Indiana university is an amazing place, a gathering of students, scholars and athletes like no other place on earth. This school has seven Nobel Laureates associated with its name and a basketball program known around the nation as one of the best (though not right now...). Graduates have gone on to become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, politicians and professional athletes. The TV network HDNET and all its affiliates were started and are currently owned by IU graduate Mark Cuban, who also owns the Dallas Mavericks.
Indiana University is truly great, but do its current students really know anything about the Bloomington campus? While thinking about this university, all the great things that happen here and the great things that come from our graduates, I began to think about the finer details.
We give Indiana University thousands of our hard earned dollars every year. Given a rough (very rough) estimate of students paying around $18,000 (on average, the out-of-state cost is around $25,000 and in-state is around $10,000) and another rough estimate of around 25,000 undergraduates, then IU students give their school around $450 million a year. That's not chump change.
So what does IU do with all of our (or in many cases, our parents') hard earned cash? They make this university great, that's what they do. They give grants so researchers can win more Nobel prizes, they put expensive software on every public computer, they provide free bus service for all students, they build new stadiums and athletic facilities, they construct new classrooms and more.
With our money, they build things like the
Indiana University Cyclotron Facility. A Cyclotron is essentially a big particle accelerator (or a giant science experiment for those of us who are not scientifically inclined.) This multi-million dollar installation does groundbreaking work in many different fields in physics, and I am certainly not here to say we shouldn't have something like this. In fact, I believe even more funding should go to this facility and others like it around the nation, but that's not what my point is- I want to know if IU students know where their money goes. I want to know if IU students know their campus.
According to its website, its annual power bill for the Cyclotron Facility is $650,000, and that's a lot of our money. Knowing that so many dollars go to this big place, I wondered if any students actually knew where there money is going- does the average IU student have any idea where the Cyclotron facility is? (though it was a bit too much to expect that they would know anything about what happens there) So, I decided to survey students to see if they knew where a small group of places on campus were.
I surveyed students in two of my smaller classes (where I could speak to everyone easily) and some other people I met and spoke with around campus. I asked them if they could do a simple task, if they could point out where several campus buildings were.The results were a lot of fun to gather.
I asked students if they could point out four buildings: Ballantine Hall, Simon Hall, the Business School's 'Godfrey Graduate and Executive Education Center' and finally, the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility. For those of you reading this who may not know where it actually is, the Cyclotron Facility is located
here just north of the stadium on the other side of 46. As a kicker question, I asked students if they could identify the number of the room they were currently in.
Ballantine was the least exciting, as everyone surveyed knew exactly where it was. Simon Hall, which is relatively close to the more known Ballantine, did not fare as well. and neither did any of the others. Only 22% of those surveyed knew where Simon Hall was, 33% knew where the Graduate and Executive Education Center was, and only 16% knew the location of the expensive and influential Cyclotron Facility.
Even though those low numbers for well-established campus buildings were pretty bad, what was worse- and more hilarious- to discover was the percentage of people who could even name the room they were in. Across the classrooms I surveyed, only 33% of my peers knew what room they were in (though to be fair, for one of my classes, I personally didn't know what room I was in).
So what does this all mean? Maybe IU students need to take a more in-depth look into where their money goes- maybe students should remember what rooms they spend their time in every day of the week. IU students need to take full advantage of their campus.
This campus is one of the most beautiful in the nation, and we walk around throwing our gum into the bushes without taking its beauty into consideration. We need to all sit down and learn a little bit more about Indiana University's Bloomington campus, about the buildings we study in, about the research that our professors do here, and about the millions of well-spent dollars to make this one of the best places to live and learn.
How about you? Tell us what you think. What's the building with which you are
least familiar? Ask yourself where the Cyclotron is, where SRSC is, where the Student Building is, and ask your friends too. Chances are you might just learn something...
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