CU Students Enjoying New Student Center
POTSDAM - Boxes are still waiting to be unpacked and not every door has a lock on it, but students have been filtering in and out of Clarkson University's student center for the past week.
Friday afternoon, students ran around on a scavenger hunt to different parts of the three-story, $25 million building, to learn where the virtual gaming and meditation rooms were, among other things.
"They're finding more and more out about the building and they enjoy finding things," said Clarkson's clerk of the works, William H. MacDonald. "The first couple of days they were looking around like, 'Can we come really come in without hard hats and safety glasses?' I think they're going to be very comfortable here."
The building opened Monday, though it is not completed yet; there still are "no admittance" signs on the meditation room, which is tucked into a corner between the international and graduate student lounges and on the walkway connecting the student center to the Center for Advanced Materials Processing.
When that corridor is complete, all of the academic buildings on campus will be connected so students, faculty and staff can stay inside during the winter.
"I would say we're 90 percent of the way there," said Jason D. Enser, associate dean of students. "I think we have more of a sort of community now. Cheel is a great facility as a hockey arena, but it was never really our own."
Formerly, Cheel Arena was the student center, with room for clubs, dining facilities and mailboxes, but with Potsdam residents and others constantly filtering in and out, it never really seemed to belong just to the students. To fix the problem, students agreed to double their student activity fund for the next decade to help pay for construction. They voted to do the same thing to build Cheel two decades ago.
The building also includes a cafe, a dining hall and a bar, though the liquor license has not yet been approved, offices and spaces for student clubs and organizations and a large, open forum in the center for movie screenings or guest speakers. This weekend, there will be movies shown there, as well as a comedian and a hypnotist, Mr. Enser said.
Throughout the afternoon, the dining hall was packed and some of the lounges already showed signs of use with discarded newspapers and the occasional soda can left behind on a table. Students clustered around the pool, foosball and bubble hockey tables and lounged in the forum, waiting for "Clash of the Titans" to begin.
"The lounges, that's one thing we as students have always lacked, is just the space to sit down, and it's in the middle of campus," said senior Melanie L. Waldman, the vice president of the student government. "Having the diverse student body that we have, I think this is exactly what we need to do to bring people out of their rooms and get involved."
