Karen Gates Andrew, a 1971 graduate of the school of Retail and Internal Design, takes a look at a photo of her old college friend, Maria Rainone Lewis, (background) a 1971 graduate of the Food Administration Program on display at Archives Exhibition: Women at RIT.
Maxwell Citizen Kepler

Joe Brairback

Mathematics
Class of ‘77

What is your current occupation?
I'm a real estate appraiser. (Laughs)

What was your most memorable moment as a student at RIT?
It would have to be the State Championship for basketball my senior year. We won, and it was absolutely fantastic: Highlight of my college career!

Joe Noble

Printing
Class of ‘83

What was RIT like when you were here?
Bricks, still the bricks (Laughs): ‘Brick City.’ It was a good campus. I learned a lot. And it helped me for my future career.

What are you doing now?
I’m working for Kodak. I manage customer service for the Kodak online photo experience. What I learned here gave me the background in what I needed to manage different situations.

Tery Olszewski Binkley

Chemistry
Class of ‘58

What is your current occupation?
I am a RAS engineer (Reliability Assurance for Manufacturing Engineer) for IBM.

Do you feel RIT prepared you for your career?
Yes. Absolutely. I had wonderful professors and many great classes.

Your favorite thing about RIT when you were a student?
When I was a student, I lived in Kate Gleason Hall, and we had dances that required that we ask out a date. If we didn't go with a date, we had to pay a penalty. Those were terrific because we always had big name bands for the time.

What were the penalties?
It was never anything official, but everyone in the hall participated. Sometimes, it was a small fine; other times, it was a big dare. I don't even want to say what my friend had to do when she didn't show up at all!

What keeps bringing you back to Brick City?
Well, meeting with all those terrific people from the [Kate Gleason] Hall to remember all those wonderful times and those dances. And I am just absolutely in love with Rochester.

Interior Design alumni Lucy Piper (Class of 2002), left, and Karen Singleton (Class of 2008) speak with Chuck Lewis, the Program Chair and Professor for the Industrial and Interior Design Program at the Interior Design Reunion.
Jennifer Abraham

Ian Howard

Computer Science
Class of ‘96

What is your current occupation?
I was working at Microsoft for a while, but it wasn't what I wanted to do with my degree. So I left and I tried to create my own start-up, which never actually started up. Right now, I'm working for small company, and looking to get into a graduate school.

What schools are you considering?
RIT is definitely on the list, which is a major reason I decided to come this weekend.

Your favorite thing about RIT when you were a student?
During my third year, my roommates and I had a prank war that lasted almost the entire year. The best prank was when I woke up and I was surrounded by male mannequins. It might sound lame, but I was scared out of my mind when I first woke up to that. I still don't know where they got all those mannequins.

Mannequins?
I didn't get it, either.

Jim Minno

Marketing
Class of ’79

What is your current occupation?
Director of Research at the RIT Development Center
[Editor’s note: Jim’s memory of the RIT campus is of quite a different place. While at RIT, he remembers launching hang gliders from the top of Ellingson hall and watching Monroe County Sheriffs chase motorcycles through the tunnels during a frat’s “Hell’s Angels Party.”]

What is your best memory of RIT?
The first day I was in the dorms. It was raining like crazy and my parents ended up leaving. I walked out into the lounge, and within like a minute somebody yelled from the balcony, ‘Hey you! Do you drink beer?’ I said, “Yeah,” and they said, “Get your mug and get up here!” I went upstairs and probably six of the people I met there I still do stuff with today. I still hang out with them. I was a best man in a lot of their weddings.

Mary-Ellen Coleman

Computer Science
Class of ’86

What is your best memory of RIT?
“I was living in NRH 6, so [one] day I’m having lunch at Gracies, and everyone said, ‘Wow wasn’t that such a pain, we had that fire alarm last night.’

I said, ‘What fire?’

It turns out there was a fire on the other end of NRH 5 and they had to evacuate the whole building. Apparently I slept through the whole thing. I had a loft… The RA looked in the room and didn’t see me in the loft and just assumed everyone was evacuated… Obviously, I lived to tell the story and it wasn’t that serious of a fire… but when I went to my RA and I said, ‘Was there a fire?’ She said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone that I didn’t get you out of there’ and I said, ‘You bet I won’t!’”

Dan Hilsdorf

Electrical Engineering
Class of ‘83

What was RIT like when you were here?
It was a lot smaller. There are a lot of buildings now where I used to park. There were very few women in the engineering department, as I recall. That has changed significantly. My recollection of what I’m finding very valuable now with my own children is the co-op program. They’re making college very affordable [for] the last three years of school, and today I think that is more important than ever to be able to bridge that gap, until graduation. It helps to reduce that debt significantly. As far as career preparation, I’ve been with the same company for 25 years. I’m the director of electrical engineering at Quality Vision International; we make precision multi-sensor measuring instruments.

Things have changed a lot since I’ve graduated. Business used to be primarily in North America and that’s changed significantly. We’ve managed to survive by going global. If we had just stayed in North America, we probably would have gone out of business by now.

How has RIT changed?
When I was here there was only a Electrical Engineering major. Well, Microelectronic Engineering was new at the time. Now, Computer Engineering and a whole bunch of engineering technologies — more than I can count — are available where it used to be just Electrical Engineering.