No gridlock at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business

The five building advisory teams met for the first time last week with our architects in preliminary planning meetings. I was very happy to discover that the ideas presented by the different team members for what should be included in our new building were surprisingly similar.

Ken Snyder

Members of the Student Advisory, Technology Advisory, Classroom Advisory, Department Head Advisory and the Program Leaders Advisory teams came to the meetings prepared with ideas and reasonable suggestions.

As an example of the consistency of suggestions, here are three needs identified by all five teams:

1. We need more upscale space like what the O.C. Tanner Lounge offers on the ninth floor in the George S. Eccles Business Building. Some people suggested that it would be nice to have two more rooms like that, one larger that could be used for banquets and other special functions, and the other smaller – more like an executive board room.

2. We need an eclectic mix of classrooms. People seemed to agree that it would be nice to have a good mix of new classrooms – some flat and some tiered, some large and some small, and some mid-size classrooms and not the strict 40-seat or 80-seat classroom sizes we have in the current Eccles building.

3. We need more student meeting rooms. Everyone agreed we need a lot more rooms that could be used by students for break-out groups, team meetings and group-study sessions. As I have traveled around to various business schools, they all reported that despite their best efforts, they still feel like they didn’t include enough student meeting rooms after they completed their buildings. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School has 55 such rooms and they told me they still feel like they could use more.

I came away not only enthused by everyone’s thoughtful input but impressed to see that 90 percent of the ideas suggested were brought up by at least two groups. I didn’t know what to expect and wondered if there would be conflicting needs that would make the process of prioritization more difficult. I was afraid I might have to referee a few battles along the way. It appears that will not be the case. We had a lot of consensus across all of the advisory teams.

- Ken Snyder