Let me tell you about Cornell
Or, "Life at Cornell, part 4."
After getting dugg I got a few visitors who happened to be prospective Cornell students. One of them asked a very good question:
Most of the picture I see of Cornell are of the outside… either the buildings, the grass fields, the marshes… but never do I get a picture of what is *inside* the buildings or classrooms. I was hoping to get some insight in to the quality of the non-educational things… Like how are the desks, furniture, room sizes, carpeting. Yeah, that type of stuff is kind of superficial, but a nice learning environment is always a plus. (do you know of an photo gallery of sorts that might show the inside of Cornell?)
I couldn't think of any photo galleries that have this kind of information, so I figured it was time for some amateur blogging-journalism. I took some pictures while I was doing my daily going-to-classes grind. Here is what I put together. Every thumbnail in this entry is also a link to the full size image. On with it:
This is a poster session for students to show off their research projects in Duffield hall. I'm not in this because I've never done research. Duffield is especially spacious for holding events like these, and it's right in the middle of the engineering quad so there's always people passing through.
Obviously no event would be complete without food. There's a chance that some of the people at this event are there only for the food… which is perfectly reasonable. The food is probably delicious and far more interesting than any research about optical data transfer or polymers.
This is a standard electrical engineering lab bench. This lab is used for classes like Radio Frequency Circuits, where we do a lot of analog circuit design (thus the need for oscilloscopes and function generators). The labs are nice, if you view the fullsize image you'll see all benches have computers and a lot of gadgets and tools for building circuits.
Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the computer labs, but ECE definitely has some of the nicest ones. We have two computer labs in our building, all Dell computers, one lab has Pentium processors running WinXP and the other has Athlon 64 processors running RedHat Linux. If you take a computer engineering course you'll spend days in these labs.
This is a standard lecture room in Hollister hall. You can see we have a great big projector screen, a few blackboards, and nice comfy padded chairs. This lecture actually has a lot of students, I just happened to take the picture early.
This is the study lounge in Thurston hall. Behind the camera is a drop box for math assignments, which are usually due Friday or Monday. On whatever day they are due, this lounge is full of students trying to finish the assignment before it has to be turned in. It's definitely effective since you get to check your answers with other students, but spending your Friday afternoon here still stinks.
The other engineering buildings also have their own study lounges and they are all nice. Some of them even have kitchens, for events that involve food. The lounge in Phillips hall has a ping-pong table, but I'm not good at that game.
This is a lecture room in Thurston hall. It also has the usual amenities; projector, blackboards, comfy chairs. It's also really long so you can sit in the back and hide from the professor. Or you can be a nerd and sit in the front. To each his own.
This is my favorite lecture room, Phillips 101. It's where a lot of ECE lectures are held, so I've spent a lot of time in there. Like the other large lecture rooms it has a huge projection screen and 3 blackboards that move up and down. It's also long enough that you can fall asleep in the back and never be noticed, unless the lecturer starts walking around. I hate it when lecturers do that.
This is the interior of Duffield hall. It's huge… the largest nanoscience facility in the world. They also have a nice little café that makes fresh sandwiches between 11 am and 2 pm on weekdays. If you explore Duffield hall you can see grad students in bunny suits working on nano-projects. You usually can't actually see the projects themselves because they are nano-sized.
This is one part of the "stacks" in Carpenter library. Not many people go back here because most engineers don't read much. It's scary too. I'm pretty sure that if you scream deep down in the stacks, no one will hear you. I would test it but I probably wouldn't make it back.
This is the main floor of Carpenter library. It's much nicer and probably has more computers than books. I really like studying here. To the left are a couple private study rooms with huge plasma displays that you can plug your laptop into. They are great for group projects that involve visual work.
Stay tuned for more pictures of Cornell, I'll post them as soon as I have the time.
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- Trackback: Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog on August 13, 2006
oooh, nice library.
for some reason, I've always love photos of libraries.
awesome. now I feel like an insider
Hi! I'm an interior design student with a project to design the physics hall at my school. I heard that Duffield has some hand's on displays for those passing through. I would like photos for inspiration. Can you help?