On the University of Mississippi campus, there are two residence halls known as “The Towers”. Housing just over 1000 freshman students, these buildings, named Martin and Stockard Hall, stand at eleven floors high. I lived and worked in Stockard for two and a half years and came to know the building very well.

In the fall, just before my last semester in Stockard, I had an idea. I was staying in the building completely alone since I had arrived a few days before the other staff members. The idea I came up with was to use the lights in all of the empty rooms to spell out something. Like most students here I have a lot of pride in my school and decided to attempt to spell “UM” on the south side of Stockard.

I used a blank sheet of printer paper and drew out all of the windows on the building, then drew a huge UM over the windows to decide which room lights would be on and which would be off. On the rooms that were off I would close the blinds to keep the light from the hallways from penetrating the design.

After planning was complete, I overlaid the room numbers on my design sheet for both buildings and grabbed some team members who had finally arrived. We started at the eleventh floor and worked out way down, adjusting all of the lights to design. It took a lot longer than expected but this was the result:

In hindsight, I realized that the “U” cam out looking like a “V”, but people driving by still got the picture. Some people even stopped their cars to take pictures and this sight was all over social media. One day, I’ll pull some people together, erase the dry erase board, and do it again, but even better.