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Epic Systems - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

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Willy Wonka and the Medical Software Factory

The engineers at Epic Systems work on a campus full of childish whimsy but also sit in on open-heart surgery. Is this the indulgence of an oddball founder, or a better way to run an I.T. company?

By Kate Kelly

In the farm country of southern Wisconsin, 12 miles from Madison, is one of the nation’s biggest tech companies — and almost certainly the quirkiest. The woman who controls it is a septuagenarian coding savant , its campus contains a human-size rabbit hole and an elevator to hell, and in all probability your personal medical records are on servers running its software.

Epic Systems is a health care services provider with $2.7 billion in annual revenue. Its mathematician chief executive, Judy Faulkner, is a billionaire recluse who hosts P.T. Barnum-esque gatherings for clients. Those clients — big hospitals and health systems around the United States and more than a dozen overseas markets — are served by customer-service representatives known as BFFs. Every month, employees are compelled to gather in a subterranean chamber for two-and-a-half-hour staff meetings that have been likened to a megachurch experience. Workers are discouraged from ordering business materials on Amazon or living more than 45 minutes away from the office, in order to shorten commutes and keep Epic’s wealth in the local economy.

Epic’s software is ubiquitous in doctors’ offices and operating rooms, and companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet regularly hoover up its young engineers. Yet most people outside of the Madison environs, I’d be confident to say, have never heard of the company.

I certainly hadn’t. I cover Wall Street, not health care or technology, and when I came across the privately held Epic this year I was consumed with questions. Who was this publicity-shy yet spectacle-loving C.E.O., and how did her theme-park sensibility coexist with the mundanity of health care billing protocols? Was Epic’s odd culture a magnet for talent and clients, or was it an indulgence that kept the company from growing even bigger? In August, I traveled to Wisconsin to see what this 1,100-acre Midwestern behemoth might be hiding.

Cookies and tree houses

When I arrived in Epic’s hometown, Verona, two beaming receptionists at the Fairfield Inn tried to offer me something called the “Epic discount.” When I said I couldn’t accept anything of value from the company, they clarified that the special rate was a gesture of gratefulness from the hotel, on account of the huge proportion of guests who come to do business with Epic. It is by far the dominant player in Verona, where the population of 10,600 is comparable to the company’s head count of 9,800.

Epic’s headquarters were a short drive away, down a meandering road through countryside dotted with Queen Anne’s lace and farm equipment. I drove past a giant Tin Man, the first indication of the campus’s fairy-tale aesthetic, and into guest parking, in one of the campus’s few aboveground lots.

There was virtually no security. I walked past a sculpture of Humpty Dumpty, set on a wall and typing away on an Epic laptop, past the warning against carrying concealed weapons (Wisconsin allows them in most public venues), and into reception. I was asked to sign an old-fashioned guest book, given a “Hello! My name is” sticker and a few pages of directions, and told I could wander the campus’s 25 buildings and numerous footpaths on my own.

The design theme was childish even by the standards of technology start-ups, where ball pits and scooters are common. I paused at the Cavey Den, a hollowed-out treehouse with stumps for seats and children’s books, then rocked on a rocking horse and ate a cookie from a jar, wondering what time was set aside for naps. There was a long series of clay slabs with handprint impressions from longtime employees, and walls and walls of art sourced from Wisconsin-area artists: a dragon perched in an iron bird cage; expanses of blue and purple stained glass; a clock featuring manicured poodles and Cupid; an old-timey circus ad painted on canvas.

The diversions went beyond art. At the Black Dragon cafe, which was next to an informal band-practice area, a sandwich board advertised oatmeal for 75 cents and bacon for $1. Along the Indiana Jones tunnel, decorated with vines and a golden idol, the sound of dripping water and roaring animals played in a constant loop. A conference room named after a Star Wars planet was reached via a rickety swinging bridge. All around me, young workers in shorts and band T-shirts hurried past. (The company’s dress code is that when visitors are on campus, wear clothes.)

The next morning, I woke up feeling off: a throat infection I’d been treating with antibiotics seemed to be getting worse. Verona, while long on breweries, day cares, artisanal pizza and jumbo mortgages, lacks an urgent-care clinic, so I drove into nearby west Madison for some attention.

The clinic I found was, naturally, running on an Epic system that logged me in, took my information and tracked my health statistics. The nurse’s assistant who saw me had visited Epic during her training, as do many medical professionals who work with its technology as part of their jobs.

