SUMTER, S.C. — The University of South Carolina (USC) Sumter campus has now opened a new science building after nearly 10 years of work.
USC Sumter Dean Michael Sonntag says when he first started at the university in 2014, upgrading the building, which at the time was 50 years old, was at the top of his priority list.
“We needed to get this thing looking good, being up to code, up to standards, and you know, we just couldn't recruit,” Sonntag detailed. “We started thinking about it almost immediately. And again, as legislators and other supporters in our community asked, you know, how they could be most helpful, that really got us thinking hard about okay, well, what would we want to do with the science building if we had the money, if we had the support?”
On Monday evening, the university hosted a ribbon-cutting to celebrate the new space’s opening.
“To have this thing finished or very, very near finished and to look as good as we believe it does is really one of the pinnacles of my career. I've been here 10 years,” Sonntag smiled. “It feels like we've been working on this building for that whole time. And it really pays off and it feels good.”
Sonntag says the entire project cost $10.875 million for construction and outfitting of the building. He says the entire cost was raised by donors and through funding from the state legislature.
“I think as far as I'm aware of that's one of the biggest amounts of money that we've raised at USC Sumter,” Sonntag explained.
Sonntag says the new space boasts top-notch technology, so students and professors could seamlessly transition to fully-online instruction. It has new prep rooms for professors to use, more accessible “student-friendly study space” and more modern aesthetic elements, like red modular seating in each laboratory.
Sonntag says the planning for the renovation began about a year later in 2015, and has been happening in phases ever since. The biggest part of the project was fixing the roof, Sonntag explains. Then, Sonntag says the school began construction on part of the building.
“Having to move out of the majority of the building, it really created some stress points. We just moved over into lecture halls and places where we normally don't have classes and the faculty and staff have just been outstanding,” Sonntag shared. “They’ve been very flexible. Very understanding, making it work, you know. And so everybody will be very glad to be back in their home space and kind of get back to normal and fix up some of the other spaces that we've been using.”
Another feature of the new building is a space for faculty to conduct research, which was an accommodation they did not previously have, Sonntag says.
“One of the things that we've done in this building now it's taking a space that used to be some office space and storage space and created a lab devoted to just faculty,” Sonntag said. “There won't be classes in it. Faculty will have the space to do the scholarship and research that they were doing, but it was difficult.”
The completion of this upgraded facility is coming at a time that Sonntag says is increasingly important.
“Science and mathematics and technology moves at such a rapid pace that if you don't keep up, then you’re teaching methodology and technology that's even five years old is probably behind the curve, certainly 10, certainly 50 as in our case,” Sonntag shared. “That was behind the times. Now that we have a nursing program on campus, and we've always emphasized math and science and engineering, this just puts them on the competitive edge by having this kind of facility.”