38 | CAMPUS SPOTLIGHT: CARDIFF BUSINESS SCHOOL | CAMPUS SERVICES
Trading places
University Business editor Rebecca Paddick took a trip to Cardiff Business School, to see its collaborative learning spaces and state-of-art trading room in action
Boosting the local economy, bolstering its research reputation, and training the future global business leaders, Cardiff Business School’s new Postgraduate Teaching Centre certainly has a lot to live up to. The £14.5 million building offi cially
opened in September 2014. Back then, Professor Colin Riordan, Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University, said that the new hub will not only help the business school at ract tomorrow’s best students, but it will also “help deliver Executive Education programmes for today’s business leaders, building long-term partnerships that bring signifi cant mutual benefi ts to the Business School and the University”. He also hopes
the centre will help drive the local economy – independent studies show Cardiff Business School contributes over £76m to the Welsh economy every year.
Get ing technical: the trading room has been equipped with:
57 Stone Ultra Small Form Factor PCs and 114 monitors to provide dual screens for students
Stone Ultra Small Form Factor PCs for the displays
Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters Eikon and TraderEx simulation
software to provide real-time trading and Global Investors portfolio management
Two screens and projectors for lecturers and teachers who want to demonstrate to students
Five Large Format Displays so that students can collaborate
CARDIFF’S GLOBAL COMMUNITY:
NATIONALITIES AMONGST FACULTY MEMBERS,
AMONGST STUDENTS AND
35 80
COUNTRIES REPRESENTED IN ITS ALUMNI COMMUNITY
120
Money well spent So what do you get for £14.5 million? Two major lecture theatres, which can host almost 400 students, an executive education suite for short and bespoke programmes for middle and senior managers, 12 teaching and seminar rooms – fl exible in design to open up into larger spaces, MBA and MSC lounge areas, a Postgraduate hub – a one- stop-shop for all postgraduate student enquiries and admin/course interactions, and the 60-seater ‘trading room’ for real- time trades in global stocks – more on the trading room later. The concourse area, lecture theatres,
teaching and common rooms and the executive education suite are all fi t ed with Stone Group hardware to enable collaboration on the University network.
Sustainability at its heart The building also boasts a range of ‘green’
architectural design features including a twin skin façade which acts as an acoustic screen and allows natural ventilation, photovoltaic panels which provide 10% of the energy, and green roof areas to aid biodiversity. The business school incorporates an
elliptical four-storey structure with terracot a rainscreen cladding to its façade and an at ached two-storey teaching wing with extensive curtain walling. The lecture theatre has been designed with bi-fold walls and folding partitions, so the building can also be used as a high-specifi cation conferencing venue.
The trade off But the jewel in the new building’s crown is without doubt its trading room.
Sponsored by the Welsh Government, OSTC and EUREX, the trading room provides students with the opportunity to gain practical skills required for life at the Stock Exchange. “We calculated that we needed two
large lecture theatres, several seminar rooms, and a much bigger trading room – the old trading room only had 16 seats, and we’ve got 60 seats in the new building,” explains Neil Davies, Technical Services Manager at Cardiff Business School.
He added: “This new facility gives us
a much bet er environment, and when you design a trading room it's all about the environment. Once you create a space with multiple screens and all these diff erent focal points of information and data, it gives the students an
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