The multi-million dollar Brad D. Smith Center for Business and Innovation offers a new spot for students to be immersed in business practices.
The center began classes Jan. 8. The structure holds the Lewis College of Business, the Brad D. Smith School of Business and centers such as the iCenter.
“The new building is so modernized,” said Carson Bird, a junior majoring in sports business. “It makes me take school more serious.”
Until recently, business students called Corbly Hall their home.
“Corbly is older. It feels like I’m in high school,” Bird said.
The front of the facility is mostly composed of glass, offering students and faculty a view of Fourth Avenue.
Bird said that she could see The Frederick, where she used to live, from her third floor accounting classroom and that it brings a feeling of comfort.
“You see the whole city,” she said. “It incorporates Huntington into our school.”
“My biggest difference is that I have an office with windows versus a cubicle,” said Drew Stephenson, the program specialist. “It’s brighter. It’s more of a positive atmosphere.”
Stephenson also commented on how students use the new building as a social and study space more often than they did with Corbly Hall. There are many seating areas throughout the three floors to allow for collaboration among students.
“Back in Corbly,” he said, “it’s as soon as classes were over, they migrate up and out.”
“I think the biggest difference is probably not only the technology but the environment,” said Alexus Wood, sophomore accounting major.
She said the student lounge on the second floor as her favorite location in the new building.
“Even if there is a lot of people in there,” Wood said, “there’s still a place for you to go, especially where this is just the business building.”
The center also contains a stop-and-go market where people can grab a snack, a bottled drink or Starbucks coffee or tea. The area also has a microwave for people to use. However, while the building offers a new setting, parking has presented a challenge for students and faculty alike.
Stephenson said that the only place faculty and staff can park is behind the building, and if that is full, they have to park farther away or compete with students for street parking.
“It’s low-key not on campus. I don’t care what they say,” Bird said. “I have to pay to park every single day.”
The facility also does not have spots for students who use alternative forms of transportation, like bike racks.
The time to walk to the location was also a worry for students. Wood said she was worried about her commute from the rest of campus prior to the semester starting.
“You kind of felt like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be able to walk here,’ but it’s really a five minute walk from wherever on the edge,” she said.
The building’s design, which took inspiration from Silicon Valley, is full of technology including a stock ticker in the main lobby, which is a screen that tracks stock prices throughout the day.
“This is my first year kind of looking at that type of thing because, especially being in economics, it’ll spark my interest in that,” said Xavier Osborne, sophomore business major. “I think it’s pretty cool that we have that piece of technology.”
The classrooms range in size and style, with rooms being able to hold between 32 and 96 people.
“It’s just so much nicer to go to class. There’s screens everywhere,” Osborne said. “You can see what you’re working on instead of having to peek over people.”
In addition to the classroom spaces, there is also a 360 seat auditorium which can be divided into two spaces and has screens that drop from the ceiling. Named the Encova Auditorium, Dr. Avi Mukherjee, the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs as well as the former dean of the Lewis College of Business, described the space’s versatility in a 2021 University press release.
In the release, he said the auditorium serves as “an ideal venue for our speaker series, lectures and classes, business meetings, conferences, film screenings and workshops.”