Epic’s reach is, well, epic. Its systems contain records for more than 50 percent of United States medical patients. It is a major software provider to big health systems like Memorial Sloan Kettering, the Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai and University of Utah Health, as well as scores of doctor’s offices and smaller clinics. Its applications handle functions both complex and straightforward, from the emergency room to the bills sent to patient homes. They calibrate drug dosages, monitor vital signs, match blood types, anticipate infection symptoms, and keep tumor measurements. Epic software is elemental to everything from transplants to cesarean sections.

Once you know what Epic does in health care, you see it everywhere. When I left the urgent-care center, diagnosed with a gnarly case of strep, the summary printout I was given was branded on one corner with Epic’s insignia.

Coders who don’t mind a little blood and gore

The next day, back at company headquarters, I sat in one of the less Montessori-style conference rooms with Steve Dickmann, 72, the chief administrative officer. He became animated when explaining some of the more functional, less fantastical features of the space. “The whole campus is designed to promote productivity, creativity, comfort,” he said.

There was a philosophy behind everything. All employees have offices, because studies show that workers in open floor plans get interrupted frequently. Stairs promote socialization, but buildings can’t be more than three stories, because workers are reluctant to climb more than a flight or two. Every conference room must have windows so that visitors don’t feel hemmed in during days and days of training.

The overriding mission, Mr. Dickmann said, was to ensure the safety of patients at facilities that use Epic software. If health care programmers make mistakes, he said, “bad things can happen.”

Epic’s coders often leave campus to embed in operating and recovery rooms, where they watch nurses ripping the tops off blood bags and surgeons opening up people’s chest cavities. It’s an experience that young engineers are unlikely to get at, say, Facebook or Snap, working on algorithms that tailor ads to demographic groups or insert rainbow vomit into photographs.

Programmers regularly faint at the sight of beating hearts, scalpels and bodily fluids. “There were people that would pass out in the hallway” of hospitals, said Aaron Webb, who worked at Epic for 10 years as a software developer. He watched “hundreds” of surgeries, often with his team in tow, before moving to Seattle, where he now works for a business that matches companies with storage space. “But if you can’t understand what your users are going through, you’re not going to design a good system.”

Epic works its more than 5,000 programmers hard. Middle-of-the-night technical crises, stress-related illness and employees weeping from exhaustion in airport lounges are not uncommon, say former employees. Long hours are expected. One piece of company lore has it that during a construction project, Ms. Faulkner questioned a plan to install motion-activated light switches, noting that employees might be sitting still at their desks for such long stretches that they’d frequently find themselves in the dark. (The sensors were installed, and she was proved correct.)

“The volume of work at Epic, regardless of what role you’re in, is very high,” said Jacob Lewis, who was a technical writer at Epic before he left in 2014. He later sued the company over unpaid overtime. His case, a class-action suit that hinged on the obligation to sign an employee agreement that forced workers into arbitration, rather than litigation, was combined with similar cases and was heard by the Supreme Court last year. The workers lost .

This combination of chaotic, stressful client visits and isolating, mundane office work might explain the company’s Disney dimension. Epic is a place where wedding music plays on a campuswide public-announcement system when new clients are signed. Dry-cleaning services are found at the “New York Sock Exchange.” Employees can hurtle down an “Alice in Wonderland” slide into a room with miniature furniture. They are encouraged to visit a conference room encased by waterfalls and a shark pond when in need of inspiration. (The shark is fake.) Internal awards for outstanding work are named after Jack Bauer and MacGyver.

The benefits of disattention

A few hours after my sit-down with Mr. Dickmann, I was granted an audience with Ms. Faulkner herself. We met in her personal conference room, a place of warm earth tones, steaming hot tea and personal memorabilia, including a copy of the prayer “Desiderata” with faux-burned margins mounted on a wall. “I think we save many, many, many lives a year,” she told me.

Ms. Faulkner, who bears the same shy, distracted demeanor as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a crocheted cardigan. She is soft-spoken and literal in conversation. But once a year, at her annual client meeting, she dresses up as the Mad Hatter or a wizard and gives an inspirational talk to an audience of thousands. This year, the theme was camp: She dressed up as a park ranger and told a story about catching frogs with her bare hands on a hiking trip and eating them for dinner.

Born in 1943, Ms. Faulkner said she taught herself to code in a week, using a Fortran textbook, during her undergraduate years at Dickinson College. As a graduate student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin, she conceived a prototype for Epic while sitting in her living room one day in the mid-1970s.

