Space Policies / Assignments

Faculty Space

  • Tenure-track faculty, full-time teaching faculty, and full-time research faculty, get one office.
  • Tenure-track faculty with senior administrative duties retain their office in addition to occupying an office in the respective administration suite.
  • Emeritus faculty retain their office for one year. After one year, emeritus faculty will be asked to transition to a shared emeritus faculty office.
  • Part-time and adjunct faculty do not get an office.

Research Lab Space

  • Allocation of lab space is under the control of the department, represented by the Department Head, and not individual faculty. Individual faculty are custodians of the lab space currently allocated to them.
  • Faculty may be expected to share lab space and cooperate to ensure safe, secure, and efficient use of the shared lab space. This policy applies only to space and not equipment.
  • Similar to the department’s load balancing policy for faculty duties (which balances teaching load with research and service), the department will adopt a lab space balancing policy informed by the annual faculty activity report and annual review meeting with the Department Head.
  • The Department Head will work with each faculty member to ensure their long-term needs for lab space are met within the constraints of the whole department and the department’s future growth. Ultimately, final decisions are made by the Department Head based on the interests of the Department.

Post-doc Office Space

  • Post-doc office space is under the control of the department, represented by the Department Head, and not individual faculty.
  • Every effort will be made to allocate post-docs to a shared post-doc office. They may be placed within student offices until shared post-doc offices become available.

Visiting Faculty Office Space

  • Visitor office space is under the control of the department, represented by the Department Head, and not individual faculty.
  • Visiting faculty stay in shared visitor and post-doc offices.
  • An office must be identified before inviting a visitor because it is specified in their visa.

Student Desk Assignments

  • Student desks are under the control of the department, represented by the Department Head, and not individual faculty.
  • Students are limited to a maximum of one office space (e.g., cannot have offices in two or more buildings).
  • Funded students* will be provided office space if requested by the supervising faculty. There is a waitlist for allocating student office space when that building’s office space is full. There is a priority among students in the waitlist, indicated by the tiers below. The first tier has highest priority, followed by the second tier, and so on. Students in the same tier are ordered within that tier by when they entered the waitlist.
    • PHD research assistants
    • Fellows
    • PHD teaching assistants
    • MS research assistants
    • BS research assistants
      *Note: There is an understanding that funding comes and goes. Once a PHD student has been assigned space, we expect the student to retain that space despite short-term funding lapses.
  • Non-funded students under the direction of a faculty member may also request space. If a non-funded student currently has office space, they may lose that space at any time.
  • When a student moves off the waitlist to an office space, they get assigned whatever free space is available. The Department, represented by the Department Head, adopts a policy of “best-effort defragmentation” so that student groups (e.g., supervised by the same PI(s)) stay together, if wanted and needed by the students and faculty member. Therefore, students may need to move from one space to another, from time to time.
  • Student office space is among the most flexible and dynamic types of space. Owing to the specialized nature of lab space and its importance for recruiting new faculty, student office space may be reclaimed as lab space as the need arises. Ideally, the reclamation will be done over time as the impacted students are moved to alternate office space or graduate.

How to Request Space: All desk assignment requests for EB2 and MRC must be sent to ecehelp@ncsu.edu by one of our faculty. Office space is determined on a first-come, first-serve basis. Student must have been accepted to NC State and be far enough in the process to have a UnityID/email before we’ll accept the request (keeps “future” requests reasonable). If no space is available, your request will be added to a waiting list. Space is allocated by the Director of Information Technology & Operations with the approval of the Department Head.

The Department continues to attempt to consolidate our student desks into larger offices with exterior windows, but this effort will be occuring over multiple years as space becomes available for reassignment.