Check out what staff and students have to say about our new building, "The Well"!
The new Student Life and Wellness Building that opened its doors in early 2022, has created a welcoming space for students that brings together three key centers to create a synergy that redefines wellness for the community.
“This project began with the need to build a Health and Wellness Center that is inviting and accessible,” said (former) Dean of the Undergraduate College Jennifer Walters. “The new building makes it possible for us to advance a concept of wellness that includes learning how to care for yourself and communities that are important to you.” Locating The Impact Center for Community, Equity, and Understanding and the Career & Civic Engagement Center with health and wellness services and programing creates a great opportunity for collaboration.
Visitors to the 21,000-square-foot building are first met with a glass enclosed entryway that leads to the main lobby and a calming “water wall” as they make their way to a central information desk that’s flanked by a common area of sofas and chairs on one side and offices on the other. Past the information desk is the elevator and wide, inviting stairs leading to the second-floor home of the Health and Wellness Center. The first floor is home to the Career & Civic Engagement Center and The Impact Center for Community, Equity, and Understanding.
Among the highlights of the new space for the Career & Civic Engagement Center are three dedicated interview/meeting rooms and a community room that will be outfitted with all the necessary technology for students to meet with employers and community partners and to engage with guests from around the world. The space also brings together the Center’s entire 16-person staff, which had previously been dispersed in four different locations across campus.
For The Impact Center, the new space means a much more central location on campus and brings a dramatic increase in common areas for student programming and support. The building is home to both a halal and kosher kitchen, a prayer room with a foot-washing station, and a multicultural living room.
Upstairs, the new Health Center has six new exam rooms, and the Counseling Center has 10 rooms for students to meet with counselors.
“The new center will include a wide variety of student support services including medical and counseling services, religious life, and our (former) Pensby Center for Community Development and Inclusion (renamed The Impact Center for Community, Equity, and Understanding in April 2023)," said President Kim Cassidy. "This co-location will enable a greater focus on the whole student and support for new synergies across departments."
The Student Life and Wellness building was made possible in part through the generous gifts made to the College during the Defy Expectation Campaign. To enhance student life, the College invested more than $103 million in buildings and infrastructure over the course of the campaign, with the campaign raising more than $25 million for new capital projects such as the Bryn Mawr College broke ground on a new Student Health and Wellness Center in early 2020 and opened the doors in January 2022. The Center consolidates services that were previously provided across different areas of the campus, thus giving students a centralized place to receive counseling and medical attention, career and civic engagement programming, and many other services that bolster the quality of a student's life.