Category: Campus life

Editors’ note: In March 2014, students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison approved a $223 million referendum to overhaul the campus recreation facilities, badly in need of improvement. Since then, the recreation program has been busy planning, fundraising, vetting architects and much more. As the project progresses, Alex Peirce, UW-Madison Rec Sports Coordinator of Marketing and Communications, will be offering an inside look at the process of coordinating such a monumental planning effort.

As classes began Wednesday, more than 2,000 undergraduate students filed into crowded lecture sections of Chemistry 103, one of the largest courses at UW-Madison. Making classes like these feel smaller is the goal of a new campus-wide initiative aimed at enriching student learning.

A new semester has officially kicked off at UW-Madison, but it comes with a major closure. The Memorial Union Terrace is in the midst of a major renovation project and officially closed on Monday.

It’s the first day of September and with temperatures in the mid-80s, campus feels like an oven. Freshmen lawlessly stream across the intersections, heading to the Chancellor’s Convocation at the Kohl Center. About 7,000 students were invited to the welcoming ceremony.

University of Wisconsin-Madison students are back in class, but they won’t be able to unwind at the Memorial Union Terrace: The iconic lakeside spot is set to close Tuesday for renovations.

The University of Wisconsin Police Department is launching a sexual assault awareness campaign targeting potential perpetrators.

The campaign is aimed at young men and reminds them that sexual assault is not OK, no matter how much they have had to drink.

The city of Madison just got a bit busier as thousands of students moved into the dorms on the UW campus on Sunday.

Sunday was the second of three scheduled move-in days on campus. Mostly freshmen moved into the dorms, but one returning student says he’s both excited and anxious to be back for the school year.

Football season brings thousands of Badger fans to the Memorial Union Terrace every year, but this fall Wisconsin students, alumni and visitors will have to find a new place to enjoy their postgame beer. Most of Memorial Union will close for the year Tuesday, with certain areas–like the new west wing–staying open in the interim.

No one can blame Ty Majeski for taking a well-deserved mini-vacation from racing this weekend at his family’s cottage up north.

The UW-Madison Environment, Health and Safety Department, in partnership with University Housing and the Madison Fire Department, will host the first-ever Campus Fire Safety Month on the UW campus in September.

The official start to the new school year at UW-Madison is Wednesday, when classes begin.For first year and transfer students, however, the year will get off with a bang on Tuesday at the Kohl Center, for the annual Chancellor’s Convocation, beginning at 10:30 a.m.

Noted: The University of Wisconsin – Madison committed to local purchasing in the late 1990s. The university’s dining halls have partnered with approximately 40 local growers and food distributors to serve meals to the 7000 undergraduates living in its residential housing.

Several downtown streets will be closed starting Thursday for more than 7,400 students moving into university residence halls, according to a release from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The big move-in days are Thursday, Sunday and Monday, officials said. Traffic around all residence halls will be very heavy on those days. Students can move in any time after 8 a.m. on their assigned day.

By this time next week, much of the Memorial Union will be closed, nearly all of the Terrace fenced off, its brightly colored sunburst chairs packed away until next summer.

The big move-in days will be this coming Thursday, Sunday and Monday, according to UW-Madison. Traffic around all residence halls will be extremely heavy on those days, the university said in a press release. Students can begin moving in on those days any time after 8 a.m. on their assigned day.

Two hours after successfully escaping police custody, police say 21-year-old Sean M. Riemanapp decided he needed a ride.

The heart of the Memorial Union at University of Wisconsin-Madison — including the Union Terrace with its sunburst yellow, orange and green metal chairs — will close Sept. 1 for the last phase of a $52 million face-lift that aims to preserve its historic integrity and beloved spaces.

A Dodgeville man arrested for drunken driving escaped from police, only to later ask an officer in a marked squad car for a ride home, landing him in jail, UW-Madison Police said.

Several downtown streets will be closed Saturday morning for the Madison Mini-Marathon. The race winds from Langdon Street to the Capitol, through the UW Arboretum, and back to the UW campus.

