The campus her electrical engineer major daughter now calls home is just a wee bit different from the one Sharon Hwang used to zip through in her fancy ride in the late ’80s.
“When I think back to my days at Illinois, I think about cruising down Lincoln Avenue and Green Street on my red Honda Elite 80 with a friend sitting on the back of my scooter. It did not matter what time of the year it was: I rode that scooter during every season, as I was determined to make great use of my first major purchase from my first summer internship,” says Hwang (BS ’89, electrical engineering), now a law partner at Chicago’s McAndrews, Held and Malloy Ltd.
“My most frequent stops were Everitt Laboratory, the undergrad library and O’Malley’s — ‘American Pie’ at midnight — in that order.
“These days, I have the distinct pleasure of visiting Champaign-Urbana on a regular basis to see my daughter. I am amazed at how much the engineering campus and Campustown have changed, and comforted that the main Quad still looks the same.
"My daughter has the privilege of taking the bulk of her classes in the beautiful new ECE building with state-of-the-art classrooms, new laboratories and excellent facilities for studying, so she will never know the pleasures of scrambling for a seat in 151 Everitt to study between classes, searching high and low for women’s restrooms in Engineering Hall, or spending hours at Kinko’s manually shrinking down her notes to create the perfect one-page cheat sheet for her EE exams.
“Great memories, and I am so proud to be an Illini.”
