Give the Graduates Some Space

Although graduate students make up about a third of all students at UNC, they lead a pretty much isolated existence.

For the most part, their studies, research activities and teaching assistant jobs keep them holed up in the respective buildings that house their programs, segregating each of them to a small area of campus.

This utter lack of an overall community has been a continual gripe and an intrinsic problem in UNC's Graduate School, which offers 81 master's programs and 60 doctoral programs.

The University administration has responded recently by throwing its support behind a recommendation to establish a graduate student center.

Although the center would undoubtedly help to create a larger sense of community among graduate students, the UNC administration might unconsciously be on to something bigger.

The graduate student center would provide a common gathering area for graduate students to be used for hosting seminars, fellowship meetings and other events.

The center also would provide a space where graduate students know they could go to chat and casually interact with students from different areas of study.

But perhaps most importantly, the center could help make UNC's graduate program more appealing to prospective students by offering a fuller overall graduate student experience.

This is especially relevant at a time when a shrinking University budget further threatens UNC's appeal to prospective graduate students, with the possibility of already-lagging graduate student stipends falling further behind those of comparable universities.

The University administration cannot take the easy way of making UNC more appealing through offering low costs, high stipends and state-of-the-art facilities anymore.

The money just isn't there -- and won't be there for at least a while longer.

Instead, administrators must be more creative in times of financial hardship, and projects such as the graduate student center fit into this way of thinking.

The center is likely to cost the University little out of pocket.

A temporary space for the center probably will be soon set up in the new Student Union, and center supporters are hoping to identify a permanent home in Bynum Hall when other departments and services are shifted out of the building in 2005 or 2006.

Both Linda Dykstra, dean of the Graduate School, and Branson Page, Graduate and Professional Student Federation president, said they hope a donor will be found to fund the renovation and furbishing that Bynum Hall would require.

If they are successful in securing a private donation, only a small chunk likely would be taken out of the University budget to fund a project that would boost UNC's chances of recruiting top graduate students and, in turn, boost the overall quality of the University.

Because although students do weigh major factors such as the possibility of acquiring grants, graduation placement rates and tuition costs, it is often the intangible things, such as a sense of community, that make a big impression on prospective students and even prospective faculty members.

University administrators, therefore, need to follow the example of that kid who runs out of his allowance right before Mother's Day and has to get creative making a big card out of construction paper and glitter.

Sometimes the personal touches and the intangible just mean more, and administrators need to get creative and find these intangible, and perhaps more importantly inexpensive, ways of heightening the UNC experience.

In the end, it will pay off.

Karey Wutkowski can be reached at karey@email.unc.edu.