If These Walls Could Talk: Extraordinary Tales from Georgia Tech

Since its founding on October 13, 1885, hundreds of thousands of graduates have passed through the hallowed halls of Georgia Tech. And that number will accelerate with the Institute’s goal of doubling the number of degrees granted and non-degree learners by 2030. Given the size of the school’s extensive campus, which spreads over 400 acres and 236 buildings, there are countless stories these walls could tell. From billion-dollar businesses founded out of dorm rooms and late-night debates fueled by new scientific breakthroughs, to lifelong friendships and marriages made, Tech is not just an institute of higher education. Rather, it’s a cultural landmark that’s served as a launchpad for more celebrated careers and relationships than you can count on a scientific calculator—or a slide rule, if you’re partial to those. Here are just a few of the many anecdotes, which continue to resonate across the Institute’s walls today.

Out Of This World

L.W. "Chip" Robert Jr. Alumni House
By: Scott Steinberg, Mgt 99

It’s common for Tech undergrads to first set foot on campus as a means to further their sky-high ambitions. But few take it so literally as Robyn Gatens, ChE 85, who currently serves as director of the International Space Station and acting director of the Commercial Spaceflight Division at NASA Headquarters. 

Every time crews are launched to the ISS, it’s her job, along with other senior NASA leaders, to conduct flight readiness reviews with the team. But having to run one virtually from the Alumni House? Even for such an accomplished professional—who was recently named to the school’s Engineering Hall of Fame and honored as part of its Pathway of Progress: Celebrating Georgia Tech Women installation—well… Having to do so during the ceremony weekend this past March was a first.

“It was our 10th Commercial Crew flight to the space station on that Friday, and the one that would hand off with the Crew-9 crew (which included Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams) so they could return home,” she says. “Normally I would be in Florida, but I wasn’t going to miss the occasion. So I reached out to [Alumni Association President] Dene and asked if I could borrow a spot in the Alumni House, and they gave me the big conference room entirely to myself. He actually got a big kick out of that and ended up telling the story at the ribbon-cutting the next day,” she says with a laugh. “What was very cool was I had my parents there who are in their 80s and live in Athens. What he didn’t realize is just how much it meant for them to hear him talk about me, which was really special.”

It was a doubly cool experience, Gatens notes, given that she mostly had the run of the entire Alumni House, which was quiet that Friday. “I was expecting, you know, hey, you can have this little office over here,” she chuckles. “But like I said, even having served on the Alumni Board of Trustees, I wasn’t expecting them to roll out such a red carpet.”

Ironically, the story is even more meaningful for Gatens, she observes, given that she couldn’t have predicted any of it when she first set foot on campus in 1981. “As a kid, a lot of people say they want to work for NASA, but it wasn’t even on my radar,” she chuckles. But her first husband, whom she met at Tech,was headed for Huntsville. At the time, there were no chemical plants located there, but there was the Marshall Space Flight Center, which just happened to be hiring. Cue a near-four-decade career that’s seen her working on everything from life-support systems for space stations to managing teams of commercial space flight engineers.

“I’m the first woman in my position at NASA,” she proudly beams. “These days, I really enjoy talking with students at campuses across the country and mentoring women. It’s really important to me to pass along lessons learned and to encourage the next generation.”

Asked if she has any advice for other aspiring rocketeers, Gatens simply notes that it helps to stay calm, unflappable, and focused on finding solutions, no matter what tricky situations you might find yourself in. She also recommends taking new opportunities as they come.

“You can never predict exactly where life will take you… don’t be afraid to walk through doors when they open,” says Gatens. “Don’t try to plot out your perfect path, either, because it will change. And through it all, make a point to rely on those problem-solving skills that you’re cultivating at Tech. You’re going to use them over and over throughout life and business.”

Fun With Science

Marcus Nanotechnology Cleanroom and Materials Characterization Facility
By: Scott Steinberg, Mgt 99

A rare native Atlantan Walter Henderson, Phys 93, associate director for the Materials Characterization Facility and principal research scientist for the Institute for Matter and Systems, jokes that he grew up in “the Stone Age.” But the work that he does managing 12 research leaders who train more than 800 fellow scientists to do over 40,000 hours of work that contributes nearly $400 million in research funding to Georgia Tech each year? That’s positively “Space Age” in nature.

He also notes that they have a surprising amount of fun on the job. For instance, Henderson smiles, consider that time when fast food giant Arby’s asked the team to create the world’s smallest ad by using technology to etch an advertisement onto a sesame seed back in 2018. “We were approached by an ad agency who wanted to earn a Guinness World Record for the smallest sign on the market,” he chuckles. “We used a focused ion beam to do it. It’s a bit like using a laser to inscribe things, except instead of a light beam, it’s this beam of gallium metal ions that you use to etch into samples such as the seed, which also featured the Arby’s logo.”

