In last month’s message, I wrote that as a preeminent engineering college and in our relentless pursuit of excellence, we should be thinking bigger and bolder in setting and implementing our strategic goals. A key element of how we do that as a college is to provide our faculty, researchers, and students the tools to make it happen, which includes state-of-the-art facilities.
In the last year, we have opened the renovated Everitt Hall as the home to the Department of Bioengineering and the Jump Simulation Center, we have broken ground on a 21st-century Mechanical Engineering Building, and are in the midst of major upgrades to the Hydrosystems Laboratory, a first phase for renovated space for Civil and Environmental Engineering. Soon we will begin major upgrades and improvements to Talbot Laboratory.
As we strive for excellence, these facilities projects help us meet a broader set of goals, one of which is maintaining our incredible reputation. To continue to attract the highest quality students and faculty, we have and are continuing to make investments in our facilities. We need the additional facilities to scale our excellence as we prepare to meet the ‘Illinois Commitment’, and also work hard to recruit an increasing diverse class with women students and from underrepresented backgrounds.
In order to meet growing demand for the number of quality student applications we are receiving (most notably in computer science) and to competitively attract and retain top-notch faculty, the College, led by my predecessor Andreas Cangellaris, strategically sought to address space issues in our facilities. Creatively looking for solutions generated the idea of what will become the Campus Instructional Facility (CIF), a project supported broadly at the campus level, but which will have major implications on our college. We will officially break ground on the 122,000-square feet building near the corner of Springfield Avenue and Wright Street on April 12 with the project expected to be completed by 2021.
On a practical scale, the CIF allows us to move some of our classrooms and other instructional spaces to one facility, opening up our buildings for more research and collaborative space, which is critical to our growth for excellence. At the same time, it gives students across campus state-of-art learning spaces, which on a large scale continues our commitment to transforming the way we educate future students.
Innovative education is at the heart of what we do. The CIF will be a space for supporting that education through pedagogy experiments, classroom technologies, and professional development for the next generation. It will give special emphasis to active-learning spaces, distance-learning environments, and cutting-edge innovative technology. It will support Illinois Engineering initiatives like Engineering City Scholars, the Center for Innovation in Teaching, and Learning (CITL), Professional Master’s Programs in Engineering (MEng), and the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3).
This is a great example of how we are aspiring to strategically upgrade our facilities to support a long-range vision. As I reflect on my time so far at Illinois, I note the comprehensive changes that have happened here. I can assure you that as we strive for greatness, we are constantly evaluating how to prepare and meet the expectations of the mid-21st century student. I look forward to working with each of you to imagine how we can continue to enhance our facilities to aggressively meet those expectations.
Rashid Bashir
Dean, College of Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign