Nursing building gets a makeover

As spring semester Nursing classes kicked off this week, people are enjoying coffee and enhanced Internet access on the renovated first floor of the Nursing Education Building.

With renovation completed in October, students say they are pleased with the new atmosphere.

"It looks great," Nursing senior Juliet Marx said. "You can sense all the enthusiasm for future changes in the Nursing School."

The finished renovation is part of a larger initiative to revitalize the school, according to Nursing School Dean Afaf Meleis. The second phase of renovations -- which will include further improvements -- will begin as soon as school administrators raise enough money.

Meleis said she is proud of the completed renovations because the space allowed student communities to grow.

"My most pleasurable moment is when I come in and see students congregating there," she said.

Meleis added that the student-centered renovations help "the students know that they are the most important part of the organization."

As part of the student advising committee last year, Marx gave suggestions to the architects and administrators about students' needs.

Students asked for "improved classrooms, improved heating and air conditioning, more space to study, improved computer lab and [an] improved student lounge," she said.

"The main thing were spaces for students to study individually or in groups or relax between classes," Marx said.

For one Nursing professor who helped advise the latest renovations, her connection to the building began much earlier.

Nursing professor Eileen Sullivan-Marx was a student on the advising committee in 1971 when the building was only a blueprint. She now teaches her own students in the building, which she says has been vastly improved by the renovation.

Sullivan-Marx she said was unable to use the building's auditorium last year for her class, but now says the new space helps her teach better.

"The seats themselves are larger so that students tend to sit together more," she said. "They were able to ask questions, interact and respond."

Sullivan-Marx called the old building "maze-like" and said it was difficult to navigate. When it was first built, it housed three separate nursing schools, a library and staff from Philadelphia General Hospital, the Children's Hospital and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, divisions that interfered with movement throughout the structure.

Some students say that the renovation has also made it easier for them to find their way through the building.

Wharton sophomore Sanja Benak, who is taking a victimology class in the Nursing Building this semester, said that "the room was easy to find this time."

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