PROVIDENCE BUSINESS NEWS, JULY 21 - AUGUST 3
Engineering Building an RWU Recruiting Tool
BY JACQUELYN VOGHEL
When Luke Calabrese toured Roger Williams University as a prospective student, one of the engineering program’s draws didn’t yet exist. But it nevertheless made an impression.
Plans for that draw — a 27,325-square-foot building for RWU’s School of Engineering — were touted by his tour guide, Calabrese recalls, and served as an important influence in his college decision.
The building, which opened in 2020, “was definitely a highlight,” said Calabrese, who graduated in May with a concentration in mechanical engineering. “It was a focal point of some of our tours… that this building was going to be able to expand the engineering program.”
Another purpose for the space: Remaining competitive in attracting quality engineering students.
RWU’s engineering building was completed just months after the mammoth 190,000-square-foot, six-story Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering on the South Kingstown campus of the University of Rhode Island was finished. Still, it was plans for new cutting-edge facilities on the Roger Williams campus that made an impression on Calabrese.
“I looked at other universities in the area and looked at their engineering programs as well,” he said. But “I felt like with the new building and the staff at Roger Williams, I [thought] I would fit in with them, versus a larger university.”
Calabrese, who is about to take on an engineering position with a Connecticut aerospace manufacturer, says his early expectations played out as expected. RWU’s School of Engineering, Computing, and Construction Management’s Richard L. Bready Applied Learning Laboratories officially opened during his sophomore year and had a notable impact on his education and faculty research, he says.
“I even look back now and wonder how they were able to do everything they did in the old building that they didn’t have in the new building,” Calabrese said. “It gave me and advantage where I could see theories play out in lab equipment, and not just on a whiteboard.”
This shift to more-direct learning experiences was a cornerstone goal of the new building, says Robert Griffin, dean of the School of Engineering.
In fact, the building, the cost of which was not immediately available, contains no traditional classrooms, instead consisting entirely of labs and research space.
“The building has a slightly different purpose than many, but it’s something we’re really proud of – that it’s designed for that hands-on interaction,” Griffin said.
For instance, the new facilities give students “the ability to prototype a design as part of any of the engineering courses, to physically construct an object instead of just sketching it out or using a computerized design program to simulate it,” Griffin said. “You actually have the capability here of constructing a prototype.”
The new space has also allowed for greater collaboration between engineering, computer science and construction management programs, Griffin says.
The former School of Engineering building is still in use, though it’s evolving to serve more of a variety of interdisciplinary courses, Griffin says, such as forensics and justice studies.
While the new building was influential in Calabrese’s decision to attend Roger Williams, enrollment numbers so far haven’t reflected an overall increase in the school’s engineering program, Griffin says, but he expects that could change as the effects on enrollment brought about by COVID-19 fade. Enrollment for the engineering program stood at 549 for the 2022-2023 school year.
“We didn’t actually start hosting on-campus recruit events until the fall of 2021, so we didn’t really get to capitalize on the new building and show our new facilities until recently,” he said, “so I think it’s kind of premature to talk about what the impact on the enrollment will be.”
Going forward, Griffin hopes the new facilities will help to attract more students not just to the engineering program but to the construction management and computer science programs.
At the time of its proposal, the building wasn’t welcomed by all in the university community: In 2017, the Faculty Senate voted no confidence on the process for choosing the building’s location, and the university’s architecture department also cited the location in opposing the proposal, the university’s student newspaper, The Hawk’s Herald, reported in 2017. Numerous students and faculty members complained the building site was too close to the building that houses the College of Arts and Sciences.
The three-story building is located between the Feinstein School of Humanities, Arts and Education and Cummings School of Architecture buildings.
Griffin, who joined the university as the engineering school’s dean in 2021, says he hasn’t come across negativity toward the building.
And for those who use the building, as Calabrese did until recently, it’s hard to imagine completing major projects without it. His capstone project, which involved a machine that generates ocean-like waves to better study ocean behavior on the coastline, would have been hard to complete without the research space and the storage space for the equipment that the new building provided, Calabrese says.
“If we didn’t have the lab or the resources of this repurposed equipment, I don’t think we would have been able to create a product that’s currently being used to conduct research at Roger,” he said.