The ad was then set up at one of their restaurants with an electronic microscope for viewing, given that it was basically about as wide as a human hair, Henderson notes. The agency also made a follow-on internet commercial. “My claim to fame is that I suited up in a bunny suit for them to shoot the video, and some footage in the clean room itself,” he says. “But the actual work was done in our basement-floor Microanalysis lab in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building. In any event, you can still find the ad on YouTube. I just wish I’d had a better agent: I didn’t get any royalties at all, not even, like, a year of free Arby’s.”

It’s not the only time that the facility—a typically serious scientific setting—has been put to equally unique or interesting purposes, though. “For instance, we’ve been asked to analyze pieces of clothing and conduct forensics for criminal investigations,” notes Henderson. “Given our advanced research equipment, we’ve also been asked to review everything from moon rocks to frogs’ tongues—and practical applications that companies can derive from their scientific properties. On top of it, they’ve also had us test samples and run mechanical property analyses for the Library of Congress and [on] trade secret items for different companies or matters of national security for the government.”

While life inside the lab is fairly routine, Henderson notes, it’s definitely more interesting and varied than some might suspect. “There are certainly moments,” he says. That said, just don’t ask him what happened to the original seed, which has since gone AWOL. “I don’t know what happened to it…or if someone ate it,” he muses. “But I still have a bottle of sesame seeds in my office, so we could always make a new one.”

Echo of the Past

Third Street Tunnel
By: Jennifer Herseim

For John Cork, Text 65, graduation often felt like a distant pinprick of light at the end of a long tunnel. Cork, who moved to Atlanta in 1961 from a small town in Alabama, set his sights on a textile degree not so much to fulfill his career goals but to ensure he passed his classes.

“Coming from a small town and a small high school, I wasn’t prepared for the academic rigors, and the Textile school allowed me to get through and get out,” says Cork, who would go on to use his degree in a long career in the fiber industry.

During his first year at Tech, Cork lived in Howell Hall, adjacent to I-85, and he quickly discovered the best shortcut on campus—the Third Street Tunnel.

“Just down the street, hang a block right, and you were at the tunnel,” he remembers. “It was a bit spooky with the traffic overhead echoing off the walls.”

When the sun dipped below the stands at Bobby Dodd, students would head to the tunnel, a pipeline for Yellow Jackets looking to cross underneath the interstate and be deposited at the rear of The Varsity.

“Equally important, it put you one block from Duffy’s Tavern,” Cork says. “The bad news was you had to show an ID to get in. The good news was a Tech ID was accepted, even without a birthdate on the card.”

Plenty of watering holes on the other side of the highway kept Tech students hydrated and fed through the quarters. Manuel’s Tavern had a $1 beer special one day of the week back in the ‘60s, and Al’s Corral offered $1 pitchers.

“Fortunately, most of us didn’t have cars, so we all just walked back through the tunnel,” Cork remembers.

In 2008, the Third Street Tunnel was closed, three years after the renovation and reopening of the Fifth Street Bridge, which connected campus to Tech Square.

Securing The Future For Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs

Smith Hall and the Graduate Living Center
By: Scott Steinberg, Mgt 99

Cybersecurity is one of the single largest operating concerns for businesses (and business leaders) worldwide today. But back in 1992 and 1993, when Chris Klaus was a student residing in Smith Hall and the Graduate Living Center, respectively, the field (like the internet) was largely unknown to most. Ironically for Klaus, who was a student when he founded Internet Security Systems, which later went public and was acquired by IBM for roughly $1.3 billion, the fundamental concept of entrepreneurship itself was also largely unknown.

“At the time, most people didn’t even know what a startup was,” he chuckles. “I remember having to explain the concept to my roommates, who mostly weren’t amused about having to share the phone line with someone who was constantly taking customer calls. And for that matter, a fraternity who couldn’t figure out what I was doing with my time and de-enrolled me for not paying dues or showing up.” Still, Klaus persevered and even benefited from the curiosity inherent to a technology founder surrounded by high-tech solutions and systems at every turn.

“I remember discovering that you could use the phone systems at Georgia Tech to basically call anywhere from your dorms free at a time when long distance calls were as much as $1 per minute,” he says with a smile. “It definitely inspired me to look more closely at concerns relating to areas like hacking, phone phreaking, and internet security.” In fact, his early work creating Internet Scanner at Tech, a cybersecurity package that tested hundreds of network vulnerabilities and security weaknesses, even caught the eye of other industry luminaries at the time. “I remember spotting a vulnerability in Sun Microsystems’ network technology back in the dorm room days,” he recalls. “After calling the company to let them know, later I received an email from a corporate representative asking for more details, which I provided. It wasn’t until years later that an FBI agent I bumped into at a convention mentioned that the [email] was a scam and I’d been socially engineered by infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick.”

