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As midterms approach, I face Janet while she sits with a cool refreshing beer in her hand. The conversations of students at the Gasthaus are inaudible, but it was still too loud for us to hear one another without raising our voices. With stress being piled on, I ask her as I fixate my eyes at the beer about why she was drinking. “Cause drinking a beer is nice and it helps you relax.” I go on to ask if it was because of stress? “Yes, partially. It’s hard to focus. I have to go to work..I have classes,” she says. She continues about balancing life as we sit in the dimly-lit restaurant, the voices of stressed students drown us out.

Upon entering the Roberto Hernandez Center, nestled in the narrow Bolton hallway that leads many UWM students toward the library, you’re treated to a colorful collage made up the flags of many Latin American countries.

On the surface, the center is an advising office for the university’s around 2,000 students of Latin American heritage. If you were to see the space as strictly an academic advising office, you wouldn’t be doing the center justice.

From the office’s director Alberto Maldonado, to the two advisors Gabriela Dorantes and Olivia Navarro, to the many different students who frequent the office on a daily basis, the center is a place for advice, shared experience, and in the words of UWM senior Leonardo Serrato, a “second family”.

“They’re there for you,” Serrato said. “It feels like you are welcome to ask questions, even personal ones.”

He’s got an unmistakable, toothy grin – the kind of smirk that’s crooked and slightly unintimidating, although his sharpened canine teeth might suggest otherwise. His body, smooth as marble, glistens in the bracing fall daylight. The wind blows across the idle campus.

I glance up at him, because even in a crouch he towers a staggering six feet tall, and mutter a question into his cold ear: “How do you feel about UWM?”

He doesn’t answer but instead adamantly beams forward, watching the students schlep across campus.

Occasionally a car or bus will zip past. He seems unfazed. I sigh.

That’s what you get when you try to have a word with Pounce – our resident guardian, mascot, eyesore – the panther statue plopped out in front of UWM’s Enderis Hall.

Behind the glass doors of the EMS Senior Design Lab, mechanical engineering students Sydney Nerad and Tucker Stone sit side by side plugging calculations into CREO, a 3D printer designing prototype software. The pair is designing a testing fixture, an assignment given to them by GE Healthcare for their senior design project.

“MRI’s need to be cleaned with chemicals after each use, deteriorating the material that could change an X-Ray,” Nerad explains.

“We are creating a machine to regulate flow rate of chemical testing fixtures for more accurate MRIs.” Stone concludes.

When the team is finished, GE will 3D print their design and create prototypes for testing. If the design turns out to be a success, GE will manufacture their creation.

The smell of sweat and chlorine haunts the air in what seems like a never ending maze of hallways and gymnasiums. Each doorway leads you into a new realm of the building where you might find a weight room or a racquetball court. The echo of dribbling basketballs is faint in the distance behind the commotion of students constantly coming in and out of the building for class or to get a workout in. In the hour I was there, I saw the UWM Men’s Basketball team practicing, a women’s swim team practice and about 50 people in the weight room, and that only covered a quarter of the building. As busy as it is, the Klotsche Center offers endless opportunity and entertainment for those interested in being physically active.

The view from the 1970’s-resemblent couches in the Sandburg Residence Hall lobby is one that can’t be matched. Unfortunately, unlike a luxurious getaway, there’s no white sand beach outside the window. Instead, you’re placed smack dab in the center of the day of the college student who’s craving that first plane to Aruba.

Five minutes after the hour, a few students are nearly sprinting through the white-tiled, white-walled lobby and out the gray doors. Their destination is obvious – class that began several minutes ago. Five minutes before the next hour, students are flooding the lobby. They impatiently wait in line, ID cards locked and loaded in their hands, itching to be the closest they can get to a getaway – their room.

The first in a three-part series on DiverCity Walking out of the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, the last thing you expect to see is a monument to your right, perched atop a small hill. Drawing from many Jewish symbols, such as the menorah and six pillars of Judaism, the monument is […]

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UW-Milwaukee student Amanda Dahms was a voluntary Marine Corps service member who enlisted when she was 17-years-old. She went to boot camp the following day after her high school graduation in 2006. After finishing boot camp, she went to the school house and then to the fleet. Dahms said that she was a survivor of […]

It was spring of 1968 when Larry Nicholson traveled down to the Pensacola area to see his brother Roger before leaving for Vietnam. It was at Whiting Field in Milton, Florida where Larry’s brother was stationed as a flight instructor after returning home in 1966. He served as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Now his […]

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUwckPSxiiw&w=700&rel=0] His dark brown hair lays on his chest as he caresses the body and neck of a Sitka spruce top Yamaha guitar perched on top of his faded out blue jeans. His almond-colored eyes look down at a book eagerly, yet calmly, telling him not to fret as he strums. Carlos Berumen served as […]

On an unseasonably warm day in the middle of December, an unexpected call breaks through the sound of the rain’s consistent tapping on the window. A woman’s voice rings out, laced with years of memories and sentiment. “I’ve talked with my daughters and we all agree that I owe it to Tom to tell his […]