It was a new ambience for the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center: eerie music, wolf howls, ghoulish costumes, giant cobwebs, a hallway-size haunted house, laughter mixed with the occasional frightful yelp.

The one flaw in the spookiness? All that natural light flooding in through the huge windows. “The sun is always shining in, it’s beautiful,” said Gabriel Chavarria, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior passing through the Career Center and Campus Ministry areas.

The Haunted Open House marked a new effort to help fully integrate the McShane Center into University life by enticing students to wander the full length of the second floor, discovering the cavernous hallways and hangout areas along the way—as well as all the offices there to serve them.

The second floor’s Halloween-season transformation highlighted a much larger, permanent transformation of student life brought about by the campus center’s construction, a pillar of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.

Enhancing the Entire Student Experience

Construction on the campus center has continued since it opened to students last year. Amid the second-floor Halloween hijinks on Oct. 17, crews were working on the first-floor Marketplace renovation that will produce a vastly better dining experience in another nine months or so.

Unfinished as it is, the McShane Center already feels like students’ home. “This is such a huge resource, and I think it’s a real asset to the University,” said Isabella Guariniello, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who found the haunted house to be “a really cool way to interact with the students and the faculty here.”

Commuter student Ryan Nole, a Gabelli School of Business junior, appreciates being able to hang out in the campus center between classes. He’s noticed that it’s brought new visibility to student clubs and organizations and provides a kind of social lubricant—“I know if I want to see someone, they’ll probably be here,” he said while checking out the open house. “It definitely fulfills its role as a community space.”

In fact, with so many students gravitating toward the new student lounge and communal spaces on the first floor, “we wanted another way for students to kind of say, ‘Hey, there’s more parts to the building, there’s a whole bunch of stuff up here,’” said Juan Carlos Matos, assistant vice president for student affairs for diversity and inclusion—dressed up for the occasion as “Dr. Acula.”

Students partook of Halloween candy—including the allergy-free kind—and activities like pumpkin painting. All of the second-floor offices got into the act, including Student Services, the Office for Student Involvement, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

‘Cathedral-Like’ Light

To be sure, the new campus center has already been boosting the work of second-floor offices including the Career Center, which gained a new suite equipped with 10 interview rooms, event space, and other amenities, including new capabilities to promote career-related events.

The new suite “has truly elevated our office University-wide,” said Annette McLaughlin, director of the Career Center. The 840 career counseling appointments held from July through September represent a 24 percent increase over the same period last year, she noted.

Campus Ministry and the Center for Community Engaged Learning, or CCEL, now share a roomy, inviting suite with floor-to-ceiling windows providing “cathedral-like” light, in the words of Campus Ministry administrator Carol Gibney. It offers plenty of room for students to study or hang out and unwind, making it more likely that they’ll learn about something they want to get involved in, said Amanda Caputo, FCRH ’23, a program manager with Global Outreach. “Students [have]made this their home, in a way,” she said.

By providing generous, dedicated space for CCEL’s meetings with its New York City partner organizations, the facility “demonstrates the University’s commitment to community engagement and experiential learning,” said the center’s executive director, Julie Gafney, Ph.D.

“It helps to show that this is what we mean when we say we’re a Catholic and Jesuit institution,” she said. “We mean that we create spaces that put our mission work first.”

Learn more about the McShane Campus Center renewal and opportunities to give in support of it.

This fall, she began a master’s degree program in higher education and student affairs at the New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Along with her coursework, she was matched with a graduate assistantship at Columbia University’s Office of Student Life. “Everybody in the Office for Student Involvement [at Fordham]helped me cultivate my own understanding of what student affairs means and find my passion,” Peay says.

What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
One of the things that really resonated with me were the Jesuit tenets of education and what it meant to be part of a Jesuit community. I had the opportunity to come with both of my parents. My mom and I are sitting next to each other listening to [former Fordham College at Lincoln Center dean]Father Grimes speak about what it meant to have a Jesuit education and what it meant to be involved at Fordham and what it meant to just generally be a student of New York City. He is a wonderful speaker and just really blew us both away. So it was kind of a combination, I guess, of Jesuit education, being in the city, knowing that [Fordham offers] a lot of different majors, knowing that I could be part of a small community, and really just some of the things that Father Grimes said about the power of the Fordham community at Lincoln Center, specifically.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you maybe would not have gotten elsewhere?
I think the biggest thing that I got out of Fordham that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else was just the breadth of mentorship network. I got the best of both worlds knowing and participating in academics and student involvement at both Lincoln Center and Rose Hill, and a lot of people were really invested in me as a student and invested in my academic career. I am still in touch with a lot of the administrators I worked with in the Office for Student Involvement. We chat about grad school and classes and all of these things. That’s one of the things that I think I cherish the most out of my Fordham experience: the number of people I met who genuinely care about students.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
I would probably say Zein Murib in political science. I had four classes with them [Murib]—American Social Movements, Interest Group Politics, Judicial Politics, and Politics of Sex and Sexuality in the United States—and they were all very, very interesting classes. I think I learned the most in those classes because of the ways the topics were so far-reaching and applicable to so many different things. They really gave me a deeper appreciation of living in New York.

Was there one particular moment when you realized you had a certain talent for student affairs work, and how did that feel?
It took me sitting back and thinking about the things that really did bring me joy and what I was really interested in and excited about at Fordham. Under the guidance of some of the people from the Office for Student Involvement, I started exploring the idea of getting a master’s in student affairs in higher education, because I realized that the things that I was most passionate about were giving back to the community and helping students find their place at Fordham and build their own community. It was something that I had struggled with freshman year, so I wanted to be a vehicle and vessel of knowledge for them at Fordham rather than just kind of move on.

What are you optimistic about?
I would say the thing that I’m most optimistic about is kind of personal; it’s more the possibilities of community building in the time of COVID, because we’re in a time where so many people are remote and so many people are digital, and not everybody is in the place that they feel most comfortable or the place that they call home. I’ve really found that, especially with my friends who are still juniors or seniors at Fordham or who have just graduated, we all are really looking for community and time to spend with each other. I think coming out of this time, we will all be a lot closer.

I would say I’m also optimistic about the state of New York City as a whole. I love being able to go outside and see people dressed up in their COVID getups, and they’re really taking it seriously, just remembering that we are part of a community as a city that is handling this all together and working together to make it better. I feel so much better and happier about being in New York than I did when I was in California, because you can feel that energy and feel the community support that is here.