Rooming With Mac (or Dell or IBM . . .)
Forget football games and frat parties, this fall college students have something else on their minds. It’s their computers and where to plug them in.
In pre-pre-millennial days, students’ back-to-school checklist might have ranged from name tags and backpacks to personal credit cards tied to parental bank accounts. But in 1999, the Internet rules, and if you don’t have access, you might as well stay home.
“It is no longer unusual for us to hear calls from students on the same day they got their letters of admission, wanting to know how they can hook into our network,” says Richard Fagen, Caltech’s director of Information Technology Services.
Happily for such techies, the answer is reassuring. At Caltech, a multimillion-dollar system called CITnet will soon offer 12,000 computer connection ports throughout the Pasadena campus. “There will be ports everywhere--in dorm rooms, in classrooms, in labs, in offices and lounges,” says Fagen.
As one of the nation’s premier temples to the gods of technology, Caltech was one of the first schools to wire dorms for computer hookups in the early 1980s. And thanks to a geographically compact campus with an exotic underground maze of steam tunnels built decades ago for heating, installation of the new wiring required little disruption of campus life.
At the more modestly endowed Cal Poly Pomona, the apartments that house more than 800 upperclassmen “don’t have a whole lot of whiz-bang technology,” said a Cal Poly spokeswoman, but they do have a good phone system for students who arrive with modems. At the state university, any student can get an account to call into a Cal Poly Internet server, and there is no charge for access through CompuServe or America Online.
But this campus is getting geared up as well, says Dean Chetkovich, the housing service’s information technology specialist. “We have installed a fiber-optic backbone throughout the campus, and as of this time next year, we will have everything wired for the Internet,” he says. “Just think of the amazing possibilities this can bring to the educational experience.”
Yes, just think--every dorm room with a link to the laundry room (Are all the dryers full?) and to the vending machines at the end of the hall (Is there any Diet Coke left?).
At UCLA, specialists are poised to help thousands of incoming freshmen make the most of their tech connections. According to Michael Schilling, who oversees technology for UCLA housing, the school’s computer move-in fair, from Sept. 24 through the start of classes Sept. 30, is a popular back-to-school event. “Our campus is 100% wired,” says Schilling, “and that means fire [alarms], phone and cable TV [as well as computers].”
Now, about those classes . . .
