villareal's piece makes sense of what had been a seemingly pointless architectural detail of the museum building, which building has been compared to the shape of a gigantic sewing machine.

The foreword of the book says Fuller served as a research professor at SIU. I hope he didn't get overpaid for the advice he gave but that they apparently didn't follow. If you have affiliation with SIU and can say more about what influence Fuller's suggestions had on the development of that campus, I'd sure like to hear from you in the comments.

Maybe Fuller was just way ahead of his time, but I'd have an easier time expecting a virtual campus that is spread around the world and reconfigured as different specialists get involved in a research project. A campus where there's no "there" there? Good luck figuring out where home-game sports events are going to be held. Perhaps the central feature of the physical campus will be a large Internet connected data center/online digital library to facilitate research and online collaboration by the people affiliated with the university, wherever they may be.

Oh, and I bet there'll be a lovely administration building with columns and brick and many window panes and a board room for the meetings of the trustees (who probably are going to lag on acceptance of online meetings). I'm not advocating that all future research be conducted in the researcher's home kitchen. Space (rented?) with suitable labs facilities would be acquired wherever the researcher chose to be. I foresee big demand for lab space in Hawaii. Lovely weather - especially compared to Ithaca, NY, just to name a place where you can find a conventional physical campus today.

Advice to undergraduates...

An overseas college sophomore majoring in Computer Science has been asking me for advice on what to study. "How to become a good computer programmer". I have no magic wand to wave to confer great programming skills, but I did find some web pages that look like sound advice.

One of my favorites is:

http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html

and I don't think that I only like it for its mention of Cornell U and my old professor Conway. The author of that piece seems to offer good advice.

A somewhat orthogonal point of view, but also interesting reading, is this very recent article from the New York Times:

study-in-science-shows-end-of-history-illusion

More on-topic for computer programming, is an article that I recently linked to in my blog here, but it's good enough to be worth another mention:

financial_software_disasters

So, I e-mailed these links along to that student, and got a nice thank-you note. That inspired me to think that maybe other folks will find this advice helpful so I'm sharing the links on my blog here. If you like this stuff, please leave some comments and/or sign up as a "follower" of this blog. Goodness knows, it should be clear by now that I'm not a spammer who's going to contact you about Ukrainian brides or mail-order pharmaceuticals. This blog has been running (on an irregular schedule) for several years now and I'm thrilled to see that the cumulative pageviews has finally passed 2000. Hardly a level where I would think about monetizing the clicks. Clicking on the +1 button when I manage to provide an article that you like, is a way to make me smile and it helps me decide what topics I should find more to say about.

Thanks for reading. Now hurry and pass the URL for this article to your 10 closest friends. :-)

Cornell Hydraulics Lab

The Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY sits atop a hill overlooking downtown Ithaca and the southern tip of Lake Cayuga, one of the finger lakes of New York state.  The campus is bounded on the north and the south by deep gorges.  (The basis for the bad pun on all those "Ithaca is gorges" T-shirts).  Well, "bounded" is too strong a word as bits of campus have long since spilled across Cascadilla Gorge into College Town to the south of the main campus; and to the north of Fall Creek gorge, North Campus is a nearly city-sized collection of dormitories.

Fall Creek gorge had the interesting feature of the long-abandoned Hydraulics Lab built into the wall of the gorge just below Beebee Lake.   In 2005, some relatives of a Cornell student took a trip to Ithaca and they posted a very nice web page documenting the trip with pictures and words.  Among their pictures was this photo of the Hydraulics Lab, which they captioned "Fall Creek and the Hydraulics Lab from the Thurston Avenue Bridge."

Sadly, their web page has since vanished, so I've substituted here a similar image of a postcard of the same view. (3/6/20129)

In good weather, the Cornell campus is a fabulously beautiful place. If you are unfamiliar with it, click on the "campus" link up above here. Click on the virtual tour check box just below the map and click on the various panorama points on the map to see various 360-degree pictures of the place. "Stroll around the grounds a bit, until you feel at home".

