“I felt like I wasn’t part of campus anymore,” Hochstein said of when she began to take nursing classes at MSU. “We would have classes in any building on campus.”

But Marquez and Hochstein watched as a dedication ceremony Friday welcomed a new home for nursing students in the Bott Building for Nursing Education and Research to campus. The ceremony marked the completion of a long-term project to bring members of the College of Nursing together in one central location.

The Timothy and Bernadette Marquez Foundation’s $7 million donation is just one of about 900 that made the Bott Building, named for Marquez’s parents and her maiden name, possible.
“I don’t remember us ever congregating,” Marquez said of the College of Nursing class of 1980. “That’s important no matter what degree you’re working for.”

Marquez and Hochstein could not contain their excitement about the student benefits, many university officials see even more potential for the Bott Building.

“The people in the this building will make some kind of discovery that will revolutionize the way health care is delivered,” President Lou Anna K. Simon said at the ceremony. “What we celebrate today is not just a building … but that possibility out in the future.”

As the first building on campus with geothermal energy for heating and cooling, MSU hopes the Bott Building will receive LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, certification from the U.S. Green Building Council soon, MSU Trustee Melanie Foster said. She added the building will help with the “critical shortage” of nurses in the country and help establish MSU as a leader in nursing research — something the building has already helped accomplish.

MSU received a $7.45 million construction grant from The National Institutes of Health “to expand the college’s research capacity,” which helped in the building’s completion, according to a university press release.

Perhaps the only downfall of the building is its location on Bogue Street just south of Service Road, Marquez said.

She said she wished the building was closer to the main parts of campus but nursing students have spent much of their time commuting to the Life Sciences Building, which is attached to the Bott Building, so distance should not be a large issue.

MSU Provost Kim Wilcox, who attended the dedication and ribbon-cutting of the three-story, 50,000-square-foot structure said the building will be an asset to both student studies as well
as collaboration initiatives.