Miami University Alumni Weekend 2009

Jun 21, 2009 at 11:23 PM
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I've put up a few posts while I was there, but I wanted to throw a bit more up.

For the bicentennial of Miami University, they wanted to have one of their biggest alumni weekends. My wife and I (both alumni, and thus, a "Miami Merger") had never been to an alumni weekend, but thought we'd make the trip up. It was quite neat. We signed in and got our nametags. Because of our Merger status, we got a special sticker. It was also my wife's fifteenth year since graduating, so she got an extra tag.

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The big event was the MIami Merger Moment, or, as I've been calling it, the mass marriage. This was an attempt to break the record for simultaneous renewal of vows. The old record, set in Pittsburgh, was 624 couples. The unofficial count yesterday was 1,087.

The site was the Upham Arch. The tradition is that if you kiss your sweetheart under the arch (at midnight, by some tellings), you will marry him/her. I was always told Miami had a fairly high percentage of couples who meet there who marry. Yesterday, they said the figure was about 14%.

In addition to 1,086 people who were already married, one couple were married the previous day, but signed their marriage certificate at the event.

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After the service, we all walked through the Upham Arch, then started the Parade of Classes. My year of graduation was 1992, though I graduated in December, a semester early. The only other person in the 1992 group had the same story (there were other Class of '92 folks in the Alumni Band).

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Going back to campus means checking out familiar places. My job at college was at the library, supporting the CD-ROM desk. These were indexes to magazines and journals that were on CD-ROM. Moslty, these were accessed via dumb terminals connected to a minicomputer. While the internet was around (we even got on from the terminals), it was all pre-World Wide Web. Now that it is ubiquitous, the function has mostly been supplanted.

The other inovation while I was there, which I supported, was Sherlock. This was an on-line card catalog system. It appears to still work under that name if you know where to look, though it has a snazzy new web interface.

I peeked in the window--the dumb terminals were all replaced by iMacs!