College of Engineering planning to expand with a new building

For years, a gap has been growing between what skills the engineering industry needs from workers, and what skills education can provide. To bridge this gap, in 2022, the College of Engineering of University of Louisiana at Lafayette announced it was building a new state-of-the-art building. Groundbreaking is set to happen in the late spring or early summer.

Dr. Ahmed Khattab, the dean of the College of Engineering said, “The new building is not just a building but it’s part of the college’s vision for engineering education’s future.”

This building will be known as the Engineering Student Centered Collaborative Building. With emphasis on the “Collaborative” because currently the five main engineering departments: chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical, petroleum and engineering and technology management are rather isolated with collaboration being quite rare. 

“In real life engineers of all disciplines work together,” said Assistant Dean Corrine Dupuy, so one of the main goals of this new building is to foster collaboration between students from across the different engineering departments.

With a student centered approach to its design, collaboration will be built into the building. The third floor or the bridge will be the heart of the Engineering Center of Excellence, or ECoE for short. In the bridge, students will be able to meet with tutors and mentors or reserve rooms by using convenient wall-mounted tablets. Huddle rooms, seminar rooms and other spaces for collaboration will all be open and available to engineering students of any classification.

On the second floor is what is called the Student Collaborative Center, which will be a comfortably furnished space for students from across the college to work together in and potentially meet with alumni industry visitors. The Student Collaborative Center will also have offices for all major student engineering organizations such as the Louisiana Engineering Society, the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Women Engineers.

The first floor will house the main star of the show: a state of the art makerspace. 

“This is not a workshop or machine shop for students. No, this is a place for a community of learners and innovators where students can get together to learn, to innovate and to build their own projects that don’t have to be connected to a class or course,” said Dean Khattab.

All an engineering student will need is their UL Lafayette ID card and they will have full access to state-of-the-art equipment with which they can make their own prototypes. And besides the makerspace’s Director and Faculty Advisor it will be a completely student-run space.

But the building won’t be all work as every floor will be full of hangout spaces that “students can go to 24/7 to study, relax, play ping pong, whatever,” according to Dupuy. And with a cafe and abundant seating, the building will also be a place to relax, socialize and form connections across disciplines.

While the college of engineering is still waiting for a construction date, groundbreaking will happen this year either in late spring or early summer. Construction will last between 18 months and two years and the building will be located next to Madison and Rougeau Hall. Once it is built, Madison will be used mostly for research and teaching labs.