“The sun was shining, I was disattentive, I was just sitting there and suddenly it all came to me: Here’s how you build it,” she said. “And I remember running into the kitchen, grabbing a pad of paper and just writing code, code, code, code,” she said. While she went on to teach computer science for a period, she kept coming back to the idea, and in 1979, in a Madison basement, she founded what would become Epic: a start-up called Human Services Computing. Today, some of Epic’s foundational programming still bears Ms. Faulkner’s initials.

Ms. Faulkner is now 75, and over the last four years, the company she built has grown an average of 14 percent a year, according to revenue figures it shared with The Times. She has instructed her heirs (she has three children) and stock-holding employees, who together constitute a majority of the company’s equity holders, that they must always vote their shares in favor of keeping Epic private. They must also ensure that Epic is run by an executive who already works for the company, and that that person is a software developer.

That decision-making may not occur for a while. It’s “more likely that I’d die than that I’d retire,” she said.

We talked about her “10 commandments” and other principles for doing business, which are hung in most public spaces around campus and discussed in detail at the monthly staff meetings. Ms. Faulkner said that staying private ensures the company can make decisions without public shareholder pressure — such as forgoing revenue when a client’s facilities are damaged by severe weather and it can’t afford to pay software maintenance fees for a time. Avoiding both debt and budgets is another Faulkner goal. But she leaves the enforcement of these principles to lieutenants, preferring to focus on software and customer relations.

“I look at our financial information maybe for a minute a month,” she said.

One criticism that has dogged Epic is that its software sometimes won’t connect with that of competitors, meaning that patient information can’t move around as seamlessly as it should. The company has chipped away at the problem in recent years, but much remains to be done.

“The problem isn’t the lack of effort, it’s the lack of standards,” said Jim Turnbull, the chief information officer for the University of Utah system and a longtime Epic client. “Until the federal government and all the vendors recognize that we have too many standards, I just don’t think it’s going to be possible to completely interoperate,” he said, using the industry term for connectivity.

The day after meeting with Ms. Faulkner, I took a final tour of Epic with its head of media relations, Meghan Roh, who was hired in 2017 as the first person ever to occupy that position. We went down a slide connecting the ground floor of a building called Heaven, with a white interior, to a lower level with an elevator whose floors were marked Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles. (When you press a button, you hear audio of an imaginary demon saying, “Please come in. It’s nice and toasty in here.”)

Underground is also where you’ll find Epic’s auditorium. Built partly to preserve the sightlines on campus and minimize water and waste runoff, the gathering place hosts the Verona high school’s annual graduation ceremony as well as Epic’s monthly staff meetings, at which attendance is required. On the way in, employees are served popcorn and coffee, an homage to an earlier point when the company used movie theaters for large meetings, and shown a reel of pictures of recent staff weddings, newborn babies and beloved pets. Then they hear presentations on new products and priorities, matters of company philosophy, and new “armies” being formed for employees to brainstorm software-based solutions to epidemics like the opioid crisis and maternal morbidity.

Workers who fully commit to Epic — who survive the long hours and grisly sights — are treated to a remarkable perk. After five years, they get a sabbatical, including round-trip airfare for two to travel somewhere they’ve never been for a month, plus a per diem for meals and lodging. (They get another sabbatical after 10 years, 15, and so on.)

Epic is constantly scanning the undergraduate ranks for new hires. Rather than sticking to engineer incubator schools like M.I.T. or Stanford, it scouts institutions like Carleton College in Minnesota and Clemson University in South Carolina. Candidates take online tests to gauge their problem-solving skills and, if they pass muster, are whisked to Madison for an on-campus interview and tour of the area.

Once on board, employees take a multiweek training course that includes basic business etiquette as well as Epic-specific skill building. Officials preach a flat structure in which it’s never O.K. to turn down colleagues for help. They also teach a tactic called “badgering” — remember, it’s Wisconsin — or the art of being persistent but not maddening.

Epic’s broad recruiting strategy and perks help draw people in, but over time, it’s the cultures of both Wisconsin and Epic that help keep people there.

“The only reason I left Epic was so that my family could move out West,” said Mr. Webb, the former Epic programmer. “Every day was different. And it was fun. And just being able to go see the impact you were having, that was really, really cool.”

An earlier version of this article misstated how patients' medical records are handled. They are accessed by software that runs on Epic servers; they are not stored on Epic servers.

