Annual Report 2003
Foundation for the Future
What a Difference a Semester (and a New Building) Can Make!
It’s eight in the evening during finals week in December and undergraduate dean Dennis Hanno is still at work. Over eighty students, most of them with laptop computers, are studying individually and in groups in the three-month-old Alfond building’s student center-atrium, in its eight breakout rooms, and in furnished alcoves that punctuate the atrium’s semicircular staircase and the hallway above. The indefatigable Hanno, who will do most anything to foster community and school spirit among his 2,500 undergraduates, has just deposited six dozen doughnuts and a canister of hot coffee—compliments of the house—on a long table near the middle of the student center’s slate tiled floor. One further touch from Hanno completes the picture. A twenty-foot projection screen, mechanically lowered from a groove in the atrium’s fifty-foot high ceiling, offers studying students the moving image of dancing flames in a brick fireplace.
“We want them to think of the Isenberg School as their second home,” quips Hanno, with eyes a twinkle that rival the flames in his virtual fireplace. “The Alfond Center is the most architecturally impressive building in the history of this university, but by design it is very student focused. Visit the Carroll School at BC and many other business schools—their scale is more corporate, more austere. At the Isenberg School, we tell the students, “The Alfond Center is your space. We don’t need to persuade them; the building does it for us.”
Since it came on line in September of 2002, the Alfond Center has given new meaning to multitasking. The building’s four case rooms have catalyzed learning interactivity, both among students and between students and faculty members. Accompanying breakout rooms have fostered student team projects and added critical study space. To that end, Hanno keeps them and the building open around the clock when classes are in session. “The building has become our students’ hub for studying; it’s also become their social center and the meeting place for student organizations,” notes Hanno. Five years ago, the School’s student organizations numbered seven; today, there are twenty, with the addition of the two new departments and community-building student groups like U-Lead.
The Alfond Center, adds Hanno, has become prime real estate for the School’s interactions with the outside world. The building’s case rooms, interview rooms, and meeting spaces present the School in its best light with recruiters, visiting academics, parents, alumni, and the business community. On a typical week in July, executives from nearby Yankee Candle’s corporate headquarters held meetings in the Alfond Center’s executive case room, UMass Amherst Chancellor John Lombardi held a press conference in a meeting area, and Dean Hanno hosted incoming transfer students and their parents. “At summer orientation, the building consistently astounds new students and their parents,” notes Hanno, who plans to invite parents back to the School for periodic family and student events. “The bottom line,” Hanno emphasizes, “is that the building is the best tool we’ve ever had for involving our constituencies in an expanding Isenberg School community.”
Hanno notes another positive outcome from the completed building project: “Overnight, our old building, which had been cluttered and overused, has become spacious and more agreeable.” Gone is the old bottleneck in the School’s ground floor lobby on its north side. And just off that foyer, the former room 120 lecture hall has become the state-of-the-art 260-seat Flavin Family Auditorium, which rivals any room in the new Alfond Center.” With that facility and the Alfond Center, we can run big events simultaneously at opposite ends of the School,” observes Hanno.
“A lesson from this year is never to underestimate the transforming impact of one’s physical environment,” he continues. “Over the past five years, we’ve invested heavily in new academic programs, student services, and student organizations. We’re proud of those improvements. But nothing has rivaled moving into a fantastic new building. We view ourselves a bit differently and our external image improved overnight. With our programmatic improvements and the new building it’s fair to say that we now have the best of both worlds.”
“The bottom line is that the building is the best tool we’ve ever had for involving our constituencies in an expanding Isenberg School community.”
—Dennis Hanno