Since We Saw You Last…
Campus Town comes to life, a Playfair proposal, groundbreaking robots, and coffee etiquette.
ONE FOR THE BOOKS >
Campus Town, the mixed-use commercial and residential center seven years in the making, is coming to life. A Barnes & Noble featuring a B&N Café was the first retailer to open its doors this summer. Others scheduled to follow suit include Panera Bread, Yummy Sushi, Red Berry Yogurt, Piccolo Pronto, Mexican Mariachi Grill, and Brickwall Tavern & Dining Room. Those openings can’t happen soon enough for the 446 students who moved into the center’s upper-floor apartments this semester.
INGENIOUS PROPOSAL >
Nicole Pieri ’11 and Chris Hallberg ’11 met by literally running into each other at Playfair, the frenetic Welcome Week freshmen icebreaker. “We were running in opposite directions, and I grabbed his arm and almost dislocated it,” says Pieri. Four years of friendship and another four of dating followed. In June, Hallberg brought a legion of family and friends to campus to recreate the couple’s initial encounter; then he popped the question. A shocked and sobbing Pieri said yes, the video of the proposal went viral—and most important, no one was hurt.
SAY HELLO TO OUR LITTLE FRIENDS >
With help from several mini-robots—one wearing a tiny hard hat and swinging a tiny shovel—the college broke ground on a new STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Building in July. The 89,000-square-foot building is part of a $75 million transformation of the campus’s existing science and engineering facilities. It will house state-of-the-art laboratories—including a robotics lab—when it opens in August 2017.
PASS THE JOE, PLEASE >
GrubHub, an online food ordering service and purveyor of frivolous college rankings, named TCNJ the 13th Most Polite College in the U.S. The ratings were based on the percentage of orders that contained phrases like “please” and “thank you.” It seems a lot of those orders also included the word coffee: TCNJ ranked 6th on GrubHub’s Most Caffeinated Colleges list.
Posted on October 2, 2015