By When students entered the Niggli Conference Center at Cal State Long Beach Monday, they were greeted with a handshake from Dean Forouzan Golshani and a cup of joe.
Attendees at the event “Coffee with the Dean,” were encouraged to grab a slice of pizza before the floor opened up for students to ask questions and voice their concerns about the department of engineering.
“I’m glad [the dean] does this,” Hari Gandhi, senior electrical engineering major said. “I’m glad he takes the time to talk to students, but it seems like every time we have an issue we have a lot more people at the event.”
Gandhi went on to explain the lack of communication between the students and the dean. He said it is up to students to emphasize the work they are doing in order to show how the space provided is adequately used.
“When there’s no issue no one is there,” Gandhi said. “It should be the student’s job to communicate with the dean on what they’re up to. That way, the dean and the associate deans have a better idea what projects we’re working on and what’s actually going on in the college.” Golshani welcomes students to come to these events because he wants to hear what they have to say.
Once everyone was seated, Golshani began the discussion by emphasizing the importance of clubs as part of student life. The main topic of discussion was the relocation of club meetings within the engineering department. The department currently has 30 active clubs that use faculty-appointed offices as a space to meet. According to Gandhi, six new tenure faculty members will be hired and the college is looking for the office space to accommodate them.
“I’m glad student clubs have rooms, I’m sad that we’re losing rooms but we have to be flexible,” said Ghandi. “These are faculty offices so we’re not allowed to be in here because they’re suppose to be occupied by professors.”
He went on to explain that club rooms are study spaces, not personal office space for the students.
“The emphasis was that these spaces are not offices and these are not labs, these are study areas,” Golshani said. “The wrong assumptions that they make is they think it is their office, their space.”
Gandhi, who is also the president of the Associated Engineering Student Body, said he has been trying to figure out where to best place all the clubs.
Golshani asked club members to share the available space and equipment with each other.
“The main purpose of these club rooms is for collaborative study spaces and meeting areas,” said James Donahue, senior electrical engineering major. “[The dean] doesn’t have any plans for that when he kicks us out of these club rooms. He said we should go talk to the instructors for the other labs, but the other labs are actually being used for research. So we normally don’t have access to those.”
Golshani encouraged the students to come together to make suggestions of possible ways to solve the relocation issue.
“I hope we were able to put their minds at ease,” Golshani said. “There is nothing funny going on, we are not trying to steal their space. We just need to optimize the use of space in those areas that are less than optimizely used.”
Although no formal solution was found during the meet and greet, students appeared to have left satisfied with the discussion.
“I gain a lot more than students do at these events,” Golshani said. “I hear what’s on their mind and they always have a lot to contribute. At the end of it we are here to make them more successful and anything we do is to help them.”
