Lisa Sheehan worked in RI Hall from August 1978 until 1982 when Geology moved out. Her office was the first on the right when entering from the main green which in Spring 2008 was room 117. She “loved working there” because it was old, and had so much character. She described her office as having a 15ft ceiling with 10ft windows, and although it was “cavernous” it had the “charm of an old building”. Lisa remembers it as “warm and cosy”, and thought that the location on the main green was “the best”. In comparison, she describes being in the Geo-Chem building as feeling like you are in a hospital.

In terms of the layout, the room across the hall from her (possibly room 116 last spring?) was fairly large and was used for conferences, and was also where the undergraduate mailboxes were located. The basement had the labs, and was a “creepy” place, probably due to the lack of light and the stories about the building. Lisa described how it was "common knowledge" that autopsies used to be carried out in the theatre with the observation balcony on the second floor (this balcony extended around room 201 and over Psychological services). People talked about stories of the building being haunted, and its history was more or less general knowledge.

In terms of the appearance of the interior, there was a lot of wood panelling. The carpets that were there in Spring 2008 were new when she visited the building after 1982. The double door at the west end of the corridor was also new, but the lighting and the corridor were the same, including the jut in the corridor where the 1874 extension meets the original 1840 building. The directory board just inside the east entrance from the main green was another addition post 1982, as it was not there when Lisa worked in the building. Despite some similarities, Lisa described the building as having “a completely different feel” to the way she remembered it pre-1982. She feels they “had tried to modernise it, so you didn’t get the old feeling as much. The wood was gone”, and they had partitioned several of the rooms so that it “didn’t have the open feeling old buildings had.”

In terms of how the building was used by students, Lisa recalled that there was quite a lot of traffic in the building. Grad students and faculty would constantly be entering and leaving, and the undergraduate geology students would come in to access their mailboxes for departmental mail.

Memories from the Department of Geological Sciences

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