Improving infrastructure

The performance of any research university at a national level strongly depends on two major factors, the facility in terms of the resources it provides to its researchers, and the healthy and comfortable lifestyle it creates for its students.  With a fast growing student community, I believe Texas Tech has to focus on a few infrastructural and managerial issues both in general and from an academic perspective. 

A major infrastructural issue concerning students is the availability of parking space.  All the major parking spaces are fully occupied and have a long wait time if applied for.  Since not all the places in the city are connected to the campus by bus routes, there is a heavy reliance on private transportation for commuting.  This combined with unavailability of parking spaces makes it extremely inconvenient for the students.   Added to this inconvenience is the parking restrictions imposed when Texas Tech hosts a football or baseball game, when neither students nor faculty are allowed to park anywhere near the campus.  Expanding the parking spaces and improving parking logistics during busy days would go a long way in improving the situation.

The second major infrastructural issue to focus on is the campus housing facilities.  Compared to a lot of other universities in the nation, Texas Tech campus housing facilities are underdeveloped, without sufficient undergraduate dorms and with inadequate graduate student housing facility.  Providing cheap housing to students would improve the standard of living and also, to a significant level, reduce the parking space problem mentioned previously.  Texas Tech having one of the largest campuses, with almost no space constraint, the solution to this issue is not a challenging one.

Shifting the attention to infrastructural improvements from an academic perspective, I believe the computational resources in the campus need to be made better.  Computational resources are the heart of many of the research projects carried out at the Engineering and Science departments.  Though the campus holds a decently large computing cluster to cater to the needs of its research community, the maintenance of the cluster has to be significantly improved.  Frequent uninformed cluster downtimes result in serious loss of research productivity and also lead to a lot of rework due to data loss.  Developing more automated systems to monitor the cluster’s health and initiating safety shutdowns in case of mechanical failures should be seriously considered.

In spite of being a nice and comfortable place to spend one’s student life, Texas Tech needs some more additions to its infrastructure.  These minor changes will influence both the personal and academic lives of students there by raising the performance of the university as a whole.  (Ashwin)