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Kate Kelly covers Wall Street, its political influence and inner workings. She previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and as an on-air reporter at CNBC. She is the author of the best-selling book “Street Fighters.” More about Kate Kelly

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Ben Jones is at heart an adventurer who delights in inspiring others. A former reporter and photojournalist, he explored towns large and small as a Wisconsin correspondent for USA Today. He later became a lead photographer and senior copywriter for an award-winning destination marketing agency, before founding Boldland Creative, a company that produces photography, video, and other content for travel destinations. Jones has completed photography and content projects in more than 15 states and when he’s not looking through a camera or at his Macbook you’ll find him exploring the world’s lakes and forests. 

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An incredible fantasy land has sprung up from the farm fields of south-central Wisconsin. If you’ve driven west of Madison, you may have gotten a glimpse of a wonderland of castles and wizards that looks a little like a theme park. It’s actually a privately-held health care software company called Epic Systems. We actually call it “Wisconsin Hogwarts.”  Here’s what makes the company’s campus incredible and why it needs to be seen to be believed.

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Epic Systems is open for self-guided public tours. Learn more on the Epic Systems website as well as the Epic Systems Facebook page. Once you’ve visited this imaginative campus, here’s an underworld fantasyland nearby that’s also worth discovering.

Have you ever been to this magical epic Hogwarts building? If so, what was your favorite part? Would you agree that it is what we call a “Harry Potter epic?” We’d love to read about your experience in the comments section below!

If you like creepy places, you’d enjoy reading One Of The Most Historic Small Towns In Wisconsin Is Also Among The Most Haunted.

For those who’d like to explore hikes around Madison, you can find some great trails by going to the AllTrails  website.

In the mood for more Badger State adventures? Take a look at this video:

OnlyInYourState may earn compensation through affiliate links in this article. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

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• Ripon was once named one of the "Coolest Small Towns in America" and is chock full of history.
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• Stoughton is brimming with its original Norwegian roots which you can experience in the community's restaurants, museums, galleries, and shops.

Read on to learn more about the many other charming places to go for a weekend getaway in Wisconsin.

Where can we find gas station restaurants in Wisconsin?

• Chilango Express has numerous locations in the state, and one of their gas station locations is in Milwaukee where they offer some of the best Mexican food in the city.
• LD's BBQ in East Troy is a widely popular spot that serves classic barbecue dishes in addition to specialty sandwiches.
• Athens Grill of Westport in Wauankee serves delicious gyros, tasty street corn, and more.

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cool gardens in a hot climate™

Green-roof prairie and fantasy gardens at Epic Systems, Part 2

The fanciful, theme-park landscaping and architectural design of Epic Systems ‘ corporate campus made for a one-of-a-kind tour during the Madison Fling in June. While I’d read about Epic’s imaginative design, I had not heard about its ambitious efforts at sustainability. According to the company’s website :

“Epic’s buildings are all constructed sustainably and powered in part by alternative energy. Farmers crop nearly 350 acres of our land, and we’ve strived to use minimally impervious concretes for our parking structures and roads to prevent runoff. The majority of our parking spaces are also underground, reducing our footprint and preserving the idyllic countryside. Our buildings are heated and cooled by 1000s of miles of geothermal pipes reaching 500 feet underground. As a software company, we recognize that we use a lot of energy – we’ve installed six wind turbines and 18 acres of solar panels to help meet our energy needs. On a bright windy day we’re practically off the grid.”

Hiking across Epic’s expansive campus, we came to a sunny field awash with coneflowers. Beautiful and pollinator friendly? Yes and yes. But also, our guide informed us, this is part of an extensive green-roof system atop an underground parking garage.

In fact, nearly all of Epic’s 9,000 parking spaces (as of 2018) are underground , with planted gardens on top. “If this were all surface parking, we’d have between 120 and 150 acres of asphalt,” according to Steve Dickman, Epic’s chief administration officer, in The Country Today . Instead of asphalt and cars baking in the sun, Epic chose coneflowers and other plants, wildlife habitat, rainwater infiltration, heat reduction , and beautiful park-like spaces for their employees to enjoy.

I call that a win-win-win for employees, plants and wildlife, and Planet Earth.

Can you imagine walking outside your office to views like this instead of parking lots?

I can, and it would be a huge selling point.

Of course underground parking garages must be hugely expensive. But everything we can do to make our landscapes and cities more “green” and resilient in the face of climate change is probably our most important endeavor now.

I love this apricot and burgundy color combo.

