[MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta and this is Lost in the Stacks, the one and only research library rock and roll radio show. I am Charlie Bennett in the studio with Fred Rascoe and Marlee Givens. I'm also on the board. And, Fred, I'm going to take this moment to let you I can't find the music yet, so we're going to have to fill a little time as we get closer and closer to the first song. FRED RASCOE: It'll be fine. CHARLIE BENNETT: Did you upload it? FRED RASCOE: It's going to be fine. CHARLIE BENNETT: Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. MARLEE GIVENS: Today's episode is called "Graduate Students-- There's a Place for Us in the Library." It's another in the series that we call the Georgia Tech Library Guidebook. CHARLIE BENNETT: During the spring and fall semesters, on the first Friday of each month, we visit a site in the guidebook and talk about a space or service in the GT Library. We're flipping the script a bit for today and starting with a demographic instead of a space. FRED RASCOE: Graduate students make up a huge chunk of the total enrollment at Georgia Tech and are an important part of the Tech community. There are around 8,500, give or take, here on campus and a lot more online. CHARLIE BENNETT: And those grad students on campus need the library. They need the resources. They need the services. They need the space. MARLEE GIVENS: So for today's guidebook entry, we're going to talk about spaces in the Georgia Tech Library that are specifically designed for graduate students. We're going to talk about the plans, the designs and the decisions that were made over the years to create those graduate spaces. And our songs today are about quiet spaces, spaces that are always open, and that feeling of being in just the right place. Graduate students need these spaces. And since grad students are a huge constituency of the library, we have to make sure that their needs are being served. Are we ready to go? So let's start with "Are You Being Served" by The Hammerheads-- no, it's not the theme to the '70s British sitcom-- right here on Lost in the Stacks. [THE HAMMERHEADS, "ARE YOU BEING SERVED"] FRED RASCOE: Well, we got there in the end. That was "Are You Being Served" by The Hammerheads and, yeah, not the '70s-- MARLEE GIVENS: Exactly. FRED RASCOE: --TV show-- British TV show theme. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: First floor perfumery, stationery, haberdashery-- I can't remember the words-- going up. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. All right, yeah, it's kind of loose in here because we've had all kinds of technical problems. But we've actually got a genuine theme. That's not about technical difficulties. We're going to talk about graduate spaces in the Georgia Tech Library. And it's very important that we have graduate spaces just for graduate students because they're a huge constituency-- MARLEE GIVENS: They really are here, yeah. FRED RASCOE: --at Georgia Tech. MARLEE GIVENS: How many grad students do we have, Fred? FRED RASCOE: Over 35,000. MARLEE GIVENS: [GASPS] FRED RASCOE: Yeah. MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, my goodness. FRED RASCOE: Most of those are online-- MARLEE GIVENS: OK. FRED RASCOE: --because of the online programs that we started-- MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: --a few years ago. But the Atlanta campus is home to-- the latest stats that are available, which is for the '25-'26 school year, is we have 8,343 students on campus. And so, of course, the library a few years ago went through a whole renovation process. We didn't really have spaces in the old library-- MARLEE GIVENS: Oh. FRED RASCOE: --for-- especially for graduate students. MARLEE GIVENS: I mean, we hardly had spaces for students, period, in the old library. FRED RASCOE: That's-- yeah, that's very true. And so we needed to actually incorporate into that design some spaces just for graduate students. MARLEE GIVENS: Right, right. And I'll also point out that we had also just built a whole building for undergraduate students connected to the library. FRED RASCOE: Right, the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, a bunch of study spaces, a bunch of places for first-year labs, collaboration rooms, things like that. The library needed to match that. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm. FRED RASCOE: And so even though this is in the past now, I think it's important to think about the kind of design decisions that we made to-- MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: --bring these graduate spaces into existence. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: And also to compare this to a show that we did a few weeks ago on the Faculty Research-- MARLEE GIVENS: Right, the Faculty Research Zone. FRED RASCOE: So if you missed that show, we talked about how we went and we-- librarians and a design firm-- we went out, we talked to faculty, we asked them how they use the library, how they would want to use the library. And so in the new library, we developed this Faculty Research Zone for them to mixed results as we discussed a few weeks ago. But we did the same thing for graduate students. MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, yeah. FRED RASCOE: We went out-- I went out and interviewed graduate students. We compiled them into these profiles that we presented to administration and here in the library and on campus. And lots of things came out of that, including-- I think the general, top takeaway is that they need not just space, but they need quiet space. MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, yeah, yeah. Do you remember any of the specific things that they said in the survey? FRED RASCOE: Yeah, I went digging through my old PDF files of the design so-- of the design interviews that we did and we interviewed, let's see, a graduate student in biological engineering-- would like computers with