Education Room 372 Collaboration Area is available to graduate students throughout the College and provides a place for both group and independent work.

The College of Education’s strong research and public engagement culture already attracts talented graduate students from around the world. Establishing this space for graduate student collaboration will facilitate even more new scholarship and discovery.

“Back in the day, or around 2013, 2014 when I was a young Ph.D. student, this room was a hangout place for various EPOL faculty and their advisees to debate current issues and have big group discussions,” says teaching assistant professor Theopolies Moton. “Room 372 was consistently packed. We jokingly called it ‘Club EPOL’. It’s great to see it reimagined and being used again to foster dialogue and conversation for all grad students.”

Now more than one large conference room, the creation of the Room 372 Collaboration Area was initiated and guided by a group of Education graduate students through a variety of mechanisms. The Office of Graduate Programs first collected feedback about the need to establish a dedicated space for Education graduate students. Each of the academic departments provided input on their grad spaces not fulfilling this general need. Then, graduate students reached out directly to Facilities and the Dean’s Office to propose a centralized space within the College—an idea that was quickly approved.

Jeffry Royce, the College’s assistant director of facilities, says the Room 372 Collaboration Area now boasts three distinct areas that are intended to function in concert: 12 non-reservable individual workstations, a conversation area with lounge-style furniture for open meetings and discussion, and reservable Conference Room 370 for meetings of up to eight people.

As its primary users, all College of Education graduate students have I-card swipe access to Room 372. Bonus features like motorized standing desk workstations, a collaboration monitor, and lockers for short-term storage make it ideal for graduate students who put in long hours teaching and working at the Education building.

“I'd say the most unique feature of 372 is its openly collaborative nature,” says Royce. “Graduate students from various groups and disciplines—and with differing goals—are sharing the same resource in meaningful ways. I think we knocked this one out of the park.” 

Graduate students involved in the project and using the redesigned space, which reopened in fall 2023, are laudatory too. They say the College’s graduate student services and facilities staff partnered with students to make Room 372’s transformation a thoughtful, participatory process.

“We continue to receive feedback and suggestions for the space and will keep implementing improvements however we can,” says Royce.

The late Eric Nethercott, former Ph.D. student in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership and an advocate of the redesign project, quickly became a Room 372 “regular”. He explained, in an email last spring, how the redesigned space had already helped build personal and professional connections among graduate students across the College. Nethercott noted how the space serves as an informal mentoring space for master’s and doctoral students—critical to graduate student success. Having a space dedicated to cross-disciplinary brainstorming, networking, and research was fostering a greater sense of graduate student community within a few short months.

Students, faculty, and staff can learn more details about Education Room 372 Collaboration Area here, including room use guidelines.