Ten Years Ago

There is an electric vibe on campus these days, and it has nothing to do with impending year end.

Maintenance is working double and triple time. The whole campus is festooned with banners and streamers. The student clubs are scurrying about, doing their part: cleaning up billboard cabinets and trash cans, scraping old postings off bulletin boards. The broom wielding women are cleaning the streets up as they’ve not been cleaned in a long time. Landscapers are meticulously pruning trees and trimming bushes. In the evening, they are watering the flowers and greenery areas. Even the basketball and badminton courts got new nets. Painters are touching up light posts.

The sports complex grounds, under water just last week from excessive rain have been dried out to make way for the giant stage being built. Today contractors started rigging up lights and bringing in sound systems.

Yes, the excitement is palpable.

Ten years ago this week, our school opened for business. The campus consisted of Teaching Buildings 1 and 2, the Machine Shop building, two dorms – one for boys and the other for girls and one administration building. All of these surrounded the small park that I used to look out at wistfully come nightfall when I first came here. Beyond the administration building was open country. Well, farmed country.  

The Street was nothing but a dirt road. Here and there a shop or two catered to the neighborhood. There were only a few restaurants and no street vendors to speak of. The old way of life in China prevailed.

Nowadays The Street is an asphalted two lane road. Shops and restaurants line the sidewalks, themselves filled with meanderers young and old, some native to the neighborhood and some only collegiately transient. The trees, planted just last year give The Street the appearance of timelessness, as though it has always been this way.

Campus has grown from the original 6 buildings to a total of 5 teaching buildings, ten dorm buildings, 4 landscaped parks/nature areas, 2 ponds, 2 sportsplexes, 2 dining halls, 2 outdoors basketball areas, ten tennis courts, ten badminton courts, 5 volleyball courts, a library and gym just completed this year, a living complex for the teachers where I am proud to hang my hat, a teacher activity center… and more to come. Enrollment has grown from those first few hundred admittances to swell into the tens of thousands.   

This week marks our school’s ten year anniversary. My friends, the event will be celebrated in gala fashion. I’m proud to be a part of it, and I’m proud to be your eyes and ears for this event.

Don’t worry: you won’t miss a thing. As it happens, I will record it and tell you all about it. It will almost be like you are right here, with us, celebrating, reveling and being regaled.

Happy Birthday to Wuchang Institute of Technology!