Last modified: Thursday, November 14, 2002
New center among the nation's best facilities for business schools
Editors: Another news release provides more details about the dedication ceremony for the Graduate and Executive Education Center. For assistance, please contact George Vlahakis, manager of media relations, at 812-855-0846 or gvlahaki@indiana.edu. The dedication ceremony will be taped for rebroadcast on the Web beginning Nov. 25. Users will need RealPlayer 8 and later will be able to access the presentation at https://broadcast.iu.edu.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- For more than 80 years, the Kelley School of Business has been setting the standard in management education. The new Graduate and Executive Education Center at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business will provide students, faculty and scholars with state-of-the-art facilities for their academic and professional pursuits.
The $34 million facility, which features 180,000 square feet of classroom and office space, will be dedicated at 2 p.m Friday, Nov. 22. Nick Scheele, president and chief operating officer of Ford Motor Co., will present the keynote address. The building, located at the corner of 10th Street and Fee Lane, was designed by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP of New York and Washington, D.C.
The building features a combination of two building materials native to Indiana that usually are not seen together -- southern Indiana limestone and oak. Limestone is a common building material on the IU Bloomington campus, particularly in exteriors. But in the new building, it is featured throughout the interior along with the distinguished look of oak.
In describing the new building and its impact, Kelley School Dean Dan R. Dalton sees its many benefits to students, faculty and the school's research centers. In addition, the new building has freed up needed space for faculty and the more than 3,000 undergraduate students who continue to use the adjoining School of Business Building. (The two structures are connected by office suites over Fee Lane.)
Offers a technological edge
Dalton said the new building is an amazing facility technologically. Students with laptop computers can utilize wireless Internet technologies to work virtually anywhere in the building and even in a new outdoor courtyard that the center shares with the recently renovated Psychology Building and a new parking garage. The building also is wired with more than 2,600 data ports for computers.
As you walk into the new building, you enter an expansive atrium forum, which includes an entrance to the center's new trading room. The room will offer a steady stream of data to students, including stock tickers, a Bloomberg News Service terminal and other sophisticated databases used by traders and analysts worldwide.
"If you were to go and look at the trading rooms at Goldman, Sachs, they would have access to similar data," Dalton said. "Needless to say, some of this data is expensive, but fortunately we have some gifts to offset that." Other information systems laboratories in the building will offer students access to important business information.
Faculty can invite speakers from business and industry to make presentations using teleconferencing available in many classrooms. Likewise, corporate recruiters unable to travel to Bloomington will be able to use this same technology to conduct face-to-face interviews with Kelley students from anywhere in the world.
The Kelley School of Business is the first business school to use a new technological innovation from the 3M Company. 3M's Wall Displays are smart whiteboards that allow students and faculty to apply hand-written notes to Web-based presentations in the center's conference rooms.
Facilities foster interaction and collaboration
Classrooms have been designed to foster interaction and collaboration. Most business schools have tiered classrooms, but the new center features classrooms that are double-width tiers. This allows for two rows of desks in the same area and enables students to gather easily for small group discussions. In the executive education area, everything -- including filing cabinets, whiteboards and desks -- is on wheels to allow for flexibility and creativity.
Also, the new building provides professors with more options to use in teaching their classes. There are 29 break-out rooms set aside for students to do group work. "One of the hallmarks of the Kelley School of Business is the team orientation that we have," Dalton said. "Those teams routinely have to meet on projects and we now have space in the building where they can do that." Previously, students had to search for empty classrooms or even go off-campus to get group assignments completed.
"From the point of view of the student, the enablement for their education is quite impressive," Dalton said. "This building was designed to be as friendly as possible. It was designed to maximize the students' ability to minimize downtime. If they want to meet with their team between classes, if they need to do work on their computers between classes -- whatever they're working on -- they can do that in real time in this new facility."
These features will help the Kelley School attract the best students and faculty, as well as companies and their employees to the school's executive education programs.
Advances business research
The new building also enabled the Kelley School to bring most of its nationally recognized research centers under the same roof. Among the research centers housed in the new center are the Indiana Business Research Center, the Leadership Development Research Institute and the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
"Consider, for example, the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. One of the things that sets it apart from other centers is the interactions it has with students -- undergraduate as well as graduate students. We were very happy with the facilities that we had off-campus, but you can imagine that it was awkward at times trying to meet with students and faculty," Dalton said. "Now, it becomes rather easy.
"The issue was not that they had good facilities. The issue was the coordination of a management group that was off-campus, a faculty that's of course on campus, and folks visiting us having to go from one place to the next to get their business done," he said.
Improving job prospects
Dalton sees the building's new offices for Graduate Career Services as particularly important. They offer better and more private areas for corporate recruiters to interview students, and also provide these visitors comfortable facilities to do their own business while on campus.
New changing rooms will serve students who have job interviews during the day. The Whirpool Corp. has provided equipment so students can press out any wrinkles in their clothes before the interview, thus helping them to dress for success.
The dean said the building will offer an interesting potential for graduate and executive education students to interact, which could lead to employment opportunities for students.
"We're not looking at this facility as individual pieces," observed Paul Robins, executive director of administration in the Kelley School and project coordinator for the building. "This is one major business environment. It's a home where all the pieces function as one. You don't have to be in a break-out room, a classroom or a lounge area -- you can do virtually the same thing in any of those environments. It's a corporate business environment."
