Moving Day for Ave Maria University

Ave Maria University is almost ready to move to its permanent campus! For the past four years, the school has been located on a temporary campus in Naples, Florida, while the permanent university buildings and the town of Ave Maria were built further inland, near Immokalee. Now the new campus is ready for use, and AMU has set July 27 as its official move date.

Ave Maria has enjoyed plenty of success on its Naples campus, but the student body, the number of courses offered, and the number of clubs, organizations and teams grow each year. Everyone, from faculty to staff to students, is looking forward to having brand-new facilities and a lot more room to grow.

One department especially benefiting from increased space is the library. The AMU library's collection has reached nearly 200,000 books, but so far a majority of it has been stored in an off-campus cataloging center. The new library boasts three floors, plenty of study space, several offices and a beautiful chapel in addition to space for the full collection.

Ave Maria's Biology department is also profiting from the move. The University's main academic building on the new campus is the Science, Math and Technology (SMT) building, which will contain brand new, state-of-the-art equipment. In fact, the technology on Ave Maria's new campus won Realcomm's 2007 Digie Award for Best Use of Automation in Academia. This award puts Ave ahead of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and last year's winner, Carnegie Melon University.

While students will benefit from every improvement in the academic facilities, they will also be getting a new experience in residence life. The three new student dorms, already named Goretti, Siena and Xavier halls, have several different room set-ups to choose from and common areas on every floor. They have been designed to foster a greater sense of community in the dorms than the temporary halls could. There will also, of course, be a chapel in every hall.

Much of the faculty is also excited, not only about the new campus, but also the town. Some of the faculty has been living in villas on the temporary campus and will be moving into neighborhoods in the town of Ave Maria. Other faculty and staff that have previously lived off campus will also be moving into the town. They are all looking forward to the community, the K-12 school, the parks, sports fields, and various other opportunities that the town will have for their families.

With so much to look forward to, faculty, staff and summer students are all eager to make the move as smooth and quick as possible. From changing contact information on flyers to packing up in every department, members of the Ave Maria community are having their busiest summer yet.

To learn more about Ave Maria University's new home, please visit our website at www.naples.AveMaria.edu or call the Office of Admissions at 877-AVE-UNIV.

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