Relocated offices crowd GTAs; new locations confuse students
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Ali Brox shared her office on campus with two people last year. That number has more than quadrupled this year.
Brox, graduate teaching assistant for the department of English, is one of 235 GTAs and faculty members who have had their offices displaced by construction at Wescoe Hall. Some were moved into buildings around campus. Others, including Brox, were grouped together in classrooms on the fourth floor of Wescoe where as many as 20 GTAs share the same room.
Photo by Ryan Waggoner
Michael DeHaven, first-year graduate student Topeka, works Wednesday afternoon in a Wescoe Hall classroom that has been converted into office space for GTA's working in the German department. Several other departments such as English, Slavic, History and Philosophy have also seen their offices moved to similar classrooms for the current school year due to construction work occuring where their offices were previously located.
“There were only three of us in my office last year,” Brox said. “We were spoiled.”
Other new office locations include Watson Library and the Military Science Annex.
The Department of French and Italian moved all of its GTAs and lecturers from Wescoe Hall to the Military Science Annex, located behind the Military Science building.
Sarah Greenwood, office manager of the Department of French and Italian, said she received mixed responses from GTAs. She said some of them liked the isolation and quiet environment of the Annex, but others thought the building’s distance from their classes in Wescoe Hall was inconvenient. Greenwood also said some students were confused about the new location of the GTAs’ offices.
“It’s a little difficult to communicate with people who don’t know the place,” Greenwood said.
Greenwood said some people confused the annex with the Military Science Building or the new Sabatini Multicultural Resource Center next to the Kansas Union because the annex housed the Multicultural Resource Center last year.
Gilles Viennot, Paris GTA for the Department of French and Italian, was among 30 instructors from the department whose offices were moved to the annex. He said he worried that the new location discouraged students from visiting him during office hours.
Some humanities departments, including English, history and East Asian languages and cultures, have moved their offices into former classrooms on the fourth floor of Wescoe hall.
Sandra Chen, Tainan, Taiwan, GTA of Chinese, is also among the GTAs now located in a group office.
Chen said the noise level in her shared office forced her to use a separate conference room in Wescoe when meeting with students.
She also said there weren’t enough computers in the new office for all the people who had been moved there.
The Department of English has its GTA offices in two classrooms in Wescoe and in small rooms on the fifth floor of Watson Library.
She said that although the big room could be noisier, it was a good place to socialize with other GTAs who were teaching the same course and often taking the same classes.
Don Steeples, vice provost for scholarly support, said those who had been displaced should be back to their previous locations by August 2009.
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Atleast nobody will get a brain tumor. amirite?
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