Graduate student center opens on Locust Walk

As returning and first-year graduate students settle in to Penn, those looking for a tangible sign of community must look no further than the new Graduate Student Center, which opened earlier this week on Locust Walk.

The center comes two years after the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly and the Graduate Student Associations Council first started to push for it, submitting a proposal to the University that asked for the development of a central hub for graduate student life.

The result of those plans came Monday when the Graduate Student Center opened at 3615 Locust Walk. With conference space, a kitchen, computers, audiovisual equipment and study areas, the center is designed to provide graduate students with space for meetings, programs and other events. It will operate on limited hours until its official opening in mid-October.

Until then, Director Anita Mastroieni will help gear up by hiring a staff of six graduate fellows who will be in charge of programming events. In addition, a volunteer advisory board will provide input on developing policies.

Mastroieni was appointed earlier this summer and officially began work at the center on Aug. 1.

"It's a realization of everything we hoped for," GAPSA President Christopher Leahy said. "The University was incredibly responsive to what we saw as the needs for a center."

The Law School student praised the center's location on Locust Walk in the house formerly occupied by the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity.

"It's a very visible symbol of the University's commitment to graduate students," Leahy said.

The renovations of the space cost the University roughly $1 million, according to Deputy Provost Peter Conn. GAPSA and GSAC also contributed portions of their budgets for equipment to furnish the center.

"The program has been very collaborative, it's been a real partnership," Conn said.

Eric Eisenstein, former president of GSAC and Kyle Farley, former GAPSA chairmanÿ-- who both worked with administration to create the center -- originally hoped the center would open a year ago. However, structural problems in the building delayed the opening.

The center will help make Penn more competitive with other top universities, Conn said. According to GAPSA and GSAC, Penn was the only Ivy League school without such a center until Monday's opening.

GSAC President Darren Glass, a graduate student studying mathematics, said he hoped the graduate center would help bring together students from different disciplines.

"One of the problems with graduate school is we get pigeon-holed into a sub-sub-sub sector of a discipline," Glass said.

"I'm interested in other disciplines, and I think other graduates are," he added.

Conn said he agreed with Glass' assessment.

"We all have the same core objectives in mind -- to provide an exceptionally visible and therefore symbolically important space," Conn said. The center will provide a space where grad students can come together "for academic and professional purposes -- to nourish conversation in a much broader engagement."

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