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Overseeing
the Bustle of a New Facility
By Jacqui Shine '05 and Eric Sean
Weld
 Even though Dawn Mays-Floyd, Campus Center
director has been here only a few months, she is already discovering
what the newly opened facility means to the college. "The Campus
Center is really a space for the entire community," says Mays-Floyd,
who began at Smith in February, when the facility was still circled by
a construction fence and heavy equipment but its potential as a community
space was already a source of excitement. Mays-Floyd envisions a facility
that will offer activities and respite for everyone and that can become
an institutional focal point.
The 56,000-square-foot center, which
opened August 25, accommodates the Grécourt Bookshop, the
mailroom, a café, the campus radio station WOZQ, offices
for the center staff and for the Student Government Association,
and a performance/meeting space that can accommodate several hundred
people. And while these essential offices ensure that the Campus
Center will get a lot of traffic, Mays-Floyd also wants to emphasize
its potential to bring people together.
"Students interact formally with faculty members in class and with some
staff members in their residences," she says, "but where else is
there on campus for everyone to come together formally and informally?"
Mays-Floyd
has worked at much larger institutions, including Ohio's Bowling
Green State University and the University of North Carolina–Greensboro,
where she was the associate director of student life for a 13,000-student campus
with its own 190,000-square-foot university center. She notes that Smith students,
though they attend a unique institution, aren't so different from college
students everywhere.
Students here, as elsewhere, she says,
are seeking programming that's "interesting,
diverse and includes a mix of educational and fun events." Thus the center's
events calendar includes a late-night Halloween party, a women's film
festival and monthly programming for first-year students and Residential Life
student
staff members.
Mays-Floyd included students in every
stage of Campus Center programming. Her staff of 25 student employees
arrived on campus August 17
to train for their
new positions and to help prepare the center for its August 25 opening. "There
will also be a Campus Center advisory board that will include students, faculty,
and staff and will have input into the programming for the facility," she
explains. In coming to Smith, Mays-Floyd is
returning to her regional roots, having grown up in
Worcester and completed her undergraduate studies at Framingham
State College
in eastern Massachusetts. She's also experienced the vitality of a campus
center from both the student and staff perspectives; after receiving her master's
degree from Bowling Green, which has an active campus center, she spent four
years as assistant director, then director, of student activities at that 15,000-student
campus.
She appreciates so far the level of
support at Smith for the facility and its programs. "Students and staff are really excited about the Campus
Center," says
Mays-Floyd, who conducted numerous hard-hat tours of the unfinished building
and has been present for the center's hectic but exciting opening weeks. "It's
been great to meet so many people who are excited about what this center will
do for the campus," she says. She's especially excited to see how
the center will fit into the Smith community once the dust from construction
is replaced by the bustle of student life. |
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