My college was a small liberal arts school in a city adjacent to my own.
- They had old buildings and old facilities, especially the student dormitories.
I remember the early days of the fall semester when summer weather was still present, and some days the air conditioners in the dorms weren’t working properly. We would sweat bullets while waiting for the a/c to kick on and cool down the room. At one point we purchased a bunch of fans to use in the dorm room, positioned carefully to redirect air currents coming through the open windows. Since the weather would get cold for much of the year, we struggled to stay warm a lot more than we struggled to stay cool. While we weren’t strictly allowed to use space heaters in the dorm rooms, nearly everyone did it because of how poor those heating systems were at that point in my college career. Of course the very same year I moved to an off-campus apartment was when they decided to upgrade the heating and cooling systems in the dormitories. One feature at that school I really liked were the custom metal staircases that were featured in all of the old administrative and academic buildings. We had classrooms on the second floor of many of these buildings, and the staircases and stair railing were forged from stainless steel rebar wire. I learned from one of the campus administrators that a former student was a master welder and he replaced the original stainless steel rebar stairs and stair railings during the past decade.