I’m hoping that someday before I graduate I get a chance to appreciate the construction that’s currently underway.

I won’t, however, be holding my breath. Despite claims of completion by November, I happen to know, from personal experiences living “upstate,” that winter is not historically sympathetic to planning of any sort. Given Binghamton’s penchant for nasty weather, I’d say a mid-October frost is definitely a possibility. Frost and unpleasant weather have a funny tendency to set construction back rather effectively. After all, the joke has always been that we only have two seasons — winter and construction.

I know that, supposedly, everything was going along swimmingly all summer until the rain outdid itself, but somehow I fail to see the fruits of this labor. Granted, I’m living in a de-asbestos-ed CIW dorm, for which I and my lungs are certainly grateful, but I’m somehow convinced that redoing my dorm didn’t take every single worker the entire summer. Especially since my common room furniture is still M.I.A. That’s another story.

If you haven’t noticed, it’s apparently not enough to start and finish projects one or two or even three at a time. Clearly, the preferable way would have been to start some during this past spring … and then to start some more over the summer … and then start some when students arrive for the fall semester, and then to start maybe just a couple more when classes start and everyone is busy trying to figure out how to get to places they may or may not have heard of.

On top of all this, the people planning these construction projects seem to have an uncanny ability to find every single one of my classes, and then cut off every single thoroughfare I have ever been able to use to get there. I pride myself on a fairly decent ability to navigate, and yet I have been thwarted more than once this fall when suddenly my new route has been plastered with the infamous yellow caution tape and the “F#&* you, go a different way” signs. I’m running out of ideas, and I’m not always so excited about class that I’m willing to think more creatively. Quit testing my patience. Please.

This situation bothers me to excess. Why? Because it seems to me that the slightest amount of planning could have avoided this mess. If you simply must create ten unfinished projects for each that is completed, how hard would it be to not cut off every single pathway between CIW and the rest of campus simultaneously? How difficult would it have been to build brick walls and pretty landscaping in the quad over the summer, instead of when large volumes of students would be needing to use those paths to Fine Arts and the Old and New University Union entrances?

The manner in which the construction has been undertaken is, quite frankly, idiotic. There is simply no reason to close off an entire side of the Library’s entrances, the Engineering ramp, the walkway on the OTHER side of the Engineering Building and, essentially, the entire front side of the Old and New Unions at the same time. It’s like every single building on the inside of the Brain is in its own little bubble, inaccessible save from the opposite extreme ends of campus. At last, Newing is getting its revenge. I don’t know exactly what construction happened all summer, but it was the wrong construction.

It’s not that I don’t like walking … but who wants to walk completely out of their way to get to their 8:30 class, never mind an entire day full of detours? So what can be done to make me and (I’d go so far as to say) a majority of students happy? Basically, one of those middle pathways — that makes it so that we don’t all have to walk to the city of Binghamton to get to the heart of BU — needs to get finished. Preferably before my next class in Science II. Oh, and while you’re at it, you can use that pathway to bring me my common room furniture. Thanks.

Molly Ariotti is a sophomore geography and political science major.