As the new west wing of Cornell University's Martha Van Rensselaer (MVR) Hall nears completion, a date stone and time capsule will be installed in the west wall of the addition during a ceremony at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 12. The time capsule includes numerous documents and objects submitted by College of Human Ecology students, faculty and staff to Human Ecology Voices, an undergraduate student organization dedicated to promoting interchange among people in the college. There will be various speakers at the ceremony, including college Dean Patsy Brannon. The event is open to the public, but there will be construction-site restrictions on where people can view the ceremony.

"We wanted to have something from Human Ecology's centennial, which was last year, that could be presented at the next centennial," says senior Jennifer Valla, a human development major from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the past year's chair of Human Ecology Voices. "The college has been changing so much over the last few years, and we wanted to capture the changes. I think all of us are proud of Human Ecology, and we wanted to show this pride by illustrating the triumphs of the current time. We chose a wide variety of items; anything we thought would be interesting or different in 100 years. In working on the project, we learned not only more about the college but also about how much Human Ecology has shaped us."

After soliciting suggestions from faculty, staff and students, members of Human Ecology Voices chose about 50 items, among them: a large piece of Tyvek (an impermeable, protective material) with hundreds of signatures on it as well as comments from students, faculty and staff; a student project from the Department of Textiles and Apparel on computer design in the apparel industry; a poem about Human Ecology written by an undergraduate student; Human Ecology publications, course catalogs, press releases and faculty research descriptions; a photo album with student pictures; and a CD that holds last year's audiovisual centennial celebration presentations by Brannon and students from Human Ecology Voices. The addition to MVR, to be completed in March 2002, includes two 135-seat lecture halls, one of which is equipped for interactive distance learning; three 50-seat classrooms; an electronic classroom seating 25; and a conference room with interactive distance learning. In addition, the entire second floor is a Human Metabolic Research Unit that includes food chemistry wet laboratories and preparation rooms, a metabolic kitchen, a ward for longer-term studies and other laboratory space for nutritional analysis.