As director of campus planning at Northeastern University’s Boston campus, Cory Berg is managing the institutional master plan.
Every day as she walks into her office on Northeastern University’s Boston campus, Cory Berg ’13 puts herself in the shoes of students. As the director of campus planning, she’s always trying to understand how the school can create the best possible spaces for students to live and learn.
Take, for example, the Curry Student Center. Berg has spent the past year asking questions like: How can the school renovate the campus’ student center to better suit the needs of 18- to 21-year-olds? How can deferred maintenance be sped up to ensure the less glamorous aspects of the space work more efficiently? What programs can be added to the agenda so students want to spend their time in the center?
“It’s a lot of different perspectives and conversations,” Berg says.
These are all questions Berg is trying to answer through student interviews, talking to facilities employees, and working with student affairs staff members. Once she has answers, she’ll develop a plan to fully renovate the student center, a process that will take approximately five years to complete.
The first time Berg experienced this method of campus planning wasn’t in Boston — it was in Hamilton.
When the geography major was in her junior year, the University was undergoing its campus master plan with the firm Sasaki. She attended engagement events with the design firm, during which students talked about their favorite places on campus, and the firm held presentations about its vision for the future. Professor Bob McVaugh had mentioned urban planning as a possible career path for Berg, but at that point, she hadn’t decided on a trajectory.
Berg was enamored. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool. I didn’t know people did this work,’” she remembers. McVaugh suggested she attend a summer career discovery program with a focus on urban planning at Harvard University, and when Berg returned to the Hill for her senior year, she filled her schedule with urban geography courses.
Now, Berg is managing Northeastern’s institutional master plan. “It’s totally full circle,” she says. In her role, she’s also responsible for making sure the school’s physical campus meets the needs of the university community.
Berg’s post is housed within the university’s Planning, Real Estate, and Facilities group, which oversees Northeastern’s 14 campuses in the U.S., Canada, and England. Boston makes up the majority of her day-to-day work, focusing on the school’s 10-year institutional master plan.
“It’s really an opportunity, just like Sasaki did at Colgate, to take stock of our existing campus and understand how we’re going to grow in 10 years,” she says. Slated for release later this year, the plan will be approved by the city of Boston before implementation.
Aside from her work on the master plan, Berg liaises with university and city stakeholders to determine how best to use space in a campus growing beyond its initial footprint. For example, many Northeastern administrative staff members have continued working remotely in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, so Berg led the charge to have their office spaces turned into areas for students to use. Other recent jobs ticked off the list have been: dining hall renovations, updating residence hall lounges, and the building of a new science and engineering facility.
A typical day for Berg doesn’t involve sitting behind a desk — the most rewarding part of her work is understanding the needs of her community, then putting a plan into action.
“My job is basically just asking questions, which is awesome because I get to learn.”