Construction on campus

Students aren’t waking up to alarm clocks in the Indian River Tower resident hall. Instead, some unlucky residents wake up to the deafening echo of steel being driven into the ground by cranes, hammers knocking nails into wood and bulldozers plowing the way for more construction material.

I have one of those unlucky rooms that face the new resident hall construction project. The project is set to be complete over the summer.

It will provide 600 additional beds and the Algonquin resident hall, that currently holds about 200, will be converted into single suites. By the end of 2007, there will be 2400 students living on campus.

According to Housing and Residential Life Director Jill Eckardt, over 400 people were on the waiting list to get into the resident halls at the beginning of this fall semester.

The department has already had a complete makeover since 2002: Mohavi, Naskapi, Seminole and Timoqua have already been torn down. The oldest dormitory at FAU, Algonquin, will remain but will be converted into single suits. Indian River Towers opened in 2001 and Heritage Park Towers opened in 2004.