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Students can expect to see some changes when they return to Quinnipiac’s campuses for the start of the school year in a few weeks.

The Quinnipiac University Facilities Department has been spending the summer working on and developing plans for both near and future renovations and additions to Quinnipiac’s campuses.

On April 16, President Judy Olian announced through a video on social media that renovations would be made to the Rocky Top Student Center on the York Hill campus beginning this summer.

“This summer we’ll make improvements to the Rocky Top Student Center adding furniture, a pool table, TVs and a bar area with extended food service,” Olian said.

If you go into the Rocky Top Student Center now, it doesn’t look like anything has changed just yet, but that’s because there have been many planning stages to this project.

“We’ve been working with an architectural firm to design the actual spaces,” Sal Filardi, vice president for facilities and capital planning, said. “We’ve met with students and Student Affairs and Res Life, kind of finalizing the program of how it would operate and what kind of programs they could run out of the space and we’re nearing the home stretch of the design.”

Filardi said that the design should be finalized next month. They are hoping to have a few things in place, including improvements to the audio visual design and new furniture. However, the main project will continue throughout the semester. They plan to separate off the space, giving the contractors an area to work.

“There’ll be some booth seating, some high top tables,” Filardi said. “There’ll be a little stage area potentially for performances. They discussed things like trivia night, so the stage could have a speaker up there calling trivia.. And some gaming tables, like pool tables and shuffleboard tables.”

There will be bar area, as well as pub style food, increasing the food options for students.

Filardi hopes to see the renovations completed by the beginning of second semester so a grand opening can be held.

As far as other projects that are currently in the works, some will be completed by the time students return in a few weeks.

The new advising suite has been installed in the College of Arts and Sciences, along with mobile offices in the parking lot located outside of the College of Arts and Sciences. Renovations are also being done in the Buckman Center and Tator Hall for additional lab space.

Renovations are also underway in the north wing of the Arnold Bernhard Library, expanding the Learning Commons. There will be six new offices for new staff members to provide academic support for students.

On the North Haven campus, workers are finishing up renovations to the cafeteria area, allowing for more social space and comfortable seating.

A big project that is in the planning stages is a new health and wellness center.

“Our candidates schedule right now is to finish up some of the concept planning early in the semester, and go into designing and hopefully be able to begin construction in the summer and build through the following summer,” Filardi said. “So it would open in September or August of 2021.”

The location has not been determined yet, but Filardi said that it should be within the next couple of months.

“Next month we start some master planning for the future,” Filardi said.

Stay with Q30 for more updates regarding new renovations across the Quinnipiac campuses.