New Jersey Institute of Technology has a new campus, but you can only go there by computer because civil engineering major Pawel Sierhej built it entirely in Minecraft.
Sierhej, a junior who commutes from Linden, said he was inspired to build the virtual campus because he missed being at the real one during the height of the COVID pandemic. It's a trend nationwide, as students at Boston University, Northwestern, Penn and UCLA modeled their campuses, too.
"If I was a resident, I don't think I would be quite as nostalgic toward rebuilding the campus. The quarantine had me really isolated. I think being a commuter was one of the reasons I did this," Sierhej explained.
Sierhej worked in Minecraft's creative mode, where players build all day, without the need to make alliances, battle enemies and ultimately slay a dragon, as in the videogame's competitive mode. He has not yet uploaded the files to public Minecraft servers but hopes to do that soon. The virtual campus could be finished as soon as this summer — it's mostly just exteriors for now, although he already built the inside of the campus center. At the latest, "I would like to have it done before I get done with my bachelor's degree," he noted.
Sierhej said he felt renewed energy for the project after receiving positive feedback on it through the unofficial NJIT subforum on Reddit. His post there in late April quickly exceeded more than 100 upvotes and dozens of comments by early May — "This is awesome! Also a really great idea for incoming freshmen too," one user commented. "Get this man a scholarship ASAP," another said.
Sierhej enlisted help from two friends, Dominik Dragan and Erik De La Cruz, who are both juniors studying mechanical engineering. They're helping finish his work and beta-testing it. They will likely find several Easter eggs — a term used by programmers for jokes hidden in code, visible to determined users — such as an invisible block placed under the campus clock tower, so students don't accidentally walk underneath and doom themselves to not graduate on time, per the Highlander legend. Sierhej said he'd be open to further input from students who study digital design,game design and related fields.
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The virtual campus isn't perfectly to scale. "I was going for accuracy from the very get-go, 1-to-1 scale on everything, but I made an error in that I started from one point and didn't consistently measure every time I made progress," resulting in the omission of the digital Naimoli Family Athletic and Recreational Facility. With apologies to the university men's and women's tennis teams, "Hopefully nobody gets too bugged out about that," he joked. (The building is temporarily serving as a regional vaccine facility.)
"A lot of what I'm building is from my visual memory of how the campus looks. The campus itself is all based on this huge hill that we captured accurately in the map. In general, by Lock Street and going down toward Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, it's all very unique geography. If it were flat it'd be a lot easier," Sierhej continued.
Jason Laboy, a computer science major from Barnegat who graduated in 2020 and now codes for a medical software company, designed Minecraft versions of the Cypress and Redwood residence halls in 2019. Other people, including local high school students, produced various buildings throughout downtown Newark, so virtual visitors to Sierhej's campus will not find it surrounded by urban emptiness.
Sierhej said he applied lessons learned from Stephanie Santos, a senior university lecturer in the civil and environmental engineering department, from whom he took courses such as CE 260, Civil Engineering Methods. The course taught him how to use Autodesk's AutoCAD and Civil 3D drafting software. Minecraft is not so precise, with each block equal to a cubic meter. Sierhej made clear that his Minecraft project was just for fun, not for credit or any technical learning, but he definitely thinks it might help to mention when applying for jobs or internships.
"It was extremely fun," he concluded. "It's one of those things I can always go back to. It got a good response."
"I think one lesson to be learned is just initiative. He took it upon himself to do something that is extremely creative. I was very impressed," Santos said, noting that there are critical factors such as safety and cost. "Civil engineering is obviously technical and a lot of calculations and things. But in engineering you have to be a problem-solver, so creativity certainly plays a role."
