I have an odd history of winding up in peculiar situations wherein I have conversations with interesting people.

Back at Montgomery College I regularly had lunch with the Stagecraft Director and Assistant Art Director, even though my major was pre-nursing. Before he was sentenced to seven years in federal prison, I chatted online with the infamous Martin Shkreli – trust me, he was far more mundane than you might think a multimillionaire pharmaceutical executive to be. I played DotA 2 with SirActionSlacks, a minor celebrity within the DotA 2 gaming community – he built Euls on Gyrocopter. No idea how this guy got to 5k.

Last April I stumbled into a group lunch with the Executive Director of USG, Stewart Edelstein. He wanted to hear student opinions about the campus, what was good and what was bad, how things could be improved. Stew and I instantly connected over our shared interest in piano, and the conversation turned to the idea of getting instruments on campus for students to use. I quite like the idea of studying for a while and taking a break to play piano – it makes spending 12+ hours on campus studying sound more appealing.

Unfortunately, it’s not just as simple as trucking some instruments to the school. This campus is a small one. Building III is huge, but it’s already filled. There is nowhere for a piano to go, let alone other instruments like a guitar. Don’t get me started on drums – there’s no soundproof rooms.

The solution that I came up with was simple – start with an electric keyboard in the corner of the library with headphones and go from there.

Back in April I sent a few emails to Stew, and he said he would look into it. Now it’s the following semester and I just had a chat with Karen Lenz, the Senior Coordinator. She says there hasn’t been any progress towards making a piano show up at USG, but she promised to bring it up in the next meeting.

Perhaps we will have a musical campus sooner or later.