SKILLS AND VALUES
Creative Thinking, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Demonstrate the capacity to think, react, and work in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, calculated risk taking, and entrepreneurship
One of the classes in the MLPD program that we are pushed the most to be creative and innovative is our capstone course. This course normally comes in our last semester (semester I’m currently in). Most of the class is a group so we wanted to select a project that would challenge everyone and also be a unique idea that we might not be able to work on again in the near future. We decided on redeveloping the Post Oak Mall in College Station, TX. We believe this project has potential to be more successful due to its location and surrounding demographic. To complete this project we needed to complete market analysis, financial feasibility, redesign layouts, demolition and construction budget, project scheduling, and branding. This is a big area to cover and provided the unique challenge of an existing structure to either work with or get rid of. Our proposal is to open the mall retail to the environment, add more restaurants, second floor office space, entertainment (Top Golf and Dave & Busters), young professional townhomes, multifamily tower, hotel, social green space, and better circulation. We believe this product has potential with the college and non-college demographic of the College Station/Bryan area.
This project was the perfect opportunity to truly test if my classmates and myself could use what we had learned to create a product that ourselves, our professors, future employers, and Texas A&M University can be proud of.