A Room with a View

For a long time, I thought that I would probably never top the office that I had at the University of Hawai`i as a graduate student. A graduate student with a nice office? How could that be?

Long story short, I was the beneficiary of a fortuitous set of circumstances.

My department was in Moore Hall, a five story building on the flagship Manoa campus of UH. Faculty had offices primarily on the fifth and fourth floors, usually with windows to the outside world, while graduate students, if they were lucky enough to have an office at all, would share rooms in the interior of the building. (Many of us were convinced that these "offices" where just re-branded closet space.)

One year, the "corner office" on the fifth floor became vacant when a faculty member left. However, the faculty member who should have been next in line for that space declined the offer. (His office was packed with stacks of materials and he didn't want the bother of moving everything to a new location.) As a result, a group of us GAs (graduate assistants) became the proud inhabitants of one of the best rooms in the building, with an expansive view from Manoa Valley down to Waikiki (and Diamond Head, if you looked just right). 

But it gets better. Not only was the room itself beautiful, one of my office mates was quite the aficionado of fine coffee. He had apparently struck up a deal with a local coffee shop to sell him a couple pounds of green coffee beans which he would occasionally roast in small batches on the weekend. During the following week, we would chat about research and life, while gazing out of our fifth story window and sipping coffee made from freshly ground, hand roasted beans.

That said, I think that my current space in the newly opened Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center is giving my Hawai`i office a run for its money.