As a mechanical engineering student, Drew McPherson came to UC Berkeley expecting complex problems, but navigating Cory Hall wasn’t one of them.

Cory Hall sits at the northeastern corner of campus, near Hearst Mining Circle. The area is the campus’s engineering hub — a labyrinth of stairs and hidden elevators built on a steep gradient. But campus modifications that help most students can instead set up new obstacles for McPherson, who uses a motorized wheelchair.

On a recent rainy day, he tried to get into the elevator in the Cory basement through a back entrance, near the building’s juncture with Davis and Sutardja Dai halls. No luck — the basement was locked because of construction. Flyers taped to the doors mapped out an alternate route.

The locked basement meant rerouting to a different elevator, going back past the long line of trash bins and taking a narrow balcony path before finally entering Cory. Then, encountering a delay when the first elevator to come up is packed with people…

Read the full article on the Daily Californian.