Meadowy grasses edged with a bit of mown lawn are prettier than just lawn, providing habitat and movement and requiring much less weekly maintenance and water than a lawn.

And at Epic you never know what fantastic beast will be striding through the plants.

Wild West garden

This part of the campus is older than the Storybook Campus I showed in Part 1 , but it’s themed as well. The most surprising area to my eyes was an Arizona, red-rock desert garden dubbed the Wild West. What’s this doing in verdant Wisconsin?

“ Why not? ” Epic would answer. Unsurprisingly there were no ocotillos or saguaros. Instead, smoke trees, conifers, coneflowers, grasses, and sedums sub in for desert species. An expanse of red gravel mulch plays up the desert theme, as do expressive mustangs crafted from rusty horseshoes.

A metal dragonfly has alit on one horse’s nose. I’m curious to know what the seedlings coming up in the gravel might be. Any guesses?

In a more densely planted area, a massive serpent seems to slither along the ground, forked tongue tasting the air. Its head doubles as a garden bench.

Its patterned body “disappears” under some rocks and a flowering yucca and pops up again to run nearly the length of a building.

Tropical-style garden

Just beyond the desert garden, a tropical-esque garden of big leaves, bananas, and jungly grasses creates an entirely different feel. A few Flingers hopped on the free Epic bicycles parked all around the campus and took off, enjoying a faster tour with the wind in their hair.

Asian-style garden

Circling around you come to an Asian-inspired office building.

A contemplative Japanese-style garden tucked between two buildings would be a lovely spot for a quiet outdoor lunch.

Here be dragons

Dragon art appears throughout this part of the campus, including a sentimental dragon holding a songbird…

…and a ferocious, three-headed dragon snarling and snapping from a moat.

A few more scenes as we dashed through the campus, like this astronomy-themed building entrance.

A silver chameleon zapping his tongue at something in a metal tree

Shapely pottery totems in a meadow garden

Prairie milkweed offering larval habitat to passing monarch butterflies

Clock-like flowers “blooming” in a birch grove

An epic-sized vase of flowers outside the main entrance

The Tin Man from Oz directing traffic in the visitor and customer parking lot (one of the few surface lots)

And a non-epic — rather modest, in fact — Epic sign.

What a place to work — and visit! Epic Systems invites the public to visit and take a self-guided tour Monday through Friday from 2:30 pm to 5 pm and Saturday and Sunday from 10 am to 3 pm. The gardens alone are fascinating, and you could easily spend a couple of hours exploring them. Believe it or not, Epic also allows covid-vaxxed visitors to poke around indoors. I’d love to come back and see the staircase to heaven and elevator to hell; the Harry Potter library, staircase, and astronomy tower; the conference-room treehouse; the rabbit-hole slide between floors; the new castaway-island building; and the Dungeons & Dragons-themed building. My fellow geeks, this place is made for you. Check Epic’s website for updates on visiting times or rules.

Or take a 17-minute video tour of the Epic campus , including interior spaces, on YouTube.

Up next: The creatively mobile driveway garden of Jane and Duane Miller . For a look back at Part 1 of my visit to Epic Systems’ fantasy landscaping and interiors , click here.

__________________________

Digging Deeper

Come learn about gardening and design at Garden Spark ! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, authors, and gardeners a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance; simply click this link and ask to be added . Season 8 kicks off in fall 2024. Stay tuned for more info!

All material © 2024 by Pam Penick for Digging . Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

14 responses to “Green-roof prairie and fantasy gardens at Epic Systems, Part 2”

Yes, it’s definitely a unique place, and always something new to see–especially in the gardens, which shift and change every season. It was fun to to tour it together with fellow garden bloggers/social media communicators. 🙂

It sure was. Thanks for putting Epic on the itinerary, Beth!

Wow. Kudos to them for burying the parking lot AND opening their campus to visitors.

Yes! The latter especially is such a surprise in the security era.

What a fun place! I should have gone the the bloggers tour this year.

Come next year, Paula, if you have a public, gardening-focused social media account. A blog, Instagram, YouTube channel, TikTok — any of those lets you join the fun!

Very interesting…the NYT ran a story on this company back in 2018…may be paywalled:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/business/epic-systems-campus-verona-wisconsin.html

What they have done to US medicine is quite something. Fascinating corporate campus, too. Your photos and comments give a good sense of the place’s gardens.

Thanks for sharing that article, HB. I’d read it too — very interesting.

