Chancellor Visits Unique Class Where Students Build Tiny Houses
Texas A&M Students Create Housing for Homeless People, Mobile Medical Clinics for Border Towns
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — The students and staff at the Automated Fabrication & Design Lab at the RELLIS campus within the Texas A&M University System are taking the tiny house craze that is growing in popularity across the country and giving it an Aggie twist.
Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp spoke with Chris Paulk, director of the lab, about a program that provides housing for people in need and mobile medical clinics for regions in crisis.
See a video of Chancellor Sharp and Chris Paulk here: http://chancellor.tamus.edu/videos/
Each semester, about 160 Texas A&M University students embrace the university’s core value of selfless service and build tiny houses for homeless veterans and other people who need of shelter.
A few tiny houses built at RELLIS have been donated to a community in Austin for people who need a little help making a transition from the streets to a real home; and another one was created as a mobile medical clinic and has been deployed to colonias along the Texas-Mexico border.
“The students at the lab are learning valuable building and design skills, and those are important take-aways,” Chancellor Sharp said. “But more significantly, they also are enjoying the feeling of helping others.”
Under leadership and guidance of Paulk, a talented and visionary craftsman himself, construction science students are learning every aspect of building a house, including design, construction techniques and trouble shooting.
About The Texas A&M University System
The Texas A&M University System is one of the largest systems of higher education in the nation, with a budget of $4.55 billion. Through a statewide network of 11 universities and seven state agencies, the Texas A&M System educates more than 148,000 students and makes more than 22 million additional educational contacts through service and outreach programs each year. System-wide, research and development expenditures exceeded $972 million in FY 2016 and helped drive the state’s economy.
Contact: Laylan Copelin
Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications
(979) 458-6425
(512) 289-2782 cell
lcopelin@tamus.edu