Turck Exercise Room Opens

After months of construction, the Turck exercise room is ready for use. The room is located on the first floor of Turck Hall, in the old formal lounge.

The room contains six elliptical cross-trainers, three treadmills, two recumbent bikes, two stair-steppers, a flat incline bench, rubber dumb bells, a two-tier rack and three cable televisions.

“It’ll be much nicer than the [exercise room] in Dupre. There are a couple machines and no windows,” Nick Christensen ’08 said.

Griesse said that Residential Life also plans to work with Health Services to bring personal trainers to the exercise room to help students create fitness plans and learn how to use the machines.

For now, the exercise room will supplement the athletic building, which will be rebuilt as early as 2006, according to Griesse. “Once it’s rebuilt we’ll probably reconsider how the space [in Turck] should be used,” Griesse said.

The Turck exercise room will be open to all Macalester students, including those who live off-campus. It will be open Monday-Thursday 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Friday from 7:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Residential Life has not yet scheduled weekend hours.
 

Kirk Lab Potential Recipient of New Computers

The Kirk Computer Lab, the only 24-hour computer lab on campus, may soon offer students 10 additional computers. If the 10 computers are installed, the Kirk lab will have a total of 18 computers and one printer.

According to Career Development Center (CDC) director and co-manager of the lab Denise Ward, CIT is currently reviewing computer labs in the Humanities, and as many as ten computers may make the move from Humanities to Kirk this semester. Ward said that these computers would help to better meet demand for the Kirk lab.

The space the lab currently occupies formerly housed student organization offices, but after some controversy, Macalester College Student Government (MCSG) succeeded in a campaign to convert the space into a computer lab last year.

Ward said that the security of the lab has always been a concern, but so far, security has not been an issue. “It has been impressive how students have contributed to [the lab’s] smooth operation,” said Ward. “There has been no theft or damage to this point—a record we’d like to keep going.”

-Briefs written by Jessica Bruce, Contributing Writer
 

Board of Trustees Meeting This Weekend

The members of the Board of Trustees will be on campus this weekend for their first meeting of the year. Each of the committees will meet during the day today and each include student representatives, who were decided this week: Michael Barnes and Blythe Austin will serve on the Admissions Committee; Tobias Pforr ’06 and Dorothe Singer ’06 on the Advancement Committee; Cara Haberman ’06 and Eliot Brown ’05 on the Buildings and Grounds Committee; Naveen Sablani ’07 on the Technology Committee; Aroosa Saeed ’06 and David Boehnke ’07 on the Academic Affairs Committee; Ben Johnson ’06 and Nate Abbot ’05 on the Finance Committee; Nishad Avari ’06, Herschel Nachlis ’07 and Natasha Sueflow ’05 on the Honorary Degree Committee; Rebecca Hossain ’05, Erin Miller ’05 and Richard Graves ’06 on the Campus Life Committee.

On Friday afternoon there will be a closed Plenary Session among the Trustees to discuss the “Quality and Access” issue. At 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, the committees will each deliver reports at a Business Meeting in Weyerhaeuser Board Room. That meeting will be open to the public.