I love the underground parking with plants on top! If SoCal’s inland valleys transitioned even 10% of their paved surfaces using such an approach, they might not be the horrible heat sinks they currently are. The whimsical art is an engaging feature too.

The future of parking lots — there’s a lot more we could be doing to make them less hot and more aesthetically pleasing. Garages can have green roofs and walls. Flat lots can have more planted islands and rain gardens for runoff. Where underground parking is feasible, that’s an even better solution.

All I can say is WOW!!! As for the seedlings in the gravel, it’s hard to tell from the photo, but they might be an Asclepius species.

Ah, that would be cool.

I love your posts. I have added this awesome garden to my bucket list. I need to plan a trip to Chicago!

Good plan! There’s a lot to see in Chicago, and Madison is just a short drive away.

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Top 10 Tips for an Epic College Campus Visit: Plus 8 Questions to Ask During your Tour

Visiting a college or university campus is one of the best ways to get a feel for a school and one of the most exciting parts of the college search process! This interactive experience helps you decide if a particular college is right for you. We want your college visit to be the best, so we put together a list of 10 tips to make your experience epic! Here we go!

1. Take Virtual Tours First

If touring every college on your list isn’t an option, take a virtual tour instead! Check with each school’s admissions office to see if they offer live, virtual tours. Some may even include webinars, virtual panels, and video presentations. If a school on your list doesn’t offer a virtual tour, you can still get an idea of the campus vibe by checking out the school’s website. If your “dream college list” is long, taking virtual tours may help you narrow down your search and help you decide which colleges you want to visit in person.

2. Sign up for a Group Tour

All colleges and universities have admissions offices that can help you plan your visit. Most schools publish a calendar of their scheduled group tours online. If you can’t find the calendar, contact the admissions office by email or phone to schedule a visit. Sometimes, high schools offer organized campus tours. Check with your counselor to see if your high school offers tours.

3. Don’t Skip the Introduction and Information Session

Most school tours start with an introduction and information session. While it might be tempting to skip this part, we don’t recommend it! This session is typically led by an admissions representative and covers the criteria for admission, financial aid, campus history, and an overview of what to expect on the tour. You’ll also have the opportunity to ask questions and learn some “insider information” about the admissions process. 

4. Take the Official Campus Tour (Ask to See your Housing Options)

Campus tours typically range from 1-2 hours, and current students often lead the guided tours. While they work off a script and start by showing the most popular places on campus, they have the flexibility to show you specific areas that interest you. For example, maybe you want to major in engineering. Ask to see the engineering building! While seeing housing on your tour isn’t guaranteed, ask if you can see a room. It’s nice to get an idea of where you might be living. Your guide wants you to have the best experience possible, so the college stands out when you’re ready to fill out applications.

5. Ask Questions

Don’t be afraid to ask questions that aren’t answered during the tour. If you’re stuck on what to ask, here are 10 questions you can ask your tour guide. 

• Do all first-year students live on campus? 
• What’s your favorite tradition at this college/university? 
• How do students get around campus? 
• Does the school offer study abroad programs? 
• What kind of on-campus jobs are available? 
• What campus safety resources exist? 
• What is there to do on the weekends?
• What do you wish you knew about the school before you came as a first-year student? 

Don’t forget to take notes and ask your guide for their name and email so you can follow up with any additional questions.

6. Go on Your Own Unguided Vibe Check Tour

Guided tours are awesome but don’t forget about the benefits of just wandering the campus. You can revisit your favorite tour spots or check out some new locations like coffee shops, the library, or the campus store. Picture yourself as a student. How does it feel to walk on campus? Your unguided tour might be the deciding factor when it comes time to choose a college.

7. Visit Your Future Academic Department (or Wander into a Few!)

If you already know your major, find out if the department offers information sessions or allows you to sit in on a class. If you’re still deciding on a major, check out a few departments that interest you. Talk with students in the departments and find out what they like most about their major and if they have any insight they’d like to share.

8. Eat a Meal (or Two!) On and Off Campus

Food is a huge part of the campus experience. Many larger campuses offer multiple restaurants, dining facilities, and grab-and-go options. Ask students about their favorite places to eat on campus and the local favorites off campus. You’re going to eat a lot of meals. Make sure you like the options!

9. Spend Time Around Town

Do you like big cities or small towns? Check out the area that surrounds the school. Find some local coffee shops, bookstores, and restaurants. Do a vibe check. You’ll spend a lot of time in the town around your college.

