The Faculty of Medicine has now begun the move to the new faculty building at the end of Alfred Nobels Vej. While the workers put the finishing touches on the impressive building, the faculty’s staff members are packing up to work from home until their new ‘home’ is ready on 10 January 2023.

Online meetings preferred

Working from home is not an unknown quantity, but there is still a difference between everyone sitting in their home offices or a few doing so:

- We can feel that day-to-day life is back with in-person meetings. It's really nice in many ways. But for the next few months, our workday will be structured differently than everyone else's. Getting to in-person meetings when we’re on our own separately at our home addresses most of the time can be difficult. So it will be a great help for us if online meetings are an option, says Trine Bovbjerg, Head of Secretariat at the Faculty of Medicine.

A way station makes sense

But why the way station in home offices? This has not been an easy decision for the faculty management to make – because it affects many people, both students and staff. But according to Trine Bovbjerg, there are several good reasons to organize the process like this:

- It means a lot to the overall project that the existing leases can be terminated quickly, that the laboratories can be packed up and re-established before January, and that all the furniture and fixtures can be moved before the building is to be used. The alternative would have been an ongoing move-in over the spring, and that would not have been optimal.

With this plan, 10 January 2023 will be a special day for the faculty. More than 300 staff members will be moving in that day and unpacking boxes again.

Huge effort from many staff members

Well over 100 of the faculty’s staff members are in the process of handling the major task that a move like this is. Without their enormous efforts, reaching the goal would be unthinkable. For example, approximately 7,000 pieces of furniture and fixtures have been photographed and registered that will now have a new address.

Patience is a necessary virtue during the period when the move is taking place. This is happening when there will be teaching, research and exams at the same time as the move. In other words, business as usual. So Bente Gaarskjær, project manager for the move-in, has this hope:

- I hope that everyone will be aware that this period is different from the day-to-day life we know. If we show patience and flexibility, we’ll get there. The building will be a fantastic setting where we will have the opportunity to interact in multiple ways.