UW-Madison will aggressively seek a new College of Engineering building as its top priority in the upcoming state budget cycle as growth stagnates and faculty compete with one another for coveted and increasingly limited lab space.
People are also reading…
Adrien Couet, from left, engineering physics associate professor, talks with Ph.D. student Cole Evered and Nate Eklof, instrumentation technologist, in his lab in the Engineering Research Building at UW-Madison.
Graduate student Celine Lu, front, and scientist Santhosh Kumar work on the HSX, or Helically Symmetric eXperiment stellarator, housed in Engineering Hall at UW-Madison.
Ph.D. student Ilhan Bok works in a room with biosafety cabinets in a lab in the Engineering Centers building at UW-Madison. The room with biosafety cabinets is completely full, and student researchers often wait in lines to use them.
Doctoral students — from left, Anna Daul, Jessica Park, Sinan Candan and Emily Blick — work in the lab in the Engineering Centers building at UW-Madison. The lab they're working in is a collaboration between professors studying different aspects of brain trauma and lacks the space required to bring in additional technology to push research further.
Ph.D. student Cole Evered works in a glovebox in a lab in the Engineering Centers building at UW-Madison. Evered studies metals degradation and molten salt with professor Adrien Couet.
Fave 5: Reporter Kimberly Wethal shares her favorite stories of 2022
In the weeks before I joined the Wisconsin State Journal in September, I was told this: Remember that a higher education institution is like their own city. It has its own character and struggles, defined by the students who learn there and the faculty who teach them.
I have seen this over and over again, and it was particularly clear when I visited UW-Platteville at Richland a week after the University of Wisconsin System ordered degree-fulfilling classes to cease because of low enrollment. During my visit, I found many of the devastated students to be emotionally invested in their campus community — and committed to saving it.
After budget cuts and consolidations, the campus' enrollment is down 90% from 2014, and UW-Platteville was ordered to shutter the campus.
With record enrollment contributing to the housing crunch, UW-Madison lured students out of dorms by offering incentives to live elsewhere.
Management companies are seeing some of their housing in prime areas sell out three to four weeks faster than previous years.
A new Early Learning Center that opened in 2021 at MATC's Truax campus doubled capacity, and a facility at the Goodman South campus could be next.
UW-Madison doctorate student Kirstan Gimse found the courage to go back to school a decade ago from a chemistry professor she would wait on.
