While the Barsema Alumni and Visitors Center has been open a little more than four months, it has already seen many visitors pass through its doors.

The center is one of the first things visitors, including parents and prospective students, see when they reach the NIU campus.

“[The Barsema Alumni and Visitors Center] has really become a front door for the university in many ways,” said Mike Malone, vice president of University Advancement. “It makes a tremendous statement of the value we place on alumni and community. We don’t just want you to graduate and go away. We want [alumni] to come back and have a place to call [their] own.”

There are several event spaces available in the center that can be used for events such as weddings, baby showers and meetings.

“We have had community groups, faculty and alumni groups come in and use the facility,” said Joe Matty, director of the Barsema Alumni and Visitors Center.

Plans are in the works for the center to host future Homecoming events as well as events for alumni weekend.

The Student Alumni Association also has plans to use the facility to host such events as an etiquette dinner and a networking night, said Jason Brokaw, president of the Student Alumni Association.

“I would say the new center has helped us out a lot,” Brokaw said. “It has given us a home base. We now have an office and a space for meetings.”

The building has generated mostly positive feedback.

Alumni have had a positive response to the center, said Matty. They are happy to have somewhere to come back to and have somewhere to belong.

Donations continue to be received, many in the form of engraved bricks, and will continue to finance the building. The bricks are installed twice a year, once in the late fall and again in late spring, Malone said. All benches and trees were purchased before the building opened.

Students are starting to trickle in and check out the center, sometimes out of curiosity and other times because it has been required for class or because they are cutting through the building to avoid the harsh weather, Matty said.