10. Have Fun!

Choosing a college should be fun! While it’s important the school offers the academics you need for your future career, don’t forget college is also about the experience. This new chapter should be exciting. Delight in the process and enjoy the ride!

Take an EPIC Virtual Tour!

Welcome to Lake Area Tech College’s virtual tours. We invite you to explore our campus, including the Student Services Center, Market 65 (our food service), MakerSpace, bookstore, coffee shop, Prairie Lakes Healthcare Center of Learning and so much more. New tours recently added include our Aviation Program Building and our MET (Manufacturing, Energy & Transportation) & Agriculture Building! And, because it’s virtual, you can decide where you want to go and what you want to see. Along the way, you’ll find points of interest that tell you more about Lake Area Tech’s EPIC campus!   

Main Building

Met/ag center, privacy overview.

• Preplanned tours
• Daytrips out of Moscow
• Themed tours
• Customized tours
• St. Petersburg

Boris Pasternak's museum house

Pasternak’s “important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition" was honored with a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. For many readers outside Russia, Pasternak is known mainly as the author of the touching historical novel Doctor Zhivago written in 1957. The novel as a whole communicates the haphazard, uncertain and chaotic quality of life caused by the Russian Revolution and the heroic case of quiet humanism demonstrated by a single person.

Pasternak’s translations of Georgian poets favored by Joseph Stalin probably saved his life during the purges of the 1930’s. However, the individualistic Pasternak was not suited to the Soviet artistic climate when art was required to have a clear socialism-inspired agenda and so Russian publishers were unwilling to print Pasternak’s novel. In fact, Doctor Zhivago first appeared in Italy in 1957.

Pasternak won his Nobel Prize the following year. Despite Pasternak politely declining his Nobel Prize quoting: “because of the significance given to this award in the society to which I belong”, the award nevertheless spread his fame well beyond Russia. He ended his life in virtual exile in an artist's community in Peredelkino village. His last poems are devoted to love, to freedom and to reconciliation with God.

Pasternak was rehabilitated posthumously in 1987. In 1988, after being banned for three decades, "Doctor Zhivago" was published in the USSR. In 1989 Pasternak's son accepted his father's Nobel medal in Stockholm.

Pastenak loved his house in Peredelkino, the house and surrounding nature featuring in his poetry. The poet considered the cycle of poems "Peredelkino", which he completed in the spring of 1941, to be his best work. The poet spent the first difficult months of the war in Peredelkino; he completed the novel "Doctor Zhivago" here, wrote the Lara poems and translated Shakespeare and Goethe. It was in this house that he learned he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 23rd 1958. He died here on May 30 1960.

The house in Peredelkino only acquired the status of a museum in 1990, thirty years after the poet's death and a century after his birth. The museum has fully preserved the environment and atmosphere of the house where Boris Pasternak lived and worked. The director of the museum is Elena Pasternak, grandaughter of Boris Pasternak.

Pasternak’s grave can be found in Peredelkino cemetery which is situated 20 minutes walk from the poet’s house.

Tour duration: 6-7 hours

Tour cost: English -  150 USD, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese - 180 USD

Additional expenses: car - 150 USD, or train - 10 USD

Send us a request!

Houston-Area Energy Startup Incubator Wins Phase 1 of DOE Competition

University of Houston Contributes to Local Hydrogen Ecosystem

By Rashda Khan — 713-743-7587

• Science, Energy and Innovation

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) selected Texas Innovates, a non-profit organization focused on hydrogen and carbon innovation and expansion in the greater Houston and Gulf Coast region, as one of 23 phase 1 winners of the Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Round 3 competition. Notably, Texas Innovates is the only Texas entity to advance to phase 2 of the competition.

“We have been working towards this day since we identified the need for energy hardware incubation in 2017 and were a finalist in 2019 for C40 Cities global competition to make Houston’s Velasco Incinerator site in the Second Ward a vibrant live, work, play community focused on energy hardware incubation,” said Alex Rozenfeld, president of Texas Innovates. “We now move to the hard work of implementing our ambitious plan and working together to make it successful.”

The winning proposal, titled “Carbon and Hydrogen Innovation & Learning Incubator” (CHILI), will harness local partner academic resources, including University of Houston’s integrated hydrogen curriculum and Rice University’s energy innovation programs at the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship. The vision is to create a comprehensive local hydrogen startup ecosystem, which includes the DOE HyVelocity Hydrogen Hub and other large-scale efforts.

