On-campus intensive care unit in the works for Humane Society

The semester is coming to a close and that means tests, presentations and large projects are in full swing. The construction management students at Southeast Missouri State University are no exception and are almost done with their building project. This year the students taking CM 143 are building an intensive care unit for the Humane Society of Southeast Missouri.

Dr. John Dudley is the professor for the class building the unit.

"They're building a house from start to finish, I mean every aspect of it," Dudley said. "All of this started as boards on the ground and they've done it all this semester."

The only thing the building does not include is heating and cooling, because the size does not permit having a ventilation system. Right now, the ICU is set to be finished and delivered to the Humane Society around the second week of February.

Dudley said most of the students in CM 143 will be together in the spring for the next class of the construction management major and they will finish up the building in that class.

"What's really good about this is we actually have a customer that we're building for, instead of just building a building and then selling it," Dudley said. "The nice thing about building for a customer is it brings a real world element into the classroom. We have her coming in periodically and saying, 'Oh well, this is nice,' or 'I would like if we could do this.' We can't get much more real world without getting out in the real world."

Construction management students enrolled in CM 134 are building an intensive care unit for the Humane Society of Southeast Missouri.Photo by Malana Bradford

The woman who has been checking up on the building's progress is Holly Godwin who works at the Humane Society. Dudley said Godwin saw a building the class had made a previous year on Facebook and then reached out to see if a similar building could be made for the Humane Society as an ICU.

"This building will be right up next to [the Humane Society]," Dudley said. "They're excited about it and, as far as the intensive care unit, I looked at what they had and it's very small. But talking to Holly, she said having sick animals in the same building as healthy animals has always created a problem, so this way they'll have a building that's separate for the sick animals so they're not spreading diseases to the healthy ones."

Garrison West, a construction management major working on this project, said, "I enjoy doing it because it's for a good cause, the Humane Society. So I feel good knowing that and also it's a part of my class so learning how to build it is beneficial."

Dudley said most construction management classes are very hands on.

"They could teach us from a book on how to build a house," West said. "But until you're actually out there, hands on and doing stuff, you don't get the real experience."

"It's a great project, I really enjoy it. It can be a little bit stressful trying to manage it," Dudley said. "But as many students will say -- I know I did in college classes -- is, 'How am I going to use this in the real world?' The really fun thing about this class is that nobody can say that to me because everything I talk about in lecture, we immediately go downstairs and I say, 'Hey, remember what I was just talking about? This is what we're doing.' It's great, it really is."