Dear AU Community,  

We are excited to welcome you back for the fall 2023 semester! This summer, we’ve been hard at work with our vendor and campus partners on a number of projects to allow us to move forward with future phases of the Student Thriving Project. These projects include a new Panera in the Mary Graydon Center, a new Qdoba in the Tunnel, a brand-new location for our Campus Store in the Tunnel, and a completely renovated Starbucks and Subway. We also completely renovated Leonard Hall.  

To make these changes possible, last spring we moved the Eagle’s Nest across the Tunnel to a new home and asked for the community’s vote on new names for the Eagle’s Nest and East Campus Market. More than 1,700 community members voted and selected Eagle Express (former Eagle’s Nest) and East Campus Market (former East Campus Convenience Store).  

To welcome everyone back for the fall and celebrate the new and reinvigorated spaces, we are excited to invite the community to the Welcome Back Block Party and Taste of Home BBQ. These events are hosted in partnership with the Residence Hall Association (RHA) on Saturday, August 26 from 12 to 2 p.m. The festivities will start just before noon with a ribbon cutting ceremony to reopen the Tunnel and Leonard Hall with AUSG President Edwin Santos and RHA President Marcus McNeill.  

After the ribbon cutting, we invite the community to check out the new venues in the Tunnel, where we will table outside each venue with giveaways and fun prizes from our vendor partners, Chartwells, Pepsi, and Follett. To support this event, the Tunnel will be closed from about 11:30 a.m. to just after 2 p.m. After checking out the Tunnel, be sure to come to the Quad for the RHA Taste of Home event where RHA and AU Kitchen will host lawn games, BBQ eats, RHA Swag, a DJ, and Captain Cookie for everyone to enjoy.  

In the coming weeks, we will share more details about additional exciting improvements that we made this summer and plan to make in the coming year.  

Onward we go, together!  

Bronté Burleigh-Jones
Chief Financial Officer, Vice President, and Treasurer