Five years is a long time to spend with the same 49 people. Five years of critiques, project briefs, co-ops, and competition. Five years of 48-hour design marathons. Five years of moving every three months, of living out of suitcases, of not knowing where you’re going to live next week.  It’s been five years of blood, sweat and tears, but most of all, a lot of laughter. We’ve had five years of crowding around each other’s laptops to watch YouTube videos. Five years of vending machine dinner parties. Five years of hyperbolic exclamations on the glories of one design or another. We are all very different people, but something happens when you spend so much time with the same group of people. One could say that we’ve become a family. We’re not just a family in the hokey, cheesy, gather-round-the-table way; we’re a family in the messy sense of the word too.