The five-story Nursing and Health Innovation II building sits north of the college’s first building and houses eight classrooms, a computer lab and an auditorium capable of seating 300 people, said Terry Olbrysh, the College of Nursing and Health Innovation’s spokesman.
“For the first time, we feel like we’re really in the current century,” Olbrysh said, adding later: “We now have a facility that kind of matches that we’re a larger college. Our mission is much broader than it used to be, and we always feel like we’re a world-class college. Now we feel like we have world-class facilities.”
With the college now containing four different programs and a research center, the school will have 3,000 students this semester, their largest enrollment ever, Olbrysh said.
“It’s a unique organization,” Olbrysh said. “Most nursing schools have nursing. They don’t have other health-type programs with them, but at ASU now, we’re the first college of nursing in the country that has other health related programs with us.”
While the nursing programs at the Polytechnic and West campuses will continue until all students who began their studies there finish, the school on the Downtown campus has picked up any students that would have gone there.
Though nursing students will still have classes in the Mercado buildings, ASU Vice President Debra Friedman said the building and its classrooms, which seat 30 students in the smallest rooms and up to 120 students in the largest rooms, arrived just in time to accommodate the rapidly growing Downtown campus.
“We’re still using … all of the classroom spaces that we were using last year, and we needed the new ones to accommodate the students,” Friedman said.
Junior nurse Ryann Wolkis said the new building will help bring ASU’s entire nursing program together.
“It’s nice because now we have the space, with the auditorium, to be able to hold events (in the Downtown campus) whereas we used to have to go all the way to Tempe,” Wolkis said. “I think it’ll be a better opportunity to transition from having three separate campuses to having it all at one central location.”
The new building, which is owned by the city of Phoenix and leased to ASU, will also be open to other Downtown campus students, Olbrysh said.
“While it has our name on it … everything that’s here, the classrooms and the auditorium, they’re shared resources for downtown,” Olbrysh said. “We’re the ones in it, but everyone uses it.”
Contact the reporter at salvador.rodriguez@asu.edu