dual monitors, large scale visualization space. That came to be presentation studios. Another graduate student that we interviewed back in 2014-- this is when all these interviews took place, in 2014-- in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, I need quiet, private space, a window-filled space, a quiet, dedicated space. And I just go through-- we have about 10 or 12 of these and I just keep seeing the same thing quiet space, large space, and occasionally dockable-- docking stations. MARLEE GIVENS: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, yeah. It's interesting that if you think about the old days, a graduate student might have a carrel in the library. There's just a little cubby for just them to work. FRED RASCOE: Right. MARLEE GIVENS: But what they're really looking for is communal space, right? FRED RASCOE: And that's where you just-- the traditional carrel, the cubby, you just walk into the library and you find it along the wall somewhere. You are part of the main library. You're not sequestered off in your own space where you have a dedicated group of people that you're working with. So it's very much part of the library as a whole. And it's not just graduate students that can use those carrels in those more traditional libraries or as the library used to be. Undergraduates can come in and-- MARLEE GIVENS: --or faculty or, yeah-- FRED RASCOE: Yeah, yeah, and they just camp out and use those spaces. MARLEE GIVENS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so somewhere between the undergraduate sleeping on the sofa and the cubby. FRED RASCOE: Right, the-- and the undergraduates can tend to make a library more of a party atmosphere. And graduate students need a little bit more focus, a little bit more dedicated-- so that's why we deliberately designed graduate spaces in the library. I think in the next segment, we need to talk about a couple of those spaces that came as a direct result from these interviews that we had with graduate students in the next segment. MARLEE GIVENS: This is Lost in the Stacks, and we will be back with more about the library spaces just for grad students after a music set. FRED RASCOE: And you can file this set under LB2371.C468. [SUN KIL MOON, "SOMEWHERE"] (SINGING) There is a place for us Somewhere a place for us [THE ADVERTS, "MY PLACE"] FRED RASCOE: "My Place" by The Adverts and before that "Nice Room" by the Martyr Group. And we started off with "Somewhere," the version of the West Side Story song by Sun Kil Moon. Those are songs about finding a place where you're right at home. [MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: This is Lost in the Stacks. And speaking of West Side Story, it's really hard not to sing this. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. MARLEE GIVENS: Today's show is called "Graduate Students." There's a place for us. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm sure you can sing it. You should go for it if you want. MARLEE GIVENS: (SINGING) There's a place for us in the library CHARLIE BENNETT: I hope my wife is listening. [LAUGHTER] MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah, so, Fred, let's get to the actual physical space. FRED RASCOE: Right, because this is a guidebook show. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: So we need to talk about what we're guiding listeners-- MARLEE GIVENS: First of all, where is it? FRED RASCOE: Well, the Graduate Student Community, as it's called, or GSC for short, is on the sixth floor of the Crosland Tower in the Georgia Tech Library. It takes up half of the floor. It's probably similar in square footage to the Faculty Research Zone, which we talked about a few weeks ago. So it's a large house. CHARLIE BENNETT: A fun fact, it matches staff spaces on the other floors. So it is the same size as, say, our office or-- FRED RASCOE: It's the same like office space footprint on the sixth floor that we have on the fourth and third floor. That's right. But, crucially, it is only accessible if you are a graduate student. And everybody has a little ID card here at Georgia Tech and graduate students can swipe their card and get in and undergraduates cannot. And it is a quiet study space inside. On the edges of the room, there are six different breakout rooms. So if you need to collaborate with maybe a lab partner or a fellow researcher or something like that, a colleague in your graduate program, you can reserve a breakout room and talk. But the main part of the floor is comfortable seating plus about 50 spaces of docking stations where you can come and you can bring your laptop, plug it in. You got dual monitors. You can work on a spreadsheet on one monitor while you're watching a video of an experiment on another, do all kinds of things like that. And there's a little kitchen area as well, so you can stay all day and then have your lunch while you take a break. There's lockers, so you can store all of your stuff all day. And you can have those lockers for an entire semester. And this place is always full. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yes, I walk by it on occasion. And the way that people are walking into it and out of it feels like folks at home, feels like folks in their office or in their dormitory space. There's no tentativeness. There's just folks who are walking straight up to the door, hitting beep, heading in and just being like this is where I am, this is where I belong. And there's a reading area outside of the graduate student space, which matches the floor plan of the other floors. That's not restricted but quite clearly is mostly grad students because that's their floor now. And that also feels very much like this is our spot. There is ownership of the sixth floor Crosland that is both comforting and a little off-putting when I walk through it. FRED RASCOE: It's clear that there's a need for this kind of space. And it's because, for a lot of reasons, graduate students don't necessarily have the kind of office space that a faculty member would have or a kind of working space. MARLEE GIVENS: Right. FRED RASCOE: And so they need a place where they can go and work. