by Page Forrest
Managing Editor
As Sewanee’s population continues to grow, the addition of new living spaces is necessary to keep a manageable infrastructure. Fortunately, a new dorm will be joining Sewanee’s residential ranks soon enough. The beginning of this semester saw the relocation of the Globe to the Pub, in order to house Print Services in the former Globe building. Van Ness, the one-story building behind McCrady that used to be the home of Print Services, will be demolished in order to make way for the new dorm. The yet-to-be named dorm is still in the Program Development stage. The committee consists of members of Residential Life and Physical Plant Services, but students will be added to the committee within the next few months, in order to better gather student input.
Current iterations of the design place the dorm at holding between 109 and 114 beds. The building will have the fairly common set-up of mostly doubles, with some singles. Construction will start after this semester ends, and will hopefully be completed by the summer of 2016. 
Becky Spurlock, Associate Dean of Students for Residential Life, reported that the Productive Development team learned quite a bit from the construction of Smith, Sewanee’s newest dorm. “I think we learn from every project we do, seeing which spaces hold up well, and which ones do not.” In addition to the more obvious aspects, such as room size and common room design, many smaller factors have to be considered in the design.
“I think students might be surprised, we spend a lot of time talking about where the housekeeping closets are, or community flow.” The new dorm could not be coming at a better time for Sewanee. Last semester, Sewanee was at a 96% occupancy rate. The admissions office also received a significant number of Early Action applicants, enough to where they had to push back notifying students of their decision to mid-February, as opposed to the regular late January date. While current juniors and seniors will not be able to enjoy the new dorm as students, if the project is completed on time, members of the class of 2017 will be able to live in the dorm their senior year.