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captainsblog...and I'm never going back to her new school.
At least not for three walking tours in a bit over four hours, covering a campus which refers to the main drag of its academic-residential axis as "the Quarter Mile."
Emily, on the other hand, will do fine with it. And we all loved looking at, and hearing about, virtually every detail of her department, her school, and the whole RIT campus and community that we saw.
SOFA (the School of Film and Animation- my, there are a lot of acronyms in this place) was the first tour, covering almost two full floors of a building which, for a budding animator, would be like a chocoholic spending four years inside the Wonka factory. The walls are covered with posters of films- animated and not- which school alums worked on. The facilities are both cutting-edge and major old-school (from a brand-new greenscreen room used by both film majors for CGI to animators doing their live-action setup work, to an editing room with real film and reel splicers). Screening rooms to be used for their own works or just for hanging with friends to watch a movie on a night off in a stadium-seating setting. Hell, I have the artistic skills of a small slug and even I fell in love with this stuff. Everybody seemed busy, friendly and down-to-earth. Plenty of wymyns in this department, belying the RIT all male/all geek rep to a major extent.
Our only downtime was about an hour between that ending and a general campus tour beginning at 2. Eleanor, the one on her feet every other day of the week, wasn't up to the independent study, so she hung out in admissions with her Jon Katz book and we explored the library, the activities center, and the general ambience. My recollection of the best way to test a library is to see what its holdings looked like in an area you already know something about. That took us into the NC and ND sections, and they did not disappoint her. As for the unionish spaces, there were far more of them than either of my schools ever provided (probably because campus administrators in the 70s were so spooked by 60s riots that they shut down or dispersed most of those gathering places- UB certainly did, not even having a student union as such when I was there.) Everybody in them looked to be wired (to their various devices), friendly (when we got flummoxed by the very non-tech campus map system a few times), and for the most part happy. Good signs, all.
A campus ambassador-type then took us on, past and around that entire Quarter Mile to see lots of the campus- beginning in the SOFA building we'd begun in, also hitting (duh) the library and activities centers, but also showing us most of the other undergraduate schools there. (RIT has a very small grad student population- roughly 10 percent of the student body- and the advantages of that are (a) fewer TA's, and (b) more chances for undergrads to assist in the kind of faculty research usually reserved in academia for the big kids.) He took us through most of the star attractions, including the fitness facilities and other support services- but was pretty honest about stuff he didn't know and about stuff he wished he'd done (like study abroad, which RIT has big programs for).
We were then handed off to a housing rep, who took us through the freshman dining facility, a sample room (girls, fortunately- we'd been warned about not panicking too much if we were shown a guys' room smelling horribly of feet), and finally, into "the tunnels"- the underground complex connecting all the dorms and dining facility and providing laundry rooms, postal and stop-and-rob food services, and some amazing artwork from 30 previous years on the cinderblock walls, from promoted campus events to murals of the Enterprise and of Calvin and Hobbes.
Not much more than an hour later, we were home- with a broken iPhone (I'm posting this at the Genius Bar, my first time ever using a Mac- more about THAT non-genius brainpower of mine to follow tomorrow), and with four very sore grownup feet, but as with Chinese food, even though it was an hour later, it definitely left us hungry for more. As in likely four years more.
(A picture entry- mostly oddities not on the standard tour- will follow once I get access to my pictures again.)
----
Confidential to the home front: I hope to be home by 9. Yes, PM. Yes, there are two:P
At least not for three walking tours in a bit over four hours, covering a campus which refers to the main drag of its academic-residential axis as "the Quarter Mile."
Emily, on the other hand, will do fine with it. And we all loved looking at, and hearing about, virtually every detail of her department, her school, and the whole RIT campus and community that we saw.
SOFA (the School of Film and Animation- my, there are a lot of acronyms in this place) was the first tour, covering almost two full floors of a building which, for a budding animator, would be like a chocoholic spending four years inside the Wonka factory. The walls are covered with posters of films- animated and not- which school alums worked on. The facilities are both cutting-edge and major old-school (from a brand-new greenscreen room used by both film majors for CGI to animators doing their live-action setup work, to an editing room with real film and reel splicers). Screening rooms to be used for their own works or just for hanging with friends to watch a movie on a night off in a stadium-seating setting. Hell, I have the artistic skills of a small slug and even I fell in love with this stuff. Everybody seemed busy, friendly and down-to-earth. Plenty of wymyns in this department, belying the RIT all male/all geek rep to a major extent.
Our only downtime was about an hour between that ending and a general campus tour beginning at 2. Eleanor, the one on her feet every other day of the week, wasn't up to the independent study, so she hung out in admissions with her Jon Katz book and we explored the library, the activities center, and the general ambience. My recollection of the best way to test a library is to see what its holdings looked like in an area you already know something about. That took us into the NC and ND sections, and they did not disappoint her. As for the unionish spaces, there were far more of them than either of my schools ever provided (probably because campus administrators in the 70s were so spooked by 60s riots that they shut down or dispersed most of those gathering places- UB certainly did, not even having a student union as such when I was there.) Everybody in them looked to be wired (to their various devices), friendly (when we got flummoxed by the very non-tech campus map system a few times), and for the most part happy. Good signs, all.
A campus ambassador-type then took us on, past and around that entire Quarter Mile to see lots of the campus- beginning in the SOFA building we'd begun in, also hitting (duh) the library and activities centers, but also showing us most of the other undergraduate schools there. (RIT has a very small grad student population- roughly 10 percent of the student body- and the advantages of that are (a) fewer TA's, and (b) more chances for undergrads to assist in the kind of faculty research usually reserved in academia for the big kids.) He took us through most of the star attractions, including the fitness facilities and other support services- but was pretty honest about stuff he didn't know and about stuff he wished he'd done (like study abroad, which RIT has big programs for).
We were then handed off to a housing rep, who took us through the freshman dining facility, a sample room (girls, fortunately- we'd been warned about not panicking too much if we were shown a guys' room smelling horribly of feet), and finally, into "the tunnels"- the underground complex connecting all the dorms and dining facility and providing laundry rooms, postal and stop-and-rob food services, and some amazing artwork from 30 previous years on the cinderblock walls, from promoted campus events to murals of the Enterprise and of Calvin and Hobbes.
Not much more than an hour later, we were home- with a broken iPhone (I'm posting this at the Genius Bar, my first time ever using a Mac- more about THAT non-genius brainpower of mine to follow tomorrow), and with four very sore grownup feet, but as with Chinese food, even though it was an hour later, it definitely left us hungry for more. As in likely four years more.
(A picture entry- mostly oddities not on the standard tour- will follow once I get access to my pictures again.)
----
Confidential to the home front: I hope to be home by 9. Yes, PM. Yes, there are two:P
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-23 01:10 am (UTC)I can only conclude that great things happen there, from the growing concentration of fascinating people I know there.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-23 10:44 am (UTC)