After months, unstable ceilings at Seeley G. Mudd Building repaired Saturday

Some classes in the Seeley G. Mudd Building were recently canceled due to the ceiling’s instability following heavy rainstorms in Los Angeles. Repair work took place Saturday to replace ceiling tiles, Facilities Planning and Management wrote in a statement to the Daily Trojan, and the whole roof will be replaced this coming summer.

In one case, the ceiling fell in, resulting in visible holes in the ceiling and rubble in the trash cans placed underneath to collect the debris. The more general issue is ceiling’s leakage, especially when it rains.

“[I’m] a little insecure and nervous about the integrity of the roof,” said Connor Castro, a sophomore majoring in psychology. “I [just] got to walk around the trash cans that hold the water from the leaks, and there’s a whole bunch of them, especially on the second story around the labs … There’d be puddles on the floor sometimes when they don’t have a trash can.”

Dylan Overby, a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering, said the leaks in the ceilings have interfered with students going about their day-to-day lives.

“I’ve seen people who usually sit in the corner not be able to sit there,” Overby said.  “A lot of people are just scooted over. It doesn’t really affect me, because I don’t sit in that area.”

Overby said he’d noticed that the building’s ceilings had been an issue prior to the recent rainstorms that brought 6.23 inches of rain to downtown L.A. in the month of March, resulting in floods and power outages. 

“I first noticed [the leaky ceilings] last semester because we had a section of the classroom cut out because no one could sit there,” Overby said. “This semester, there has been a chair and there’s just been dripping water on it the entire semester.”

Castro, who took classes in the same room in SGM for three consecutive semesters, said that the ceiling has been leaking for around a year. He said ceilings caving in, though, is a relatively new issue.

A sophomore majoring in pharmacology and drug development, Colin Nguyen compared the state of Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences buildings — including SGM — to newer, more well-kept ones, such as Wallis Annenberg Hall.

“Since I’ve been a freshman here, I was so fascinated by how beautiful and how nice Annenberg and Marshall [buildings] were,” Nguyen said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, how come we don’t get this at SGM or at Kaprielian Hall in the basement?’”

Nguyen said he feels as though there is “always something wrong” with Dornsife buildings. There seems to constantly be construction occurring around them, he said, which he doesn’t see happening at other schools. Nguyen said he’s surprised that Dornsife supposedly “[doesn’t] get that much funding compared to Annenberg or Marshall” especially considering that Dornsife has the greatest undergraduate student population out of all the schools at USC.

“I almost never study in … any Dornsife building,” Nguyen said. “I normally study in Annenberg or Marshall because the facilities — and obviously the roofs and the infrastructure — are a lot nicer. I felt like there can be a lot more done to make the [Dornsife] buildings more hospitable, more comfortable, more conducive to studying, especially in places like SGM.” 

When the Daily Trojan inquired about Dornsife’s funding, the school said it “has the support of the university for the resources needed to serve our students, faculty and staff.” School-specific financial reports are not publicly accessible.