New Building!

As you may or may not know, the university just built a brand new building for Microbial Sciences, and I finally got a chance to go inside and check it out! The place is enormous - bigger than anything else on campus except for the basketball stadium.

The first thing you see once you're inside is this tremendous atrium. The stairs are not for the faint of heart, but I suppose they probably won't collapse in the first couple of years. There are actually two atria, but this is the big one, which will have a cafeteria / cafe in it, which should be nice.

The place is full of comfy chairs and places to sit and socialize. One feature I especially appreciate is all the rolling whiteboards. There are dozens of them, which is going to make scientific chattering really easy and fun. The place is set up to increase collaboration among labs, which is a nice change from being isolated in the basement of the Enzyme Institute.

Heading up into the lab areas, it's divided into "neighborhoods" of 4 to 6 labs each. We're in neighborhood 4 of the 6th floor, along with the Downs, Forest, and Thomas labs, who should be good neighbors. We share this corridor with the Downs lab, and eventually it'll have a bunch of equipment (-80°C freezers, etc.) in it. The student offices are through the windows on the right there. They're cozy, but should be workable.

And here's the bench which'll be mine! (And my chair, apparently.) I have shelves! And drawers! The luxury is nearly overwhelming. The lab space is considerably smaller than the space we're in now, but it's not as bad as I had been led to believe. We should have lots of room for most of our stuff.

Turning 180° from the last picture, here's the view from outside my bench! Pretty nice. I've never worked in a new building before. I've always been crammed into spaces which haven't been renovated since the 60's. I'm not sure I know what to do with nice things. I'll have to be careful with stuff. :-)

We move in November. I think we're about the last lab to go, but that's all right. It means they'll have plenty of time to figure out all the things that don't work before we get there. Hopefully our "neighbors" will leave us some room in the coldroom.