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University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Beam Ceremony Tops New EIT Building

A construction crane hoisted the highest beam for UALR’s newest building Tuesday, April 7, topping out the superstructure of the 115,000-square-foot building that will house three departments in the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT) when completed in March 2010.

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During the week before the traditional building topping ceremony, the beam had been placed just east of the construction site to give students, staff, and faculty a chance to autograph a piece of UALR’s future before the girder was hoisted to the top of the $30 million building.

Two of the signatories who symbolize the promise and the progress of the college attended Tuesday’s ceremony:

  • Samantha McClenahan of Bismark, a senior at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Science and the Arts in Hot Springs with a 4.0 grade point average and very high standardized test scores, has accepted a scholarship offer to be an EIT major at UALR starting in the fall. She continues the trend of EIT’s attracting ASMSA students. A contingent of ASMSA graduates now attending UALR also attended the topping-off ceremony.
  • Melissa Reed, a 2006 systems engineering graduate with an emphasis in telecommunications engineering, completed an internship at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral during her time at UALR. Today, she is employed as a transport engineer with Windstream in Little Rock.

The topping-out ceremony came just months before the 10th anniversary of UALR’s promise to the Arkansas General Assembly to create a college dedicated to improving Arkansas’ stake in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century.

crowdThe college has more than doubled its student enrollment of declared majors and has garnered more than $33 million in research funding.

“UALR’s College of Engineering and Information Technology has delivered on our promise to strengthen economic development efforts in Arkansas with more than 800 graduates and a faculty dedicated to solving highly technical problems to keep Arkansas corporations globally competitive,” Chancellor Joel Anderson said when the building construction project commenced.