Memorial Day weekend, 2009, I went back to visit the Cornell campus.   Through fortuitous bad planning, that turned out to be the weekend for Cornell's graduation ceremony.  (No wonder I'd had such a hard time reserving a hotel room - we ended up in a hotel in Owego, about 30 miles to the south of Ithaca).  I picked up a graduation edition of the Cornell Daily Sun in the lobby of Willard Straight Hall and didn't get around to reading it until I'd gotten home.  I was surprised to learn from the paper that one cold night in February, 2009, the hydraulics lab collapsed into the gorge.   That motivated me to look for more info on the web and I found a March 2009 Cornell Daily Sun article (link now dead, sniff, sniff) about the proposed clean-up of the site.   That article included this wintery "after" photo:

Vanishing act: The remains of the old Hydraulics Lab,
 which collapsed into Fall Creek Gorge

Alas, in 9/2013 that archived article and the photo were tidied up from the Sun's web site. Happily, I found another copy of the photo on George Lowery's Cornell blog.

If you look at the "after" photo, you can see the large vertical water pipe that must have been the central feature of the lab at the time it was in use

The Hydraulics Lab had stood for 111 years.  The estimate is that to remove the remnants will cost a million dollars.  That leaves me wondering what did it cost to build the lab in the first place?  The rock of the building matched the walls of the gorge very nicely.  Was the rock for the building carved from the site or is most rock in the area roughly the same color as the gorge walls?

Can you imagine the expense and time it would take to try to build such a lab on that site today?  I'm sure it would have to be fully handicapped accessible, and would require bathrooms and a sewage system connection.   Most likely it would never get the necessary permits at all, but if it did, and if in another 111 years the modern replacement was to again collapse into the gorge, my hunch is that it would leave a heck of a lot more debris than the above picture shows.

Thinking about the old lab got me to wondering.   What motivated the engineering school to build such a lab on so challenging a site as this one more than a century ago?  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that engineering has sure changed a whole bunch since the late 1800's.  I entered Cornell's Engineering school in 1970.  As a freshman, I was in a select group that, as an experiment, studied PL/C computer programming instead of mechanical drawing.   Within a year or 2, the T-squares, drawing boards, triangles and mechanical drawing classes were gone entirely.   PL/C was a Cornell variant of the PL/I programming language.  PL/I's lifespan didn't turn out to be as long as that of T-squares.  Computing in 1970 was mostly batch processing.   We'd submit our programs on 80-column punched cards and get our error messages back on fanfold printouts that would come off a line-printer.  The printers would only print in upper case, unless you made special arrangements for a print-chain to be mounted that included lower case letters.   The Internet and the Web, even PC's were still many years off into the future.   Cornell's computer was an IBM 360/65 mainframe located off-campus out near the Ithaca airport that did both academic and administrative processing.  The computing facilities in Upson, Clark and Warren Hall's were just remote job entry stations, little (Well, the size of a kitchen counter. That's "little" compared to a room-sized 360/65) 360/20 computers to drive the card reader(s) and line printers and a 56Kbps (?) communication line to the mainframe at Langmuir Labs.  The giant mainframe had a total of 512KB of memory.   Today when I type that I have to force my fingers to type that K because my reflex is to think 512MB of memory would be unthinkably small.  (Just this weekend a friend asked me to look at his notebook PC to see why it was so slow.  I pointed out that he was running Windows Vista with only 1GB [that's 1024MB which is 2048x as much memory as Cornell's mainframe had back in the day] of memory).