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah, or not a quiet space at any rate. FRED RASCOE: Yeah, they probably lots of spaces where they could find a place to plug their laptop in, but this is dedicated quiet space. And I'll tell you, they do a good job of enforcing the quietness of the floor. MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, yeah. FRED RASCOE: Because if anybody ever breaks that silence-- and sometimes it's been me leading a library tour in, showing folks, hey, here's the space. And I try to whisper to the tour group but maybe I speak a little too loud and then I hear later, hey, someone was in here talking. This is a quiet space. CHARLIE BENNETT: So you hear later like there's a report? FRED RASCOE: Right, yeah, when I used to be more involved in the service management of the space CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: --and so I would hear back complaints if someone was too loud or maybe if someone heated up something in the microwave that disturbed the solitude-- the working solitude of everyone else in the room. MARLEE GIVENS: I-- so I remember from the days that we were in the design and planning phase. Someone just looked at both library buildings and imagined that they would go from the lower left to the upper right, going from loud to quiet, gradually getting quieter as you got up to the sixth and seventh floor reading rooms in the grad student space. FRED RASCOE: Yeah, yeah. And they definitely want the quiet space. But, I mean, it's always packed though. So you have 50 people sitting in there but packed. They are alone together. They feed on that working environment. So that is the main graduate space in the library. But we'll talk about-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, there's more? FRED RASCOE: --we'll talk about another one in our next segment. CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. We'll talk more about graduate student spaces, including another one that I didn't was on the menu at the Georgia Tech Library on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] SUBJECT: Hi. This is Sandjar Kozubaev. I'm a PhD student at Georgia Tech, and I study digital media and public spaces. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "Graduate Students: There's a Place for Us in the Library." It's the last seg-- in the last segment, we talked about the quiet space of the graduate student community on how-- and how our own experience and feedback from graduate students helped lead to the final design. Other research bears our thinking out. In a 2015 article by librarians at Florida State called "Assessing the Space Needs of Graduate Students," the authors found that even though quiet space is important in their library, it's just as important for grad students to be surrounded by others working just as hard and quietly as themselves. So here's a little excerpt from that article. "Being surrounded by other graduate students who are serious about their work is also motivational for some students. Since studying and writing can be isolating, being around other graduate students engaged in similar work helped lessen feelings of loneliness and isolation for many students. During one interview, a student talked about a group of students who are not in her classes but who study in the same area where she does and who provide a sense of community. She says--" MARLEE GIVENS: "--There are some of these second- and third-year students that are working on some pretty impressive projects. And I always feel, kind of, reassured when I see them there because they're my cohort. We don't actually study together, but we're in the same room." FRED RASCOE: So from that excerpt, I think we see graduate students benefit from working quietly alone and quietly alone together. File this set under NA7125.S63. [MUSIC PLAYING] [ELLA FITZGERALD AND NELSON RIDDLE, ALONE TOGETHER] Together, together Alone MARLEE GIVENS: That was alone together by Ella Fitzgerald and Nelson Riddle. And before that, the opposite of that, "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode. But they have something in common. They're both songs about being alone and quiet among others like you. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks, and we're talking about graduate student spaces in the Georgia Tech Library. I'm very familiar with the graduate student community. I mean, I've never been in it, but I've certainly walked by it and stared inside with my face pressed up against the glass, wondering what it must be like to be a Georgia Tech grad student. FRED RASCOE: I got complaints about that too, by the way. CHARLIE BENNETT: I've always tried to wear a mask, so it wouldn't bother them. But you say there's another space and I wasn't sure what you were talking about until I saw in the script-- FRED RASCOE: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: --oh, the dissertation defense room. FRED RASCOE: Which, naturally, is for graduate students. CHARLIE BENNETT: I mean, it has to be because the dissertation defense being the final form of your PhD candidacy, where you explain-- defend your dissertation, simple as that. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: I don't hear much about this. