By Lily Fay
Imagine yourself as a student who chose to live in a single dorm room. You like having your own space, you value privacy, and you find it calming to be able to control what happens in your environment.
Now, imagine you’re that same student, and the university moves another student into your room to live with you. How would you feel?
A similar situation happened between two of Susquehanna University’s support services, Residence Life and the Violence Intervention and Prevention (VIP) Center.
In the spring of 2025, the Degenstein Campus Center underwent severe renovations. Its major projects included an update to Evert Dining Hall, an expansion of Mellon Lounge and Starbucks, a new grand entrance, renovations to the Benjamin Apple meeting rooms and a new 380-person event space.
To support these renovations, support services, like Residence Life, were forced to move out as their spaces became part of the construction zone. In May 2025, their office moved from the lower level of the Degenstein Campus Center to the VIP Center, located in the Blough-Weis Library.
According to Residence Life Director Katie Grooms, “Originally, we thought we would only be out of our office for a few months, and it ended up being almost 15 months.”
Roughly, between May 2025 and July 2026, Residence Life and the VIP Center shared a workroom, causing complications with space, access to items and business hours.
Both support services reflect on the experience with gratitude, even though each director agreed that sharing the VIP Center was a big adjustment.
Grooms says, “Residence Life is grateful to the staffs of both the Library and the VIP Center for being such gracious hosts and to Facilities Management for their support of our moves on both ends of this adventure.”
Wynn Phillips, director of the VIP Center, states how it “allowed me to build so much more of a strong relationship, rapport, and appreciation with and for our Res Life professional team.”
During their time together, both support services had to come up with tactics to overcome the difficulty of space. Issues such as privacy posed a main problem for both teams sharing the area, especially with the VIP Center’s need to host individual meetings with students.
Grooms says Residence Life found it easier to occupy the rooms and offices located in the VIP Center during the summer. Since fewer students would filter into the library during the summer months, both support services were more comfortable with making do with the minimal spaces that they had.
However, since the VIP Center had its specific objectives during the academic year, Residence Life found it hard to get work done once students came back on campus.
Since both services had been under the impression that their time together would be temporary, Residence Life had not brought all their items with them into the library. They faced difficulty with a lack of materials and whether they should replace what they were missing.
Grooms states that luckily they could use the VIP Center conference room to hold the materials they transferred over. This allowed Residence Life to have a designated space for the RAs to access their on-call materials.
The library also worked with the Residence Life staff to allow them to use its study rooms on the 2nd floor for one-on-one student meetings and other residential conferences during the academic year. This gave Residence Life the privacy that they needed despite not having their own offices at hand.
Phillips agrees that finding enough spaces that would allow for both support services to get their jobs done was one of the biggest challenges of combining locations.
However, she states, “There are so many human ways, outside work checklists, that we all had the opportunity to offer each other an ear, a shoulder to cry on, grace or a moment of levity that, if we had not shared that same space, would not have had an arena to exist.”
During the support services’ time together, another challenge was the limited working hours. The library at Susquehanna University holds open hours that differ from what Residence Life had experienced while located in the Degenstein Campus Center. So, if the VIP Center’s hours were shortened in response to when the library closed, so were Residence Life’s. This lack of building availability caused constraints on student accessibility as well as the RAs’ access to their materials.
Fortunately, over the course of more than a year, Residence Life and the VIP Center were able to provide Susquehanna University students with an idea about what each support service had to offer.
Since they were both in the same space, a student looking for help about where to live the following year might have stumbled upon the information that the VIP Center had to offer, and vice versa.
This school year, however, Residence Life is back in the lower level of the Degenstein Campus Center. Due to the construction, the staff was reintroduced to their new space quickly. Getting things ready, such as RA training and move-in key preparation, was essential to start the 2026-2027 school year off right.
In their renovated space, Residence Life created an area in the office where students can come in and sit, allowing for further engagement aside from typical residence life meetings. Additionally, a TV was mounted to display digital flyers and departmental information, helping students explore the new and improved location.
For the VIP Center, Wynn says, “The biggest benefit was giving VIP a refresh and reset to our space. It felt like the move-out gave us time to think of our common room, Wellness room, and study rooms as fresh canvases.”
Having to share a space that was designated to them was no doubt a difficult adjustment for the VIP Center. Now that Residence Life is back in their own space, the VIP Center is free to adjust their rooms how they would like.
There is no doubt that sharing a space with another party is challenging, regardless of whether you are a support service or college student. However, through these shared experiences, it is important to recognize not only the inevitable challenges that arise, but also the opportunities for growth and the strength that comes from learning to coexist.