In its nearly 170-year history, a lot has changed inside UW Madison’s residential halls.

The study of 166 UW-Madison students found that, on average, students who did not drink lived nearly a half-mile further from the nearest alcohol outlet than drinkers, and that more than double the number of alcohol outlets were within a half-mile of where drinkers lived compared to nondrinkers.

Organizers of UW-Madison’s drive to reduce waste during the busy mid-August move-out believe the project collected more than 100,000 pounds worth of donated items last weekend.

It’s move in weekend for many UW-Madison students, and that means downtown is a sea of moving trucks and discarded furniture.

An online subscription to the Journal of Coordination Chemistry costs more than $12,000 a year. Multiply that by the hundreds of similarly expensive scholarly journals UW-Madison libraries subscribe to, and their budget disappears quite quickly.

UW Police officials say Dane County’s district attorney declined to criminally charge a suspect in a campus sexual assault, when the victim balked at the possibility of a trial.

20-year old UW student Kenneth Plaisted was arrested in February on the tentative charge of second degree sexual assault, in connection with what authorities said was an October 2014 assault of a student. Plaisted left school in the wake of his arrest.

Pieces of the pedestrian bridge between Vilas Hall and the Humanities Building over University Avenue fall to the ground as a crew works on demolishing the bridge.

The new, 313-unit Hub Madison complex at State, Frances and Gilman streets opened last week for early move-ins. But Aug. 14 and 15 are the traditional moving days in downtown Madison as leases expire, so the apartment’s managers have an elaborate plan in place to get through the crush of those days.

Most people can’t imagine what it would be like to live in Africa, let alone interact with exotic animals every day. UW Madison student and zoology major Austin Ronan did just that during his semester abroad in Cape Town, South Africa. The culture shock, he said, was enormous.

Q & A with associate professor in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health David Vanness.

A portion of University Avenue will be closed this week so crews can remove a pedestrian bridge, according to a release.

Current and former UW-Madison students say they’re sad to see a pedestrian bridge on campus torn down.

There is no subway system where these kids are going. And it’ll be white: Snowstorm white. Dairy farm white. White white. But Kenneth Jackson, a new high school graduate from the Washington area, isn’t too worried about trading in his urban life for a dorm at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a few short weeks. He knows he can handle it. After all, his posse is coming along.

The bridge over University Avenue between the George L. Mosse Humanities Building and Vilas Hall is scheduled to be demolished next week. The demolition will start Monday and continue throughout the week, according to a news release.

A university engineering study in 2013 revealed numerous structural problems with the four-decade-old bridge. In some places, concrete had fallen off, exposing steel reinforcing bars. Officials concluded it was time to either replace the bridge, which would cost about $1.5 million, or demolish it, which would cost about $180,000, director of campus Gary Brown said.

A Tuesday news release from UW News stressed the installation a few years ago of a traffic signal at East Campus Mall a block away has reduced bridge use.But Gary Brown, director of campus planning, added that deterioration of the bridge built in 1971 has led to repeated repairs in the past few years and an engineering report last year recommended its removal or replacement, Brown said.

A new report has the University of Wisconsin-Madison ranked as the third biggest party school in the country.

Noted: Rounding out the top five party schools are, in order: The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and last years No. 1, Syracuse University in New York.

University of Illinois, University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison were ranked 1-2-3, followed by Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and last year’s No. 1, Syracuse University in New York.

A look back at protests on campus in the 1960s.

The Catholic student center at UW-Madison has slightly downsized its proposed new building, dropping the number of stories from six to five. The revision is a further cut from the initial 14-story proposal.

Babcock Hall is well-known as a mecca for ice cream and cheese making, but it’s also where candy makers from across the nation and even the world come for two weeks each summer for an intensive, hands-on education in the science of commercial candy making. The course that started last week include students who traveled from Germany, Chile, Mexico and Canada.