How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
After years of enduring communal bathrooms and unreliable heating, NYU Langone Medical Center students will finally get their wish — to leave Rubin Hall and move into a new dorm.
NYU Langone plans to demolish Rubin Hall, the school's current dorm that sits adjacent to the medical center, to build a neuroscience research facility after listening to student feedback. NYU Langone students will reside in University Court and 26th Street residence halls next year.
"When Dean Grossman first arrived to the Medical Center what we heard almost uniformly from our students was, 'Get us out of Rubin Hall,'" NYU Langone spokesperson Lisa Greiner said.
NYU Langone Student Council President Alon Mass said students were surprised by the change, but thrilled to move out of the 50-year-old building and into the newer, apartment-style dorms.
"We've been waiting for Rubin Hall to come down for years," Mass said. "It's basically been a very big impediment for recruiting students to NYU because no one wants to live in Rubin Hall."
Although the new dorms will not have the convenience of Rubin, which is located near the classroom facilities and library, the new housing choices will only be about four blocks away from these areas of campus.
While no plans to adapt the new buildings are finalized, Mass said the student council plans to install study areas, student lounges, printing facilities and possibly a gym into the buildings to compensate for the location change.
"The student council will have a lot of input regarding what changes should be made to better accommodate students," Mass said.
Although the student council was not involved in the decision to update the housing options, Mass is confident it will be involved in future decisions.
"I'm very happy that they're allowing us to be a part of the process because we're going to be the end users of this process," Mass said. "I think that our voices are definitely being heard."
Currently, all medical school students are guaranteed housing, and are assigned to a dorm through a lottery system based upon seniority. With the addition of the new facilities, the system will be adapted.
"The addition of the new buildings will provide us with the opportunity to move away from a lottery system and simplify the housing process," Greiner said.
NYU Langone plans to build a new neuroscience research facility in the place of Rubin. NYU Langone class of 2013 president Ilina Datkhaeva said changes to housing, while necessary, are not a priority.
"A new research building will certainly facilitate novel and essential biomedical research that will better everyone in the long run," Datkhaeva said. "The need for a new neuroscience building was the bigger impetus for this fast transition."
Mass said the new facility will improve the face of NYU Langone.
"Research and patient care should be the main focus of the medical center," Mass said. "It could theoretically help our ranking. We could be a leader in that field."
