Hallway Names The plan for hallway names was a noble enterprise: to help freshmen find their classes more easily and efficiently. No longer will freshmen be told “it’s in the math hallway,” for this is now MIT hallway. The names will certainly be helpful for those who were never accustomed to the old system of specialized “wings” but for those who were accustomed to such wings, the hallways will be known by their previous designation: such as “the social studies hall”, even though these names no longer hold relevance. Upon venturing to band the first day, I glanced up at the name of the band hallway: Juilliard. At first I thought none of it and proceeded to stumble through “Raise Your Glass” and “Dynamite.” However, while returning to the band room, drenched in sweat and downright sick of today’s popular music, I found myself wondering: why do we have a Juilliard hallway? Certainly it provides an excellent morale boost for band students every day, but I doubt that many graduates have attended the school. Furthermore, the DMACC hallway is not even a hallway, but a network of hallways differentiated by the letters A, B, and C. Obviously, DMACC is overrepresented. Why not name each individual hallway after an individual college? If we’re not going to name each individual hallway, no matter how under traveled, after a college, why not just name every hallway in the school Iowa State A, B, etc? Why not name hallways the phonetic equivalent of differing onomatopoeia? Because, we are naming each hallway after a different university or college, representative of where Ames High graduates most commonly attend. Unless it’s Juilliard hallway. Or the DMACC network. There are two ways the hallway names could have gone: the hallways could have been named after the loftiest aspirations of Ames High graduates, schools such as Princeton and Harvard, or the hallways could have been named after the most commonly occurring schools graduates attend, such as ISU and U of I. However, the strange mixture, along with the multiple DMACC hallways, leaves me confused. I crave consistency. I strive for structure. I need hallway names that appeal to the most basic human nature: creating order out of chaos.