In the 1980s, students at St. Mary's College of Maryland studied psychology in a building called Anne Arundel Hall. Refer to the map of the campus from 1982 which can be seen in Additional Content. Goodpaster Hall, where psychology students currently attend classes and conduct research, was not developed at the time. The first floor of Anne Arundel was mainly dedicated to physics labs, according to Hopkins (2018), while the main experimental psychology lab was located in the basement of Anne Arundel Hall. This laboratory was an eight foot by twenty two foot space, only large enough to house a small rat colony and basic pieces of equipment (Jordan, 2018). It was a crammed space but also served as a classroom for most of the day (Hopkins, 2018). If professors wanted to conduct labs, they would have to book the room, and move all the desks, chairs, and equipment, to be able to use the labs. This made it hard to do any kind of real observation work. Dr. Hopkins was promised new labs when he was hired, but renovations never happened until the mid 90s. The psychology faculty had to made due with what they had in the basement of Anne Arundel until Schafer was built, which meant that the physics, biology, and chemistry faculty left Anne Arundel and Kent; which gave more room to the psychology department (Hopkins, 2018). Dr. Williams remembered that the old Anne Arundel Hall had a human observation suite and a behavioral neuroscience laboratory, but they were tiny and cramped. She was very excited to move to Goodpastor Hall later in the early 2000s. She believes that the rest of the department is quite happy in their current building (Williams, 2018). In the old Anne Arundel Hall, there was a small room in the back that acted as Dr. Jordan's office and there was a small room in the front that was utilized for storage. Due to the lack of adequate space, Dr. Jordan mentioned that he would often times have to carry rats from the basement of Anne Arundel upstairs to his laboratory (Jordan, 2018). During the first few years, faculty would purchase equipment in order to slowly build and expand the lab.
When the psychology program was first created, Dr. Glidden was one of only 6 Professors. Each of them had their own specialized areas, but had to be ready to teach something they didn't feel quite as comfortable with (Glidden, 2018). It took about ten years for the lab to develop into a more realistic facility. Anne Arundel was remodeled in order to meet federal guidelines for studying animals. Several years later, the establishment of Goodpaster paved the path for state of the art equipment and facilities, allowing for further exploration of psychology (Jordan, 2018).
In 2007, the psychology department moved from the Anne Arundel building in historic St. Mary's to the newly refurbished Goodpaster Hall, closer to the residential buildings. The move occurred right before the department external review in 2007 (Platt, 2018). Since development of Goodpaster Hall, the psychology department has been able to attain more laboratory spaces such as the human observation lab, the perceptual lab, and labs for animal research (Platt, 2018; Finkelman, 2018; Glidden, 2018). Computer labs were also added for students to use during class and after class had ended (Platt, 2018). Since the establishment of Goodpaster, St. Mary's projects have been introduced, allowing for students to establish strong professional relationships with their professors. The development of the various lab facilities has allowed for further student/faculty research to be conducted (Finkelman, 2018).
Anne Arundel, as many students know it now, is in a different location than it was previously. Today's Anne Arundel building has recently been refurbished and redone (Finkelman, 2018).