Tuesday November 6, 2018
The Student Voice of California State University, Fullerton
Volume 104 Issue 30
Construction takes over campus Cart theft is treated as felony
The renovation project is expected to be completed by Aug. 2019. HOSAM ELATTAR News Editor
Construction is currently underway in the central Quad area and is expected to cost a little less than $8 million, according to Danny Kim, vice president of administration and finance at Cal State Fullerton. The project was launched in order to address fire lane compliance issues caused by the library renovations this past summer, Kim said. Around $4 million comes from the library renovations budget and around $3.5 million will come from the capital improvement fund, which provides money for campus improvement projects. “We hired an architect to help us develop a plan on how we can address the entire Quad area about three years ago,” Kim said. “The price on that project came to roughly $11 million and at the time we did not have the funds to move forward with the project so we didn’t proceed with it.” The improvements made to the fourth, fifth and sixth floors of Pollak Library have converted the building to a high-rise. Fire trucks are required fire-lane access to high-rise buildings for larger ladder trucks. “Our goal is to complete the construction and open those floors by Aug. 2019,” Kim said. “Without the fire lanes we will not be able to open the buildings. That’s what instigated this
Last month’s theft of an athletics department cart resulted in three arrests. SOPHIA ACEVEDO Asst. Opinion Editor
JOSHUA ARIEF HALIM / DAILY TITAN
Construction will address fire lane compliance issues and create a promenade walkway.
project initially.” The construction has interrupted student life on campus, said Tony Pang, interim director for the office of Student Life and Leadership. “The central Quad is a centralized location for a lot of programming. It has offset quite a
bit but our hope is that after the renovations are complete there will be a lot more opportunities to host programming,” Pang said. Last year, the space was reserved 93 times for programming space. Forty-four percent of the reservations were made by
student organizations, according to the 2017-2018 Central Quad Usage Report conducted by Student Life and Leadership. Construction has interfered with 36 reservations set for this academic year, Pang said. SEE QUAD
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A joyride on a campus golf cart left unattended may be a crossing thought amongst students’ minds but several significant consequences would follow afterward, said Capt. Scot Willey of the University Police department. On Oct. 5, a golf cart from the athletics department was stolen by a group of Cal State Fullerton students, and later retrieved by the University Police. The golf cart was worth around $12,000. The cart was found and three arrests were made. University Police officers treat cart thefts as felonies, not as misdemeanors, Willey said. A misdemeanor would mean the person who stole the cart would possibly get a citation for their crime. A felony would result in harsher repercussions with the person being handcuffed and booked into jail. “It’s not something that we deal with very often. Maybe once a year, we get reported that a cart has been moved without somebody’s permission,” Willey said. “It’s not often that we catch somebody in a cart that has stolen it. That is very rare.” SEE CRIME
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Mia Gallo earns scholarship Pumpkin Launch takes off CSUF engineers competed in the 11th annual Pumpkin Launch. BENJAMIN BURKHARDT Staff Writer
NATHAN NGUYEN Asst. News Editor
Mia Gallo appeared in 11 games for the Titans last season, averaging 2.6 minutes per game.
CSUF women’s basketball rewarded the senior walkon in her final season. SAMMY JONES Staff Writer
Surrounded by her teammates in the locker room after a practice over the summer, Mia Gallo, a forward for Cal State Fullerton women’s basketball, was presented with a letter.
While reading the letter aloud to her teammates and coaches, Gallo found out she received a full athletic scholarship for her final year at CSUF. “It was not something that I expected at all. We never really talked about it. Coach kind of asked me for my student ID to set up the financial part of it, but it was totally out of the blue,” Gallo said. In the last two years, Gallo has been a walk-on for the Titans.
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As a San Diego native, she played high school basketball at Cathedral Catholic High School. An injury during her senior season slowed down her recruiting process and limited the opportunities she had at the collegiate level. “I tore my ACL going into my senior year and that kind of messed some things up. Then I came here just as a student and walked-on,” Gallo said. The walk-on process wasn’t
COURTESY OF MATT BROWN
easy for Gallo though. With no available spots on the roster her freshman year, Gallo took the year as an opportunity to work on her game. “I pestered the coach like crazy. I was told my freshman year that there weren’t any spots and then I just took that year to get better and try to develop. I came back the next year and made it,” Gallo said. SEE EFFORT 8
October may be over, but hundreds of people arrived at Cal State Fullerton’s Intramural Fields on Saturday at the 11th annual Pumpkin Launch to witness a variety of catapults, trebuchets and pumpkin launchers put to the test. The event was jointly hosted by CSUF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, and the Discovery Cube center. Keith Brush, director of education at the Discovery Cube’s science center, said the event was used to show participants how exciting science and engineering is, and provided an opportunity for young kids to get on to a college campus to see engineering in action. Aside from pumpkin launching, activities such as sword fighting, archery, Alka-Seltzer rockets and food trucks rounded out the field. A total of 12 teams participated in the event with five of them hailing from CSUF. Santa Ana College’s Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, California Baptist University, Sunny Hills High School, Alpine Middle School and three other independent teams filled out the rest of the roster. SEE LAUNCH
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