A renovation planned for the Van Hoesen building on campus will take around two years to complete.
“The department as whole is very excited about this project,” said Communications
Department Chair Dr. Paul van der Veur. “This year we are entering the design phase and currently figuring out where the walls go, where the electrical outlets are going, and allocating spaces for each of the elements that we require in the department.”
The new floor plan includes a student media common consisting of the radio station, newspaper, and the television station. If you are in one of these clubs now, you already know that they are all over the campus. These renovations are going to be able to centralize all these clubs to one location so there can be a lot more collaboration between them.
“We would like you guys to be able to collaborate much more than you
are now because media is converging. The goal is to get a greater overlap between what you are learning in the classrooms and what you are doing in the media labs”, said Dr. Van der Veur.
Not only will having a centralized location encourage more collaboration, but it will also increase the levels of interest in them on campus. Many of these clubs run on student participation. This new concept of collaboration could really “change the game” in terms of the various clubs working together.
“There is a lot of potential here,” says Dr. van der Veur. “With the paper going more online, there are a lot more possibilities for embedding audio and video right into the newspaper, or at least the electronic version of the newspaper.”