In Review
GRADUATE SPACE: The Messinger Graduate Study North, the first of two areas in Rush Rhees Library designed for graduate students, opened this fall. (Photo: Brandon Vick)For the first time graduate students have their own niche in the library.
“It’s scholastic yet comfortable,” Kristina Wilson, a doctoral candidate in chemistry, says of the Messinger Graduate Study North, which opened in August.
Its design was a byproduct of two years of interviews, anthropological studies, and focus groups—the same model used to develop the undergraduate Gleason Library, which opened in 2007. Research showed that graduate students wanted a welcoming space, “kind of like a living room,” says librarian Suzanne Bell, who coordinated the student-led planning process.
It also revealed that graduate students, especially those in the humanities and in master’s programs, often worked at home in isolation, says Susan Gibbons, vice provost and Andrew H. and the Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries. “They didn’t feel connected to the University,” she says. “This space is designed to help them feel like part of a larger community.”
Wendi Heinzelman, dean of graduate students in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, says the room will “provide students the opportunity to interact across disciplinary boundaries that often define much of a graduate student’s time on campus.”
The renovation was made possible through a gift from Martin Messinger ’49, a senior trustee of the University. He also funded renovation of the Messinger Periodical Reading Room, which opened in 1998. His decision to underwrite creation of a second graduate student room will complete the restoration of the entire second floor of the west wing of Rush Rhees Library.
—Susan Hagen
Susan Hagen writes about the libraries for University Communications.
