CENTENNIAL CHIC

Now that we are rolling into our sixth week of classes it's only appropriate to assess how the year is going, how your professors are, and how much we all love the new building on campus, Centennial Hall. Remembering back to last year on campus, there wasn't much to enjoy. The grounds for Centennial Hall looked more like a trailer park than the mansion that now resides there. Construction workers were always roaming through campus, and on any given day your morning sleep could be interrupted by the sound of chainsaws or jackhammers. But out of all that rubble and all that noise erupted a magnificent building that we can all enjoy. When you walk into the grand entrance you're overtaken by the amount of natural light and the modern feel. All of our other academic building date back many years and have old architecture. That's all fine and dandy, but Centennial Hall has those sleek, modern, chic lines that we all love in this day in age. Not only is it great to look at, but also there are lots of places for studying or just bumming around between classes. It's so easy to find a quiet corner to bury your nose in a book, or a group common area to catch up with friends and talk about your crazy weekends. It also makes for a great building to people-watch, if you're into that sort of thing. Centennial is all about "going green." Which seems to be on the minds of many these days. Don't use paper bags at the grocery store when you can bring your own from home. Don't buy bottled water; instead invest in an aluminum one that you can refill. It was with this mentality that they approached the building of Centennial Hall. The building has solar panels on the roof to soak up sun rays to heat the water throughout the building. There are even rain gardens outside to soak up the rainfall and distribute it into the groundwater. And the natural light helps to light about 90 percent of the building, which helps cut down on artificial lighting costs. This will hopefully save the university a lot of money in the long run. We all know that there aren't any clocks in the building. But what's so bad about that? Now we won't all be staring at the clocks the entire class time, and we might actually listen to our professors. Crazy, right? Maybe it was all a ploy to do just that. We all carry our phones with us, and most of us text during class, so don't try to complain that you never know what time it is. Having new and innovative buildings like this located around campus make me proud to be a student at UW-La Crosse. It shows that the school cares about giving as much as they can to the students. So look past all of the absent clocks and the days of construction workers and jackhammers; now just look at the green, innovative building we can all embrace and love.