Welcome to Michigan State University. We offer a broad range of beautiful, aesthetic and artistic points of interest throughout our historic campus, all ready for you to explore and make part of your life as a college student.

We recommend staying at one of our beautiful West Circle residence halls. These beautifully crafted buildings offer a peek into history with their old architecture and spacious halls. You'll even be able to wake up to the smell of flowers, which grow on our many trees. When they're in bloom, it's a real treat.

What? Oh, you're in a wheelchair? Well, West Circle isn't really the place for you. There aren't any ramps to help you get to your room. Tell you what - we'll stick you in the Brody complex. Sure, the buildings aren't as pretty, but at least they have makeshift ramps and a freight elevator (the front desk worker can help you with that). The smell of flowers isn't there, but the collective odors of the students staying there can be quite the olfactory treat.

MSU is a great place, but unfortunately its accommodation for people with physical disabilities is not as up-to-standard as it should be. Classroom numbers are often without Braille and many buildings don't have ramps.

The university has taken strides to make our campus more accessible, but there are still areas and sights that simply can't be accessed by everybody. Students taking an English class in a fully accessible building likely have a difficult time meeting with their professor in the completely inaccessible Morrill Hall.

A recent Supreme Court decision could rectify the situation, and the university is now allotted $300,000 each year for accessibility improvements.

Student accessibility needs to be a top priority at a school that offers such a diverse range of programs and opportunities. After all, there isn't much benefit in going to a school with distinct technological privileges if you can't get to them.

There are, of course, many issues that come to play when planning how to update facilities to accommodate everybody. Many of the buildings on campus were erected before accessibility issues were even considered, including the gorgeous West Circle area, Morrill Hall and the Psychology Research building. Careful attention must be paid to the aesthetics of these buildings when updating their accessibility. Such care was taken in updating the IM facilities, the ramp to which blends in with the architecture of the building, thus preserving the old-school ivy-covered image of the site.

To insure accessibility as quickly as possible, officials need to plan appropriately. Installing ramps in each West Circle building by the end of the summer is simply an unrealistic goal. However, installing a ramp in one building per ill-equipped area per year ensures that more students are able to enjoy more of the campus.

It will be a long process and a long time before our campus is fully accessible. Patience needs to be exercised from all sides. Those in need of more accessibility will have to wait while each facility is updated, and we'll all have to meander around construction areas. In the end, though, we'll have a better university where anybody in our community can enjoy every corner that makes this campus unique.