If you are putting any serious consideration into choosing the University of Maryland for your higher educational needs starting this fall, then you need to know that the official tours offered by the university typically will not take you anywhere that you couldn’t find on your own. We have a big library, a big student union, and several redundant engineering buildings with marketable names for when the original ones finally collapse due to age. There’s your official tour, and we didn’t even charge money for it.

The best selling points of our campus are the ones that usually won’t appear on the lists of tourist traps. There’s a reason that New Yorkers try to stay out of Times Square. I think that’s how the saying goes. As with everything else about this college, the best information won’t come from the college’s administration itself. That’s where we come in. You’ll become rather familiar with us here at The Hare if you decide to come to UMD, and you’ll definitely decide to come to UMD if you visit us this summer and check out these five under-the-radar locations on campus.

1. The fourth floor of the A.V. Williams Building

A.V. Williams is the perfect place to go if you ever want to forget what part of the country you’re in or what the local climate is. To aid in your disassociation, there are little to no exterior windows and the interior temperature always feels the exact same year round, including when your face is flushed so red from the still air and project deadline stress that it feels hotter indoors than it actually is. On the fourth floor, there are a collection of communal office style rooms that sort of seem like wasted space, and appropriately those are the places where a lot of STEM classes hold their office hours. Learn how to get to that floor now, since you’ll definitely be trudging there more than a few times. The elevators are mostly safe.

2. The steam/utility rooms in the subbasement of the Biology-Psychology Building

This place looks like how a song by the band HEALTH sounds. There has to be some place that’s keeping all the earthworm reproduction experiments running in the biology buildings. Not only is that place so god damn cool (in all ways save for the temperature), but there is never anyone down there, making it one of UMD’s most underrated study spots. Whether you use the loud equipment noise as ambience or tune it out with your own playlist is up to your personal preferences. Be sure to turn a random valve before you head out so facility management can keep turning a paycheck fixing it.

3. Lounge space near OneButton Studio in the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center

Read carefully, as ESJ is a very complicated building to navigate and getting to the floor or exact side of a floor that you want is not straightforward, but this secluded and quiet study area is worth it. From McKeldin Mall, you can enter through a side door underneath the big set of stairs up to the mall-side entrance and simply turn a corner to find the room. If you’re already in the building, go down to the ground floor. No, not that far; if they’re watching Soviet silent films from the 1920s then you went too far down. On that ground floor you can find a ramp that looks like it goes somewhere you’re not allowed to be, but it’s ok, you are. Go through that doorway and take a right, then another right, and you’ll find it. Oh, all the seats are already taken. Well I guess there’s always McKeldin Library for the twelfth time in a row then.

4. Engineering Fields

A member of the Board of Regents dropped a tube of ChapStick here four semesters ago. It slipped out of his shallow pockets while he was biking across the field to work to maintain the balance between his career and his fit lifestyle. Naturally the large search area made recovery of the ChapStick impractical, but he said it was gifted to him by none other than famous UMD alumni John Secu, for whom our football stadium is named. Anyone who finds the tube will receive four years of free tuition as a reward. This could be a freshman prank, but you’re not going to take that chance and potentially miss out.

5. Chesapeake Building

This is a smaller administrative office building on Research Greenhouse Way, up on the northernmost frontiers of the campus where the “name the streets after what building is on that street” convention starts to break down. You would never learn of this building’s existence from a UMD tour guide; in fact, most current UMD community members would never learn of it if it weren’t for the traffic on University Boulevard forcing frequent detours in order to get to Terrapin Trail Garage. The people who work in Chesapeake are starting to get lonely and someone should probably go say hi to them and make sure they’re ok. At least they didn’t wind up at the Turfgrass Research building — those people might actually be dead by now.

Be sure to make time for all of these top destinations when you come to visit. We sincerely think you’ll love it here, just not for the reasons they want you to.

Image Credits: Kenlynn Ingham