HALIFAX—Engineering students at Dalhousie University say a new campus building spans 49,615 square feet but manages to make little space for study.

Peter Svidler, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student at Dalhousie’s Sexton Campus, said the $64-million Emera IDEA (Innovation and Design in Engineering and Architecture) Building lends itself mostly to administrators and other non-academic interests.

“The biggest utility these students get out of this space are these little couches,” Svidler said Monday, gesturing to a row of seating and tables along one wall of the entrance.

“The idea that we did pay for this is a little frustrating.”

The IDEA Building, funded in large part by utility giant Emera, opened its doors in October. It is home to the IDEAhub, which is available for small, private companies to rent and occupies much of the building’s workshop space.

Thus two-thirds of the building is inaccessible to students, Svidler said, even though all engineering, planning and architecture students are paying $200 ($100 for both 2018 fall and 2019 winter terms) on top of their tuition fees toward the new addition.

With roughly 2,650 undergraduate and graduate engineering students paying those fees (looking at enrolment from winter 2018), Svidler hoped the university would create better spaces for hardworking students.

According to numbers from the 2018-19 school year, full-time undergraduate engineering students pay some of the highest fees at Dalhousie: about $10,991 for the year in tuition and other fees. In comparison, undergraduate arts students will pay $8,939 and science students $9,967.

But Svidler said the extra fees are really part of a larger issue on campus: a lack of group discussion space.

In September, Svidler and his classmates were shocked to see that their favourite study space, the Design Commons in one of the older Sexton buildings, was no longer accessible to the greater student population.

The old Design Commons, as well as another classroom on campus, were handed to the Imhotep Legacy Academy at the beginning of the school year without students’ prior knowledge or feedback, Svidler said.

According to Dalhousie’s website, the Imhotep Legacy Academy is an outreach program for young people of African descent to explore engineering and other fields in science. The initiative is part of the university’s “commitment to diversity.”

“Imothep’s Legacy Academy is a significant user of this space, and their outreach programming for young people of African descent is a leading example of this approach,” says Dalhousie University in an online statement.

While Svidler welcomes the Imothep initiative itself, he said he’s not pleased with Dalhousie’s lack of communication about this change — nor with the lack of seating and work space he and his classmates have had to deal with for the last three months.

The new John W. Lindsay Design Commons in the IDEA Building, which was meant to replace the old commons now being used by Imothep, was not furnished for several weeks, Svidler said.

“We came in, and we were all excited to make use of this new space, and it was still basically a construction site,” he said.

There are now about a dozen work tables designed for small groups but they aren’t ideal for the large-scale group projects engineering students often do. Plus, the high ceilings mean conversations tend to travel.

There are about four or five bookable study rooms, but the number of students far outweighs those spaces, said Svidler.

There are five new workshops and prototyping labs in the IDEA building, which Svidler says is a huge improvement — but they are mostly used by fourth-year students and aren’t an ideal space for other undergrads’ academic work, which composes 80 per cent of their workload.

Anywhere from 15 to 30 per cent of the projects that engineering students work on in a year are group-centred and require active engagement and open discussion in large spaces, Svidler said. That’s 10 to 20 hours of discussion-led work a week, he noted.

In an email sent this fall, obtained by StarMetro, an engineering professor outlines to mechanical engineering students some responses to the “many complaints/issues/grumblings regarding the Design Commons and student study space in general.”

Department heads were informed of the decision to give the old Design Commons space to Imothep “only after it was well past the point of undoing this decision,” and they were not aware the change wasn’t communicated to students, the email said.

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The current dean of engineering “is working very hard to address space issues but it will take time to correct the various problems,” it said.

Janet Bryson, senior communications manager for Dalhousie University, responded to requests for comment with information found on the university’s website.

“The John W. Lindsay Sr. Design Commons floor space and seating capacity is a significant increase over the number of spaces in the faculty’s old design commons. It has a variety of space types to accommodate a variety of student study and work styles,” she wrote in an email.

Correction – November 27, 2018: This article was updated from a previous version that incorrectly stated that Svidler said the five new workshops and prototyping labs in the IDEA Building are mostly used by master’s students. In fact, Svidler said they are mostly used by fourth-year students.

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