The above quote is from Nathan Deuel (Class of 2003). He shared the following Rock memories:

I came to Brown as a transfer and maybe found something a little too gorgeous in all the brick, the ivy, the history. Three places on campus made me feel more at home: Grad Center, that forbidding labyrinth of a dorm, where I did pull-ups and smoked 1,000 cigarettes to get through my first semester;  Loui’s, where a pitcher of beer always seemed like a fine idea; and the Rock, that somewhat cruel, mostly stunning building on College Street. Slowly, as I gained a foothold among my peers — speaking more confidently in class, writing stories, getting a sense I might find a way to be a real Brunonian, however brief my stay — I found myself spending more and more time in the library. Sure, I needed to use the computers and the printer and to find my place among all those books. In the endless stacks, at the immaculate carrells, I often felt like there was more important work being done. Feeling out-classed, I would take refuge among the various  green spaces surrounding the building, where a body could sit and smoke a hand-roll. After a lit class one day, somewhere in that dank old English building  since torn down, I remember poking my head into a closet. In a trash can was a treasure trove of old press-board desktops, which had been pried from where I couldn’t tell. Had Brown students done all that writing? It blew my mind; engraved into the surface of each, with knives and pens and pencils, were words like K I S S and S L A Y E R and Buddy Luvs Tammy and TEAR THE SYSTEM DOWN and DOSTOEVESKY RULZ and all manner of speech I never would have imagined seeing on such a fancy campus. Greedily, getting ideas for the kind of writer I might yet become (and the way Brown might let me do it) I slung a half-dozen desktops under my armpit, late for my next class. Thinking fast, with ideas of what I might do later, I hid the stash in the bushes beside the Rock. Days went by, then weeks, and as the semester flew by and my girlfriend moved to New York and I with her, I forget the pieces…Are they still there? Did someone find them? Are they contributing in any meaningful way to someone’s life? I’m not sure, but I’ll never forgot the experience of finding another way we could use a library, and for that I’ll never forget the Rock.