Gazing out the window of his son’s new digs on the second floor of UMR’s Residential College, Vincent H. Grelle, EE’81, MS EMgt’87, acknowledges that the four-lane, landscape-lined boulevard below doesn’t much resemble “the old road to frat row” he remembers from his days on campus.

In 1950, the year the Missouri School of the Mines opened its first dormitory, the New York Yankees could afford the best baseball players in the world, tensions were high overseas and Americans were embracing new technologies at home. In Rolla, the annual St. Pat’s celebration was, no doubt, the best ever.

It looks like a puck. At least, it’s shaped like a puck. It must be a puck. That’s what UMR students decided after a rather mysterious concrete and rock structure, shaped like a huge hockey puck, showed up on campus in the early 1970s.

Over piles of paperwork on his desk, through the summer rain streaming down his office window, Ashok Midha, chair of mechanical and aerospace engineering, looks out at an old building now called the Mechanical Engineering Annex. He likes to point out that the annex, which is not long for this campus, was originally constructed in […]

While Stephen Grelle sorted through his CD collection in his new room in UMR’s Residential College, his girlfriend, Emilie Lueker, was thrilled that her spacious abode, one floor above Grelle’s, accommodated a collection of another sort.

To paraphrase the late painter Bob Ross, who made a living making landscapes come to life on public television, “Maybe a happy tree lives right over here…” Well, from crab apples to dogwoods, from oaks to maples, the UMR campus now has more than 3,000 happy trees. No makeover would be complete without careful consideration […]

Visitors to UMR no longer follow a beaten path to campus – and the university couldn’t be happier. The once homely, well-worn passage known as University Drive was transformed this year into an attractive entryway that welcomes travelers from U.S. Interstate 44, guiding them into the heart of campus.

Two sculptures on the UMR campus that celebrate the passage of time – Stonehenge and the Millennium Arch – were recently joined by MSM-UMR 20th Century, a new mural by Jack Guth, CE’50, that portrays scenes from campus history.

There’s something slightly justified about the name of UMR’s new student and campus center, named after Gary Havener, the 1962 UMR mathematics graduate whose $5 million gift to UMR helped make the student haven a reality.