The Old Line State's flagship university is now home to its first WeWork location, as the coworking giant tests out a campus concept it hopes to bring to more colleges around the country.
WeWork celebrated the grand opening Thursday evening of its University of Maryland location, an 18K SF coworking space on the edge of the College Park campus. For its first location on a college campus, WeWork differentiated the space in several ways from its typical offering, and it is already filling up quickly.
Members began moving into the space in December, and more than half of the private offices are already occupied, WeWork Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Director of Business Operations Lex Miller said.
To meet the type of demand it expects from a college campus location, the space is evenly split between individual hot desks and private offices, which usually comprise a larger share of the WeWork's spaces.
The private offices it does have are smaller than those in a standard WeWork. The largest office at WeWork UMD includes 16 desks. WeWork Metropolitan Square, its largest D.C. space, has individual offices with over 200 desks.
WeWork has also forgone an element that is a cultural draw at most of its other locations: alcohol.
