Sitterson Hall , built in 1987, is the home of the Department of Computer Science. The laboratories, offices, conference areas, and classrooms are bound together by the Department's fully integrated, distributed computing environment . Students either share an office, or have their own office in more senior years. All students have their own personal computer or workstation, and all have access to a variety of cutting-edge equipment. This is the most open, communal research site I've ever visited in academia or research.
Every student can sit down at virtually every machine, log on, and start using it.
The labs I've seen on my faculty interviews have all been locked. Many of our labs don't even have doors. Our students have access to the entire University library system, which includes three major centralized libraries and several specialty libraries containing more than four million volumes, as well as to libraries at nearby Duke and North Carolina State universities, with a unified on-line searching capability. The Brauer Library, next door in Phillips Hall, is a satellite library with extensive holdings in mathematics, physics, statistics, operations research, and computer science. Students may attend courses at both Duke and North Carolina State universities.