This page is referenced by:

• 1 2018-04-18T16:21:36-04:00 Field Visit: Mayer Campus Center at Tufts University 1 An Interview for Comparative Study image_header 2018-04-23T17:34:15-04:00 I made a field trip to Tufts University to speak with employees and interns in the Office of Campus Life at the Elizabeth Van Huysen Mayer Campus Center at 44 Professors Row in Medford, Massachusetts. 
  
  Interviewees:
  Denisse Huezo-Rosales
  Operations Coordinator
  • Coordinates the Event Registration for Student Orgs' upcoming events on campus.
  • Assists Student Organizations with any Event Planning or Space Reservation needs.
  • Manages the Vendor/Tabling program that occurs in the Campus Center.
  • Directly supervises Office Assistants of the OCL.
  
  Vicky Adinkra '18
  Campus Center Manager & Office Assistant
  • Responsible for the daily operations, security and services of the Mayer Campus Center.
  • Answers a high volume of questions about events, ticket sales, campus locations/departments.
  • Calculates and accounts for financial transactions in the Office of Campus Life info booth. 
  
  During this interview, I asked very fundamental questions about the functions of the Office for Campus Life while slowly getting into the aspects of what builds a successful student campus center. Through using the Mayer Campus Center as a model, we quickly learn about the ways in which the SOCH at Harvard is lacking and where it could improve. First we addressed the availability of the Mayer Campus Center.
   

  Denisse: I think visibility is important. If you noticed, [the Office for Campus Life] just moved some stuff here. The ATMs used to be here. There was no gender-neutral bathroom so we’ve been doing a lot of renovations in this area, but even such I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that where our office is located [within the Campus Center] is kind of hidden. So visibility is important because our office has its own little space, but a lot of people don’t know that. People don’t know that this office runs the building.

  
  Visibility ensures that students understand exactly how your office works, who your office works with, and how easy it is to navigate and utilize the resources offered by an office for student life services. The SOCH is a large building in the Radcliffe Quadrangle that, like the Mayer Campus Center, you cannot miss by walking in this section of Harvard. However, visibility is only one factor of a variety of things that assemble a successful campus center.

  Vicky: A campus center is successful when you clearly know what the campus center offers for students of all in different areas. In this campus center, we have upstairs TCU (Tufts Community Union), where we get our money, where we come if we need certain things. We have the office for fraternity and sorority life upstairs as well. A campus center should be a hub for all of those important things, but also access to open space for students to convene. Something for here that I would change would be to have more open spaces that are more comfortable like our lounge instead of the formal eating tables.
   

  You always need options where you can just go kick back in the corner there with your friends or in comfortable chairs or a bean bag or access to plug up some music if I wanted to or have constant music playing around in different spaces in the campus center. You want to feel like you can just chill and not necessarily be in an academic or formal space like the meeting rooms. You want [the campus center] to be the main spot for everyone and i’ve heard some friends say that they don’t want to come to the campus center because of the vibe of it and so they are like “we just go in there and pass through.” But there are others, even when I’m working who I’m like  “you’re always here. You don’t do work in your room or anywhere else on campus?” They find the space comforting for them, but a lot of students wish that there were more areas kind of like the lounge that are more chill.

  
  A student center must carry options that make it desirable for active use by students. Through commons spaces, food and set amenities, there is a lot to keep people coming back to Tufts. Which led me to the next central question: Does the location of the campus center matter? Has Tufts discovered a model where centrality is not a necessity?

  Vicky: I think it would be an issue if the campus center was located where our gym is, which is down past the bridge. From here it’s a smooth ten-minute walk. I have no business going through there - the only academic building on that end is the child development department and if I’m not in child development or an engineer trying to go to Halligan, i really have no business going there. But for this location, our shuttle stops here, there are academic buildings, but there are also residence halls that are around here, and right across the street is our library. So you’re right in the middle of things and you can kind of get to anywhere quickly if you need to meet up with someone. I’ll usually say “meet me at the campus center” because i know that wherever you are it’s going to be close to equidistant from wherever you are on campus or where I am.

  
  Vicky's comments stressed the importance of a campus center bridging the gap between academic, residential, social and recreational life for students. Then I proposed the idea of a shuttle system. Harvard has a working shuttle system that can take students to and from the Quad where the SOCH is located. I wanted to know if the Office for Campus Life at Tufts believe that a shuttle system would aid in campus center attendance if it was located a little farther out.
   

  Denisse: I still don’t think that a shuttle would work. It would be inconvenient. The thing is that Tufts has the shuttle that comes every 30 minutes, so are you really going to wait another 30 minutes to go to the campus center to study or will you just go to the library? The campus center would have very low traffic.

  
  
  jnkmkmkm