So 35 years since I graduated from Engineering school, I'm wondering how did I ever write papers and stuff without Google.  I had a mechanical portable typewriter and if it hadn't been for corrasable paper, I'd probably have been stuck in high school until word processors became available.   They became available on campus to undergrads about 1973.   I remember Tim Metcalf, my very forward thinking roommate, used the by-then available online computer terminals to produce his resume while job hunting our senior year.   My portable typewriter and ream of corrasable paper apparently slipped through a window of opportunity as checking today for the correct spelling of corrasable, I find that that kind of paper apparently has been banned for final copies of thesis submissions as it doesn't have proper archival properties for long term shelf life of the typed documents.  If you wanted to buy such paper today, good luck to you.   Staples doesn't have it.   But then I was mildly surprised to find Staples still has a selection of a dozen varieties of typewriter to chose among.

But think back to the late 1800's when campus buildings were not yet wired for electricity.   Were there gas lights in the dorm rooms?  My memory of hydraulics as a topic in 1970's physics classes were maybe an experiment with a couple of columns of water, different diameter columns, connected to each other at the bottom with some tubing.  At first I was asking myself what the academic value was of a huge steel pipe encasing a column of water many feet tall in that ancient hydraulics lab to have justified the trouble and expense of building that hydraulics lab.  Then it hit me, hydraulics in the late 1800's surely wasn't something you'd only encounter in the service station's "lift" for raising your car for an oil change.   Hydraulics must have encompassed the study of water power for driving machinery.  Now I'd feel more confident in this speculation if I could find something about a large steam engine elsewhere in the engineering school to study another major source of mechanical power in the late nineteenth century.  I Googled for

cornell steam engine

and didn't find anything about a steam engine lab, but I did find an online copy of an 1878 book about steam engines by Cornell Professor Robert Thurston, and mention of a patented improvement to the steam engine that had been invented by Cornell Professor J. E. Sweet that apparently was the foundation of Brampton, Ontario having a manufacturing industry.

Hmm...  Given my tendency to have my attention wander off to tangentially related topics, maybe I'm lucky that Google wasn't around to distract me when I was in college.

In case you were wondering, the collapsed Hydraulics Lab was quite separate from the Cornell hydroelectric plant.   From digging around on the web, the Fall Creek hydroelectric plant was built in 1904.  By the time I was at Cornell in the 1970's, the plant had fallen into dis-use, but during one of the various energy crises (1981), the hydro electric plant was restored and apparently remains in service today.

If you do visit Cornell, be sure to wear comfortable walking shoes.  Puzzling that there hasn't been significant seismic activity in Ithaca, yet I found the hills are significantly steeper now than they were in 1970.  It's still a stunningly beautiful place to visit in the Spring or anytime that isn't winter.

Drew
Revised 08/03/2009 to fix a typographic error.

Revised 06/03/2010 to replace the link to the Cornell steam engine article.    The old link has gone 404 on me.
Revised 5/4/2013 to fix the URL's of the images. Old URL's as posted no longer worked, but thankfully the pictures are still online
Revised 9/21/2013 to replace the photo of the collapsed lab as the Cornell Sun copy has vanished from the web.
Revised 9/22/2013 to replace the link to the campus map, which went 404 on me too. New map has virtual tour feature! Revised mention of IBM 360's to provide a link to a web page to show what they look like lest I mislead in describing the "360/20" as "little".
Hey! Didn't you get the memo about Web 2.0? The idea is that you aren't stuck just reading the site. If you run into a missing photo or broken link or typo or even a bad idea, you can leave a comment to let me know about it, so I can fix things up.
Revised 9/22/2013 to replace the links about the hydroelectric plant with links that are currently in good working order.
Revised 9/22/2013 to replace the link about corrasable paper not being acceptable for theses final submission to put in a link that is currently in working order.
Revised link to staples web site and noted that they now have even more typewriters listed than they used to.
Revised 3/6/2019 to replace the now missing images of the hydraulics lab (before) and the again vanished image of the hydroelectric plant. Lesson is, if the image is to be incorporated into the article, I need to make my own copy of the file. Seemed more polite to just link to the original image, but not reliable over time.