By: Josh Wegman
While most students spend their illustrious four month vacations away from campus, the facilities planning and development team worked all summer to make improvements at the college.
One of the most prevalent changes to Algonquin is the addition of a Tim Hortons in A-building.
“There are so many places to get coffee on campus now, but it’s great. Very convenient,” said second-year paralegal student Brent Smith.
A total of 65 classrooms were made mobile friendly by adding power to the tables and adding projectors.
“The college intends to have every class mobile friendly moving forward,” said Lorenzo Bruno, manager of the facilities planning and development team.
Over $2.6 million was spent on this project. In retrospect, the college has a budget of about $7 million to spend on construction projects, academic projects and maintenance each year.
Another project over the summer was the renovation of the H-building kitchen. The walls were repainted, the ceiling tiles were changed and other minor beautification jobs were done according to Bruno.
“The kitchen looks good,” said second year culinary management student Cody Vanderscheer. “It was very well done.”
Not only was work done to improve Algonquin at the Woodroffe campus, but there was also construction ongoing in Perth and Pembroke.
The carpentry program at Pembroke found themselves out of room directly on campus so Bruno and his team had to renovate a lease facility off-campus to make it carpentry appropriate.
“The carpentry program requires large space and unfortunately there was no room on campus to accommodate it,” said Bruno.
Bruno and his team also made four classrooms mobile friendly at both Perth and Pembroke campuses.
“I think the college is really moving in the right direction with all these mobile classrooms,” said police foundations student at Pembroke campus Taylor Lanthier.
At Perth campus, walls are now filled with pictures of students engaged in college life.
“The murals really warm up the halls and make it feel like this is genuinely a student space,” said Deborah McConkey, a professor at Perth Campus.