Finding Your Way Around Uni

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 31/12/2015

Ever wondered how to read the codes given to you on your SSO? For example, SSO tells you that you have a lecture at 260-098? You try to look it up online at this link but all it tells you where the first 3 numbers are. They then expect you to navigate your way through to the last 3 numbers. This guide will briefly run you through the University's coding system.

For simplicity's sake, we'll allocate "260-098" into 4 sections:

260-098 abb-cdd

Sections "a" and "b" are the building number whereas sections "c" and "d" are the room numbers.

Section "a" - Building number           This denotes a certain subsection of the University. For example, all Grafton Campus buildings are denoted by "5". For example, "505-007". However, in city campus, since it is so large (as it is the main campus for the University of Auckland), the campus is subdivided into certain sections. See the map below:

Section "b" - Building number           This is simply just the rest of the building number. Sometimes it is used as a label for which buildings were created first (as is the case for the Grafton campus where Buildings 501, 502, 503, 504 and 505 were erected in that order. Otherwise, I haven't really figured out why the rest of the building numbers in the City campus were named so.

Section "c" - Floor number           The first number denotes the floor at which the room is situated. For example, in building 260 (also known as the Owen G Glenn Building - OGGB), a "c" value of 0 means the room is found at level 0. OGGB is weird in that the main entrance is actually level 1 but  you can also enter at 'ground floor' from another entrance at which point you're entering at level 0 instead. However, as a rule of thumb, ground floor is level 0 and with successively increasing levels of "1" onwards denote the number of floors above ground floor. Additionally, in the Grafton campus, there is such thing as the "B" floor which stands for basement.

          Special note to Engineering: When you enter into engineering (perhaps for tests and the suchlike), their ground floor is actually "4". So if you're trying to find 401-401, the "floor number" of "4" is actually the ground floor according to the main entrance.

Section "d" - Room number           Similar to section b, there is nothing too particular about this apart from this section simply denoting the room number of a certain room. I've yet to discover a pattern for how they name certain rooms with certain numbers, but I am uncertain if there ever was a pattern.