The following article appeared in the Pacific Daily News:
The University of Guam’s newly constructed $8 million School of Engineering marked completion on Friday and will soon be the training ground for homegrown engineers now in high demand.
Along with the new 16,000-square-foot building, UOG will launch a degree program in construction management this Fall and electrical engineering by next year, engineering school Dean Hiroshan Hettiarachchi said.
UOG leadership and public officials, armed with scissors, cut the ribbon on the engineering building during a ceremony Friday morning.
“This building with its modern classrooms, labs and spaces, is more than just a structure,” UOG President Anita Borja Enriquez said during the ceremony. “It is a promise kept, a commitment fulfilled, to future generations of engineers who build the roads, water systems, infrastructure, buildings and innovations our overall region needs.”
Completion of the building comes six years after UOG approved its first full four-year civil engineering degree program in 2019, and two years after that program was accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
To date, some 62 students have graduated from the civil engineering program, according to Enriquez, adding that graduates are being snatched up by employers.
She said out of the 30 students who graduated in May of 2025, every single one got three job offers a full semester before they graduated.
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero, speaking during the ceremony, said the building showed that UOG has the “the caliber, the competency, the know-how, the vision, the creativity, the innovation, to make this school of engineering happen.”
The governor thanked former UOG President Robert Underwood, who first laid out a vision for the engineering school back in 2009.
Hettiarachchi stressed that the new building will be home to the only engineering school in the entire western Pacific, training engineers who serve the population of just over 1 million people in the area.
“That’s our limit. We can go beyond the island. We can have a whole region to conquer,” Hettiarachchi said.
Construction started in December 2023 on the $8 million building. It is outfitted with classrooms, a computer lab, and three laboratory areas for students to learn about hydraulics, materials, soils and more.
Construction was financed with a mix of grant funding from the Office of the Governor and the U.S Department of Agriculture, as well as the UOG Endowment Foundation.
Furniture, fixtures and equipment for the school, still being purchased and installed, could cost around another $2 million, according to Hettiarachchi.
He said engineering students and faculty, now working out of office spaces and repurposed faculty housing around the UOG campus, will start classes in the building by around March.
Nearly 300 students enrolled
Completion is a welcome development, with close to 300 students, about one-in-ten UOG students, now enrolled in the School of Engineering, according to the dean.
Engineering school alumni Anna Mallari, a 2025 graduate, said students had almost all of their classes in the same couple of rooms years prior.
“I am proud of the students who came before this building, and I’m excited for the students who now get to learn inside it,” said Mallari, now a structural designer for SSFM International. “This building will be home to the engineers who will shape the future of our island.”
Hettiarachchi said the school could start pumping out the first construction management and electrical engineering graduates in about four years, though things will “fluctuate” with the programs just launching.
“The building itself is an icon,” he said, which will hopefully attract more students.
Civil engineering and construction management degree programs were the first to launch with “construction sites everywhere,” Hettiarachchi said.
There was a “huge” number of new professionals needed in those areas each year.
Electrical engineering will follow in 2027, to keep up with demand that is high but less obvious.
“There’s one thing you do every day. You go home and turn the light switch on and it’s there. We take it for granted,” the engineering dean said.
He said the Guam Power Authority, with a shortage of steady new professionals, has been turning to converting mechanical and civil engineering graduates to get work done for the island.
Mechanical engineering, a more complicated field with limited local industry, is not in the pipeline yet, according to the dean.
But students in that field can still start their engineering education at UOG, and then articulate to the University of Hawaii Manoa and the Colorado School of Mines in collaboration with industrial 3D-printing company ASTRO America.
‘Fierce competition’
Hettiarchchi said the local industry response to the School of Engineering has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
He said when he started on the job back in 2024, he got phone calls and knocks on the door every day from places trying to hire his students.
There is “fierce competition” for engineering graduates between Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command Marianas, the private sector, and to a lesser extent, the government of Guam.
As for faculty, the engineering school now has six faculty members, up from just 3.5 back in 2024, Hettiarchchi said.
The dean said he’d like to get that number up to at least eight, as the school moves forward, though it will take some time.
GovGuam salary scales aren’t very attractive for engineering faculty from the states, and new rules requiring a $100,000 payment to process skilled H-1B visas are another headwind, according to the dean.