Grad student lounge opens in West

The Graduate Student Council (GSC) opened the first lounge on campus explicitly for graduate students in the basement of West Hall yesterday. The goal behind creating a space for graduate students is that it will foster community among a fragmented population at the University.

The space provides graduate students with a place to study and socialize.

"Some graduate students don't feel comfortable studying in the library," said Hillary Green, a graduate student in history, who attended the opening. "This lounge gives them a chance to get out of their offices and study in a new environment, without having to compete as much for room, and especially computer space. I think it will be very useful and thus successful."

The lounge has four rooms, two of which will serve as study rooms and the other two as hang-out spots for graduate students and meeting places for graduate student clubs and organizations.

The lounge will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; access will be controlled with student ID cards.

Planning for the lounge began approximately five years ago after the administration decided to move the post office from the basement of West to Boston Ave. "It has taken a while to completely secure this space as ours," said Kellie Donovan, the president of the GSC for Arts, Sciences & Engineering.

According to former GSC President Donna Wilson, the idea for a graduate student lounge first came about after the graduate councils from area universities such as Harvard and MIT met to pool their ideas and see what schools were doing for their graduate students.

Harvard has a "gorgeous" graduate lounge, Wilson said, and she felt that graduate students at Tufts "needed a place that they can call their own,"

Upon proposing the lounge to the school, Wilson received the support of former Dean of the Graduate School of AS&E Rob Hollister. "They advocated for the center, and we decided that it was an excellent way to support the graduate students and reinforce their work at Tufts," he said.

"Graduate Students are a substantial part of the student body, and while they have their own department space, now they have a centrally located space to study when the library is closed, or to meet and socialize with other students," Hollister said.

The project was mostly funded by the Graduate Student Council, according to David Proctor, the council's treasurer and office manager, although the project also received significant financing from the Graduate School.

A number of administrators and approximately 30 graduate students attended the lounge's opening. As he cut the ribbon to officially symbolize the opening, Provost Jamshed Bharucha said that "this space is an affirmation of the administration's value of the graduate programs here at Tufts."

The lounge is technically open only to students in the Arts Sciences and Engineering (AS&E) Graduate program, but "we would never kick a Fletcher student out," Dean of the Graduate School of Arts Sciences and Engineering Robin Kanarek said.