My husband and I took our daughter for a scheduled tour yesterday. I was very impressed. The campus has gone from 523 students, as it states on the website, to over 900. They had to turn some of the single dorms into doubles…which they were set up for anyway, they are quite spacious, because they had more kids than they anticipated. They do have 4 bedrooms, each room being it’s own room, but those are now for upperclassmen. The new housing will be done by this summer, and it is freshmen housing, which all of those will be like the traditional dorm rooms with 2 bedrooms on each side with a shared bathroom in the middle. As awesome as the building looks from the outside, it is even more amazing on the inside. It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. They now have 63 3-d printers, more than any other college in the nation, I was told. The dorms are right next to the Wellness Center, which has the dining area. There is a Barnes and Noble book store and a Starbucks.
My daughter just loved the small feel of the school. I think she would be much happier at a smaller school like this. I am not so worried about accreditation as some others are. I know it will happen. This is a state school, I just keep thinking there is no way the state would have put all of this money into this school, for it to not get it’s accreditation. It will happen. If Gulf Coast got theirs, this one surely will as well.
My husband, who is not so easy to impress, was impressed. Very much so. My daughter has already been accepted, but she is waiting to see if she is accepted to the other Florida schools. I think she is leaning towards this school though. It is less than an hour from home. She likes that she can come home on the weekends if she likes, and she is a bit nervous about being too far from home. We are only 20 minutes away from UCF, which is the other school that is a strong possibility, but there are so many things about the school that she doesn’t like, the size, the parking, which is terrible, and not being able to sign up for the classes that you need because they are instantly full 15 seconds after registration opens, hence the nickname, U can’t finish. My oldest daughter went to UCF for a year, hated it, transferred out to a smaller school. UCF is a great school, I don’t mean to bad mouth it, at all, it is just a complicated school to deal with.
I think anyone that saw this school a year ago would be very impressed with how far it has come in the year that it has been open.