Campus Life

A new Grand Canyon University mail center opened Monday to meet the needs of a growing student population and its consumer habits of shopping online. Stephanie Salas said the center will process more than 1,500 packages every day. Inside the complex located across the bridge of the Little Canyon Trail in Building 44 is a huge warehouse filled with shelves that will be holding everything from shipped bicycles to lamps and refrigerators. After all, Salas said, it is a “click-and-shop generation.”

The usual lunchtime burger-and-fries fare is getting an upgrade at Canyon 49 Grill, which rolled out its new all-day menu. That means foodies can not only get their fill of their favorite lunchtime sandwich-driven items but also can try some of the Grill’s dinnertime offerings, such as an herbed chicken breast atop calabrese pesto (a type of broccoli), roasted caulilini (baby cauliflower) and goat cheese grits. The Grill also rolled out some new menu items, such as Country Nachos and the Sriracha Burger, which it introduced to about a dozen food bloggers on Tuesday evening as part of the first Food Blogger Night. It’s a reminder, Executive Chef Marcus Maggiore said, that “We want to make sure we have a place on campus where people can get a dining experience instead of just a meal.”

GCU and GCE volunteers fanned out to two homes in the neighborhood on Friday, digging into painting and landscaping projects and defying the July heat. Homeowner Mira Nava recalled the first time Habitat visited her home eight years ago to fix the roof. Her mother was battling cancer at the time and told Nava: “This is a reminder that God is still here.” Andrea Northup, Habitat for Humanity Faith Relations Manager, told Nava: “That’s what GCU lives by — faith.”

There will be a lot of laughs in Ethington Theatre this season, and that’s by design. The schedule, which begins Aug. 23 with “One Man, Two Guvnors,” is filled with classic comedies. “Lighthearted,” said Claude Pensis, Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Production, “but still the plays have messages. It’s always a matter of what does the director want to do, and then how does it fit into the program?”

Christopher Crawford and his Grand Canyon University landscape team perform magic every summer. Despite the summer heat, they water, trim and tend hundreds of plants and trees and acres of the grass to keep the campus looking like an oasis in the desert. Making the campus one of the nation’s best also requires careful selection of plants for shade — thank you, ash trees — and for color, such as lantana along the north end of GCU Stadium.

Six weeks from now, thousands of student volunteers for Move-In will arrive, followed shortly thereafter by many more of their peers. Yes, Welcome Week is fast approaching, and it once again promises to be a moving week at GCU.

Students are the top priority at GCU, of course, but that ideal is shown in many ways. One of them is web shows featuring students talking about their time at the University, and the latest one is “Living as Lopes,” which aims to give current and prospective students insights into the many activities on campus. “I feel like it’s a really cool opportunity because it shows our genuine lives, but it also shows that we’re all so different and unique and we all love such different things that it just shows from different perspectives what you can do, what the options are,” said Hailey-James Hines, one of several “Living as Lopes” cast members.

Three new apartment buildings on Grand Canyon University’s campus will add 1,800 beds for returning students when construction is completed later this summer. The new apartments add to a growing population of students living on campus, a four-fold increase since 2012.

It’s been a big couple of weeks for the GCU Recording Studio, which is seeing yet another success story. Jason Henshaw, an incoming Worship Arts senior, found out this weekend that his song, “Calabasas Rose,” was used on the end credits of a recent episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” Henshaw recorded the vocals for the rap song in the campus studio. Earlier this month, a former student, Joseph Allen, gained national attention on “America’s Got Talent.”

When his daughters Mackenzie and Madison headed to school for a new year, Kevin Scruggs knew that someday he would want to see those moments again. So he filmed his daughters on those first days of school, every year — and they’ve gone viral. The videos, put together in time-lapse montages, have been viewed by more than 100 million people. “You get tears. There is a lot wrapped up in that video,” said Scruggs of his latest video of younger daughter Madison, who is an incoming freshman at GCU (Mackenzie graduated from GCU in April). “As a dad, you get to see her life play out in a minute.”