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: But I know you were a key part of its development. FRED RASCOE: Yeah, for a while, I was in the service management area of this in my responsibilities. I'm not any longer. It's in public services now. But it is a different kind of space. It's not just open. You don't just walk in. You can't just instantly reserve it and walk in and go and defend your thesis. This is a very particular, dedicated space. MARLEE GIVENS: Sorry, I just got the funniest-- I got the funniest image of someone just-- they wake up one morning and they decide I'm going to defend my dissertation today and just walk-- FRED RASCOE: Just round up some people, like, hey, listen to this. CHARLIE BENNETT: I like the flip side of it, which is everyone keeps attacking me about my dissertation. I need a room. FRED RASCOE: Right. So it's a very particular space for a particular purpose. You do reserve it, but it's not like one of those in-- you have to reserve it weeks in advance. And you reserve it for quite a long time because you have to include-- I think we reserve it in four-hour blocks because you have to include not only the setup time and the presentation time but also time for your committee to talk about whether you did a good job or not. And it's also a different kind of space in the way-- you know we talked about how the graduate student community was designed back when we were designing these things with librarian input. This was also designed quite differently because this actually sprung from interviews with faculty. This actually came from one of those faculty workshops where librarians and design consultants brought in faculty and said, hey, what do you want to see in a library? And one of them-- we had these workshops where they put Post-it notes on the board and people wrote things and we moved them around the wall. One of the things that we captured was a defense presentation space, where we can capture and record dissertation defense presentations for posterity. That's just-- I still have the picture of the Post-it note that's written in a magic marker. And that was a spark that led to eventually having a dedicated space only for these kinds of presentations. CHARLIE BENNETT: So find this one really interesting because you said what they thought should be in the library-- FRED RASCOE: Faculty. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, which is a little bit-- it's not a misrepresentation because what you mean, but it was more of a faculty saying, we think graduate students need this kind of space, maybe you could have it there. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's a little bit outside of the library vibes of the graduate student community, which is, hey, we need a study space-- a library space that's just for us that we can't be bugged in. And so the dissertation defense room, it's more of an end of the college career kind of service that could be in, say, student success. It could be in the departments themselves. But this is like the last vestige of the, well, it's something students need, let's put it in the library kind of philosophy. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah, but I also kind of-- I mean, maybe I'm making this up, but I remember a conversation about how Georgia Tech is so interdisciplinary and there are students who get their PhD and half of their committee is from another school and so where do they have their defense, right? FRED RASCOE: And this space helps to solve that problem a little bit, not only because it's a, quote unquote, neutral space, you don't have to go to a particular department's meeting room, but there are technological capabilities to bring in remote committee members. So there's four monitors around the walls of this room. So you can have your slideshow up on one of these monitors, and you can see a committee member that's remoting in on another monitor. CHARLIE BENNETT: I think, very quickly, we should say, in case you're not familiar with what this is, what we're talking about, dissertation defense-- a PhD student, after they've written their dissertation, which is a book essentially of their research, they then present their findings and their book, in essence, to a committee of advisors, folks that they've chosen, but also folks who are important in the field at the school. And then they are questioned and they have to defend-- as you said, defend the dissertation. And that can happen from a distance. Our colleague Ameet Doshi defended his dissertation in the School of Public Policy after he got his job in Princeton. FRED RASCOE: Right, yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: So I don't know if he came down here or if he did it virtually, but there's a lot of variability to the essential, I'm presenting my dissertation to these professors to be approved. MARLEE GIVENS: We actually have another colleague who got his doctorate at Valdosta State University but defended his dissertation here. FRED RASCOE: OK, in the dissertation defense room. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: OK, yeah. So it is a very different kind of space, but another space dedicated especially for graduate students. We have lots of spaces for presentations in the library and on campus, but this is the only one that's dedicated to that specific function of graduate students that you just mentioned, Charlie. CHARLIE BENNETT: A piece of how they are going to school, not just how they support research and learning, but the end result of what they're trying to do. FRED RASCOE: So this is Lost in the Stacks. And we've been talking about spaces just for graduate students in the Georgia Tech Library as part of the Georgia Tech Library Guidebook. MARLEE GIVENS: File this set under Z679.Y45. [MUSIC PLAYING] [VOCALIZING] (SINGING) Bright and early every morning. [SHAKATAK, "NIGHT BIRDS"] FRED RASCOE: All right, Charlie really enjoyed that jazz fusion there. CHARLIE BENNETT: It was groovy and I liked it. "Night Birds" by Shakatak. And before that "Bright and Early" by Vikki Nelson. Those are songs about the different times of day that a graduate student can use the library. