You can show off your creative juices and win a $100 gift certificate to the Barnes and Noble University bookstore if the name you enter for the Phase III housing project is chosen by the student body.
Charlie Sanders, Secretary Three for the Director of Residence Life, said the students will have until Oct. 21 to submit their names on the SHSU Web site.
“A panel will select five names and those five will be given to the students to vote on,” she said.
According to an e-mail from Dana Grant, Assistant Director of Business and Operations, the panel will consist of faculty, staff and students. The students will have the chance to vote on the five panel decisions on Oct. 27-28, and the winning name will be submitted to President Gaertner for approval.
The Phase III housing project will hold approximately 409 students, according to John McCroskey, Assistant Director for Facilities and Construction. The building will be a four story building with elevators.
McCroskey said the new construction will also add approximately 350 parking spaces.
“Every time I do a project I try to add parking wherever I can,” said McCroskey.
The building will contain some functions that the other housing facilities lack. McCroskey said there will be a C-Store that has necessities for students such as sandwiches, cookies and toiletries. There will be a large laundry room, study areas scattered throughout the building, community and learning room, a television and recreational room, small kitchen for small building events and some floors will have rooms for faculty members to tutor students.
The bedrooms are basically two-bedroom apartments with a common bath and a kitchenette with a small refrigerator and microwave included in the unit.
“The square footage of the dorms is approximately 525-530 square feet, which is not as big as Bearkat Village but bigger than Sam Houston Village,” said McCroskey.
McCroskey said the benefit to this housing project compared to the other two is that the three main rooms which are the two bedrooms and living room, will have windows facing the outside.
“In Sam Houston Village, there are no windows in the living rooms and in Bearkat Village, there is a small window that looks out to the corridor,” said McCroskey.
“Our objective is to have it completed by Fall of 2006,” he said. He said they have done some innovative structural techniques to insure the schedule continues as planned. “Basically we have done a lot of pre-fabrication construction on the basic foundation,” said McCroskey.
It seems that construction has been all over campus lately, so why another housing project?
“For one thing, the student population is growing 1,000 students a year, [and] another reason is I think the new dorms are helping to attract students to the campus,” said McCroskey.
This new dorm is replacing the Gintz family apartments and two other small houses. According to McCroskey, the two smaller dorms only housed 36 students each.
“That was a lot of real estate for just 72 students, so the idea was to build up and compact the site with more people,” he said.