After months of launch rumours, McGill’s once-fabled, first-ever science student bar is here. On February 6, hundreds of students across faculties waited in the basement of the Burnside building for the chance to grab a drink with friends and classmates. A project of the Science Undergraduate Society (SUS), the bar operates on Fridays from 6 to 9 PM, every other week, in rooms 1B17 and 1B18. All McGill students are welcome to attend. “It’s all very exciting, to finally have this,” SUS Vice President External Hadrien Padilla, third- year Computer Science student and primary organizer of The Lab, said in an interview with the Daily.
A science student bar has been a work in progress for over four years. Prior students in SUS’s VP External position made efforts to organize a faculty bar, but logistical complications kept the idea from materializing. “The problem that we’ve always had is that we don’t have a good space,” Padilla told the Daily. “Arts has their basement, same for Engineering, and Management as well: they all have really large spaces with limited exits.” The Burnside basement had been the ideal location for a Science-faculty bar, but using the entire open space would have been a fire hazard. Last year, two adjacent Computer Taskforce rooms were reallocated to SUS, which inspired Padilla to present the idea to the SUS executive board.
“It wasn’t the most popular idea, using two study rooms of limited size in the basement of an academic building,” Padilla told the Daily. The SUS executive team began discussing The Lab over the summer, and had prepared to present the idea to the McGill administration by September. Getting the idea off the ground required discussions between SUS executives and McGill staff, including McGill’s Burnside building director, the Spaces Administrator, and administrators from the Science Faculty’s student affairs office and Security Services. After four months of emails, meetings, and negotiations, the idea was approved and planning for opening night began.
The Lab is run by SUS’s pre-existing after-hours committee – which exists year-to-year, planning after-hours events – including Padilla, directors Ella Rikley and Madison Brass, and five coordinators. There are currently 30 student bar staffers, as well as multiple staff photographers. Padilla stressed that organizing The Lab and preparing for opening night was a joint effort across SUS: “I’ve been lucky to get a lot of support from everyone who’s been willing to help wherever it’s needed,” he told the Daily. “It’s been a very collaborative process.”
The Lab’s doors opened only three and a half weeks after being confirmed for operation, a feat Padilla attributes to “an incredible, dedicated team.” An estimated 300 to 500 students came to the basement on opening night. Some waited for over two hours, and many who packed into the adjacent stairway reported line-cutting and rowdy crowds. The organizers, who had an hour to set up the room, did not realize how many people had congregated until the bar was ready to open. For future events, the committee plans to schedule staff to monitor the line during and before opening hours. “The capacity is limited, so we try to work the best we can,” Padilla said. “We definitely had at least twice our capacity show up, which was a little bit intimidating. It was a little scary, but things were good in the end.”
Organizing a student bar is a large undertaking, especially for McGill’s second-largest undergraduate faculty. “There was a lot to do, and very little time to do it. I think everyone really learned how to be overwhelmed and yet still take one thing at a time,” Padilla told the Daily. He added that the launch has also been a learning experience for those involved within the SUS executive committee, and working together to set up The Lab has been another instance of successful collaboration to serve the needs of the Science faculty. “Being thoughtful in our communication and including everyone is the biggest thing that we’ve learned, but I think that’s something that the SUS team is really good at.”
Ultimately, Padilla reported that opening night was a success: they opened, served drinks, and closed without any incidents or destruction to the basement. Beyond the primary goal of having fun, the team’s aim for the bar’s initial nights is “to show SUS, admin, and all the parties involved that this is something that can work.” Padilla described this semester as a “proof of concept,” a demonstration that the space can bring the faculty together safely without disruptions. The Lab’s biweekly schedule was designed for the committee to troubleshoot between events and learn from any setbacks or unexpected chaos, through their own observations and their anonymous feedback form. The team hopes for the schedule to shift to weekly in the upcoming Fall semester, once staffing and routine are solidified.
The Lab will be open five times this semester, including this Friday, February 20. The concept – drinking a warm, two- dollar beer out of a plastic cup in a crowded basement – is shared among McGill’s other student bars, yet The Lab was designed by and for McGill’s Science undergraduates as a place for the community to come together. “It’s a spot that you can go, as Science students, every other week or every week in the future, and know you’ll have friends there and people from your faculty that you can hang out with,” Padilla told the Daily. “I’ve heard from a lot of people that they’re super excited to finally have their own space, ad I hope it continues to be that.”