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today's episode of The Georgia Tech Library Guidebook was called "Graduate Students: There's a Place for Us in the Library." Before we wrap, I think I want to expand past the library spaces and let's ask around the studio. What's one thing that a new graduate student definitely needs to about the Georgia Tech campus? I'll start. I've been thinking about this, I don't really know except I had a discussion with a potential grad student recently and they did mention, so I hear it's kind of hot down here. And I said, oh, yeah-- FRED RASCOE: Like in Georgia? CHARLIE BENNETT: --it gets hot in the summer down here. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Sure. This person was from Indiana. FRED RASCOE: Oh. CHARLIE BENNETT: So I think my answer to this question is you got to the weather and you got to experience it a little bit, even if you have to maybe, I don't know, go to the center of the sun briefly during winter to understand what you might be getting into. How about you, Fred? FRED RASCOE: I'm going to say that you should that there are little nooks and crannies in every building on campus where you might be able to sit down, have a quiet moment to yourself, plug in your laptop, and do something. If you just walk around, walk into an unfamiliar building, there'll be some chairs somewhere and oftentimes there's not a lot of traffic. You can find some interesting nooks and crannies all over campus. CHARLIE BENNETT: Are you trying to dissuade people from using our graduate spaces at the library? FRED RASCOE: If the graduate student community is full, there are opportunities to explore the campus. Marlee, what do you think? MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, I'm thinking more practically. I think graduate students need to know where all the microwaves are-- FRED RASCOE: Yeah. MARLEE GIVENS: --because they are bringing their lunch from home. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: I-- we have a little extra time and so I want to ask another question. What do you wish you had known before you started grad school, Fred? FRED RASCOE: Oh, man, I wish that I had explored more opportunities to fund myself-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, wow. FRED RASCOE: --in graduate school. Towards the very end, I did get a job in one of the campus offices, but it just-- I was busy with my schoolwork and I'd been married recently and just the idea of exploring graduate funding-- I didn't know to look for it until later on. I thought, oh, wait, I can get jobs on campus. I can help fund myself and not just have student loans. CHARLIE BENNETT: How about you, Marlee? MARLEE GIVENS: I mean, I think I needed to more about software because I was having to-- I was having to make things, like PowerPoints, that I'd never really made before and-- FRED RASCOE: Right. MARLEE GIVENS: --I think I could have used a little bit-- if I had known that I could download this software for myself and use it at home-- I spent a lot of time going into campus and going into the computer lab. So it would have been nice to know what options I had for getting software, or getting training on software, or things like that. FRED RASCOE: And we are dating ourselves here a little. We all used computer labs in the library. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah, so this-- yeah, I finished my library program in the year 2000. It was like right after Google came on the scene. I mean, it was-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Man, remember when that was the future? MARLEE GIVENS: And, actually, PowerPoint was very new at that point, Charlie? CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I wish someone had said if you let it, it can consume your whole life. It can take all the time you can give it. So be sure to carve some out for yourself and others. And with that, let's roll the credits. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. CHARLIE BENNETT: Cody Turner is our absent and missed board engineer. I've just been doing what I can do. I made the dials into a smile like I hear for the EQ and I pushed everything up. MARLEE GIVENS: Legal counsel and a proposal for a new space in the library for mock trial were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. FRED RASCOE: I think Philip would appreciate that if we would carve out a space like that for him. Special thanks to our colleague Christina Tatum for providing some statistics of these spaces. Thanks to all the grad students that use the Georgia Tech Library. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. MARLEE GIVENS: Our web page is library.gatech.edu/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week we hope you will dig our archeology-themed episode. MARLEE GIVENS: Womp, womp. FRED RASCOE: Nice. CHARLIE BENNETT: I didn't write it, everybody. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. No, it was great CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred, made me say that. He's got a weapon to my head as we speak. I am sorry for the pun. FRED RASCOE: Time for our last song today. Graduate students at Georgia Tech or anywhere lead a hectic, busy life, always running to attend class, to teach labs, to undergraduates, appointments with advisors, deadlines, always running, running, running. Their life is as busy as a nanny in Manhattan. CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred, what are you doing? FRED RASCOE: Oh, you know, that's a nanny in Manhattan. That's a hectic job. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, there's just a lot of other jobs you could have used or-- think-- what-- FRED RASCOE: OK, well-- CHARLIE BENNETT: --what are you doing with this one? FRED RASCOE: --I admit I missed participating in the Olympics show that you all did a couple weeks ago, where you all played songs from 1996. So I wanted to belatedly get in on that action by playing a straight up 1996 banger called a "Nanny in Manhattan" by The Lilys right here on Lost in the Stacks. CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred, I'm with you and I support you. FRED RASCOE: Have a great weekend, everybody. [MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) Here I go out the--