As a part of the Houston hydrogen ecosystem, CHILI will provide startups with incubation, access to partner laboratories, and scale-up support for hydrogen, CCUS, and related industry technologies. It will also help startups overcome technical, regulatory and commercial barriers.

Texas Innovates board members include Rozenfeld, who is managing director and founder of Climate Impact Capital LLC, Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president for energy and innovation at UH, and Sergio Kapusta, faculty at Rice University and former chief scientist at Shell.

EPIC phase 1 winners receive $150,000 each to support energy startups and entrepreneurs nationwide. In phase 2, spanning seven months, the organizations will implement their programs and have an opportunity to negotiate a three-year cooperative agreement with OTT, worth up to $1 million each. It also includes two national pitch competitions.

“Incubators and accelerators are uniquely positioned to provide startups things they can't get anywhere else -- mentorship, technology validation, and other critical business development support,” shared DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of OTT Vanessa Z. Chan. “The EPIC program allows us to provide consistent funding to organizations who are developing robust programming, resources and support for innovative energy startups and entrepreneurs.”  

The EPIC program aims to encourage energy innovation ecosystems, increase local business productivity and improve the commercial success of energy startups. To learn more the program, competition and other winners, check out the DOE press release .

Top Stories

April 11, 2024

University of Houston Lands 18 Programs in Latest QS World University Rankings

The University of Houston is, once again, demonstrating its strength as a global leader. UH has 18 programs ranked among the top in the world according to the 2024 edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject, released today by QS Quacquarelli Symonds.

• University and Campus

April 09, 2024

U.S. News & World Report Ranks UH Graduate Programs Among Nation’s Best in 2024

The University of Houston is once again proving that it is a powerhouse in graduate education, with 13 of its programs securing spots among the top 50 nationwide in the 2024 U.S. News & World Report graduate program rankings, released today. Three engineering programs maintain their top 50 rank pending the release of 2024 engineering rankings, which have been delayed. In total, UH has 17 programs in the top 50.

• Student, Faculty and Staff Success

March 29, 2024

Three Renowned Argonne Scientists Accept Joint Appointments at the University of Houston

Three top researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have accepted joint appointments in various capacities at the University of Houston. This strategic collaboration furthers critical research efforts, public-private partnerships and educational opportunities for students.

Victor Mukhin

• Scientific Program

Title : Active carbons as nanoporous materials for solving of environmental problems

However, up to now, the main carriers of catalytic additives have been mineral sorbents: silica gels, alumogels. This is obviously due to the fact that they consist of pure homogeneous components SiO2 and Al2O3, respectively. It is generally known that impurities, especially the ash elements, are catalytic poisons that reduce the effectiveness of the catalyst. Therefore, carbon sorbents with 5-15% by weight of ash elements in their composition are not used in the above mentioned technologies. However, in such an important field as a gas-mask technique, carbon sorbents (active carbons) are carriers of catalytic additives, providing effective protection of a person against any types of potent poisonous substances (PPS). In ESPE “JSC "Neorganika" there has been developed the technology of unique ashless spherical carbon carrier-catalysts by the method of liquid forming of furfural copolymers with subsequent gas-vapor activation, brand PAC. Active carbons PAC have 100% qualitative characteristics of the three main properties of carbon sorbents: strength - 100%, the proportion of sorbing pores in the pore space – 100%, purity - 100% (ash content is close to zero). A particularly outstanding feature of active PAC carbons is their uniquely high mechanical compressive strength of 740 ± 40 MPa, which is 3-7 times larger than that of  such materials as granite, quartzite, electric coal, and is comparable to the value for cast iron - 400-1000 MPa. This allows the PAC to operate under severe conditions in moving and fluidized beds.  Obviously, it is time to actively develop catalysts based on PAC sorbents for oil refining, petrochemicals, gas processing and various technologies of organic synthesis.

Victor M. Mukhin was born in 1946 in the town of Orsk, Russia. In 1970 he graduated the Technological Institute in Leningrad. Victor M. Mukhin was directed to work to the scientific-industrial organization "Neorganika" (Elektrostal, Moscow region) where he is working during 47 years, at present as the head of the laboratory of carbon sorbents.     Victor M. Mukhin defended a Ph. D. thesis and a doctoral thesis at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia (in 1979 and 1997 accordingly). Professor of Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Scientific interests: production, investigation and application of active carbons, technological and ecological carbon-adsorptive processes, environmental protection, production of ecologically clean food.   

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