It has a long, airy lounge, with a 1950s-style fireplace, overstuffed chairs and sofas, and plenty of coffee. It has a study area and a computer lab with four high-powered computers, as well as two moveable computer kiosks. And it has office space upstairs for the two main graduate-student-government organizations: GAPSA (the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly) and GSAC (the Graduate Student Associations Council).
The new Graduate Student Center officially opened its doors at 3615 Locust Walk last month after a $1 million makeover of the former Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity building. And it fills a very definite need for Penn’s 10,000 graduate and professional students.
“There was a strong feeling among the leadership of the two student organizations that there was no sense of graduate community,” says Anita Mastroieni GGS’99, the center’s director, formerly associate director of alumni relations in charge of the Global Alumni Network. “They were looking for a home that was just for them—a place where graduate students could go and relax, work, meet, and have activities.”
The two organizations submitted a proposal to President Judith Rodin and Provost Robert Barchi, who “made it happen,” says Mastroieni. “It was very important for graduate students to be on Locust Walk, in the center of campus, not in a fringe location.”
Mastroieni says she is excited about using “all that big white wall space” on the first floor to showcase art by students in the Graduate School of Fine Arts. She also plans to do a “lot of programming” at the center—some academic, some social, some both.
“We hope we’ll be getting a lot of synergy from the center, in the sense of having students from the vet school as well as Ph.D.s in art history here,” she says. “Graduate students have expressed a strong interest in learning about what goes on in outside disciplines. We want to do a lot of cross-disciplinary activities here—because we have the ability to do it.”