Thankfully, all worked out for Klaus in the end. With the world of digital defense still something of the Wild West at the time, he released the first version of his software as shareware (a try-before-you-buy model) online while at school—and became an overnight sensation. “It kind of went viral,” he remembers. “I released it and later on went to my English class…at which time my professor, who was big on futuristic tech, was telling us all about this internet scanner thing that just got released. It turns out it was my program!” And after Klaus received his first check for $1,000 from an Italian research group, which got sent to his mailbox at the Student Center, he knew there was no looking back.

These days, the veteran founder—once named to Fortune’s 40 Richest Under 40—heads up Fusen, a startup accelerator that pairs students with founders, mentors, investors, and early-stage funding. You may also recognize his name, which adorns Georgia Tech’s Christopher W. Klaus Advanced Computing Building, or from his work cofounding CREATE-X, Tech’s flagship entrepreneurship program. But most recently, word of his accomplishments is still ringing across halls around campus from this year’s Commencement address, where he personally agreed to cover the incorporation costs for any graduating student seeking to launch a startup.

“People didn’t really understand what I was up to as an entrepreneur back in the day,” he says. “In fact, I once got called into the Dean of Students’ office because she had a huge printout of internet logs and was suspicious of what I was doing on my computer. Amusingly, it just happened to be running all sorts of cybersecurity scans from my IP address.” Klaus says he found support from those who were willing to take a chance, believed in him, and grasped the importance of what he was doing early on.

“One time an advisor pulled me aside and asked: ‘Hey, have you thought about commercializing this stuff?’” he notes. “And that one question was the impetus for me to go, you know what, I hadn’t, but now that you’ve asked me, I’m sitting here in math class going, man, if I could just charge $1 per vulnerability I find, this could be a huge business!” Acknowledging this, Klaus reminds us that one simple act of kindness, or one simple act of risk-taking, can be a powerful driver of change in someone’s life.

Interested to find ways to help create positive change and uplift others in a similar predicament as he found himself while at Tech, it struck Klaus that his own journey started with a simple prompt in the form of that question. “And so I kind of looked at my own journey and thought I’d ask graduates: ‘Hey, if you could do a startup, any startup, what would it be?’ Hopefully the spark of asking them that question and convincing others to take a baby step toward entrepreneurship will lead to a lot of folks leaning in and making an effort to solve a lot of problems…and will create more pathways to opportunity for folks going forward.”

Black Powder and Brotherhood

The Flats
By: Sharita Hanley

In the fall of 1969, two freshmen from Jacksonville, Florida—Greg Lynn, Mgt 73, and Theodore Ruskin, IE 73—moved into the fourth floor of Smith Hall. “We went to high school together, so we chose to be roommates,” Lynn says. That floor became the start of a lifelong friendship, and a launching pad for innovative, wild, and crazy fun.

“We were just a few of the engineering students with a pocket full of pens and short hair,” Ruskin says. Smith Hall wasn’t always a quiet place to study. “The dumpsters behind Brittain Dining Hall were occasionally set on fire, and students would shoot off bottle rockets,” Lynn says.

After sledding down Freshman Hill on a cafeteria tray on a particularly icy day, Lynn injured his leg. “I spent a week in the infirmary and had to drop out of school for a little while.” When he returned, the duo moved to the now-demolished South Gate Apartments. “That was our big headquarters, and Larry Patrick was the organizer of it all—the Ramblin’ Raft Race and the pep rallies.” (Patrick, Text 73, died in 2015.) 

The team dreamed up pep rally stunts that only sleep-deprived students could pull off. Lynn became “G-Man,” the villain. Ruskin became “T-Man,” the caped hero. “We would do skits where T-Man would come in and save the day, kind of like Batman and Robin,” Ruskin says.

The plotlines were wild, the crowd louder. “T-Man would come to the rescue, riding in on the Wreck. They’d throw me in the back of the car and haul me off,” Lynn says, laughing. Lynn and Ruskin used creativity, pranks, and pep rally skits as a shield against the threat of the Vietnam War draft.

Eventually, their good-spirited tomfoolery made its way to The Flats. The most memorable skit involved explosive black powder. “We brought some black powder that was supposed to be remotely ignited when G-Man fell to his death, but it didn’t work correctly,” Lynn says. To make matters worse, President Nixon was in town that weekend.

“The Secret Service found out about the explosives and thought the president was in danger. It got some attention,” Lynn says.

After Lynn and Ruskin graduated, the pep rallies continued. “They got more outrageous. I believe there was some rappelling and zip-lining off the Student Center. It got to a point where it was a bit too dangerous and somebody in administration ended things.” The pep rallies may have ended, but their friendship hasn’t.“We had our little craziness, and other generations of Tech students had theirs,” Lynn says. “I’ve got nothing but fond memories of it,” says Ruskin.