I enjoyed imagining what they work on in the Critical Fluids Lab in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology.
“No, no, no, you’re doing it all wrong! Don’t pour me like that!”
or, “Freeze him, he just sits around in his beaker all day doing nothing, anyway!”
An awesome mural in the office of one of the professors in Animal Science/Agricultural Engineering. He was really nice and let me take a picture, instead of just surreptitiously walking by really slowly, pretending to text on my phone at eye level so I could snap a photo.
A seal on the floor of the Potomac Building, which apparently houses the Asphalt Institute. This sounds only vaguely like Cyberdyne Systems, and so I am sure that there we will never see a swarm of evil robots emerge from Potomac to take over the world.
Well, pretty sure.
I should’ve been an Engineering major. 
A couple of days ago, I decided to (gasp) wake up early and wander around the science buildings before going to my class in Physics. Needless to say given the photo above, I noticed quite the juxtaposition going from Kim back into the Physics building, which as best as I can tell was dedicated by Isaac Newton shortly after his publication of Principia Mathematica in 1687.
The Kim building was very cool, though, containing such facilities as The W.M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Combinatorial Nanosynthesis and Multiscale Characterization and the Tissue Engineering & Biomaterials Laboratory, where I can only assume they’re working on new developments in Kleenex.
After Kim, I wandered over to the Engineering Annex across the street, which was locked. The back of the building has an entrance to the Robotics Realization Laboratory, which sounds like just about the coolest thing ever and is definitely somewhere I’ll have to come back to check out.
I went into the Potomac Building in front of Kim, which is one of those old buildings that probably did not contain the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute when it was built.
I wandered some more and came upon the Central Animal Resources Facility. “Good old CARF,” I did not think to myself, because I’d never noticed the building before. But I went in, and had a lovely conversation with a woman in a conference room by the lobby that went something like this:
Her: Can I help you?
Me: Oh, no thanks, um, I’m just looking around.
Her: Well, you can’t “just look around.”
Me: Oh, ok. Thank you! [I exit.]
But hey, still counts! I went into that building with the weird glass windows, which turned out to be the Animal Science/Agricultural Engineering Building. Then I checked out the mysterious Institute for Physical Science and Technology across from J.M. Paterson. I took some good pictures, and only felt a little bit sketchy doing so, but perhaps I’ll save those for future posts.
Anyway, looking at my Master List O’ Buildings, it turns out that Kim is on there three times. That means that I can actually count seven buildings marked off, even though I only went into four!
140 buildings to go!
It’s been really hard coming to terms with the fact that there’s prooobably only a finite amount of (even pseudo-)humor I can get out of UMD placenames. I’ll have to pace myself!
Rough progress so far, i.e, the buildings I’ve been into before actually starting.
Based on the Official List O’ Buildings, here are the stats:
319 total buildings on the list
75 buildings I’ve been in already
97 buildings that don’t count (frat houses, graduate student housing, etc.)
=147 buildings left to enter
So, as long as I’m pretending (for about another week) that I can actually do this, it’s time to set some arbitrary rules for myself. They are:
1. Successful completion of this task will include me having entered every building on campus before my graduation in May.
2. “Every building” on this campus is hereby restricted to:
2a. Buildings bounded by Route 1, 193, Metzerott Road, and the Knox/Mowatt/Campus Drive boundary on South Campus.
2b. Non-residence halls. (This is cheating, I know, but it will be tough enough to get into all the other buildings without me having to tailgate into every residence hall on campus.)
3. Buildings that I have already entered over the course of my time as a student on campus are declared to already be counted for the purposes of this task.
I’m Logan, a senior who will be graduating this spring from the University of Maryland. As a tour guide, I’ve spent more time wandering around North Campus in 90-minute blocks than your average student. As a quidditch player, I’ve spent a good portion of my time practicing on (read: tearing up) McKeldin Mall. As a physics and philosophy double major, I’ve spent more iPod songs than I can count running back and forth between Toll and Skinner over the course of the past four years. And as a devotee of puns, I’ve told more bad jokes about all of these locations than anybody has ever wanted to hear.
But even after receiving the Cole shoulder time and again, I realized that there are tons of buildings on campus that I haven’t ever been inside of. And that doesn’t just include all the houses on Frat Row (which was featured as a stand-in for Georgetown in the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, thanks for asking!) but also a lot of random buildings that are on the chunk of land bounded by Route 1 and 193. Looking at the campus’s full list of buildings, some of the names sound pretty cool. The Blacksmith Shop! The Vending Machines Building! The Autonomous Mobile Robotics Lab!
And even if the AMRL is defunct (which this page would seem to indicate, worrying me only slightly about the possibility of loose, sentient robots roaming around campus after dark,) I thought it might be pretty cool to go inside the buildings I can, and learn about the ones I can’t, during my final semester on UMD’s campus. So will I make it inside every building? Almost certainly not. Will I get a good story out of this whole thing? Heck, it has to be better than that time as a freshman that I rode the C2 Metrobus in the wrong direction for 70 minutes.
So let’s see what happens! If you want to join me on my exploration, I would love the company! As long as you’re not one of those autonomous robots. That would be kind of creepy.
