Students traveling through Grise Hall will be able to stay up to date with the latest stock information by the end of the month.

Michelle Trawick, associate dean for faculty and administration in the Gordon Ford College of Business, said a stock ticker will be installed on the first floor of the building and have a 40-foot display.

The ticker will cost around $58,000, which come from private donors, Trawick said.

“We placed this at the far side of the lobby where you would enter the stairwell to go up to the rest of the college of business,” she said.

She said the display will also include three other screens placed below the ticker.

“We’re also installing three large television displays where we will be able to have announcements for the college, information for students and current events,” she said.

Trawick said the installation process is supposed to begin next week and is scheduled to be completed by Oct. 26.

“We wanted to renovate Grise Hall and give it more of a business school feel and a stock ticker is representative of business,” Trawick said.

She also said she wants the ticker to stimulate conversation among business students, but she does not expect it to be widely used for classes.

“It certainly, we hope, will contribute to conversation within classes, but I’m not sure I can say it will be used for specific assignments,” she said.

Trawick said classes would not need to directly use the stock ticker because the information it displays will also be available on the Internet.

Chris Brown, chair of the finance department, said the new ticker is being brought in to replace a smaller one on the third floor that is no longer in use.

He said the information displayed on the stock ticker comes from a company called Telemet Orion on a subscription basis, adding that he believes the larger stock ticker will be more sustainable.

“For a ticker that small, it’s very expensive,” he said. “It’s the same subscription you would have with the forty-footer that they’re putting downstairs.”

Brown also said the ticker is being installed to give the school a more business-like feel that will help draw new business students and professors to WKU.

“I think if you look at business colleges around the country, you’ll see that a lot of them have new buildings,” he said. “We want to attract quality faculty and quality students to our university and our major.”

Brown said he thinks making Grise Hall “look and feel more like a college of business as opposed to a general teaching building” might give WKU a competitive edge in attracting prospective students.

“As you compete to get students from other universities that know they’re majoring in business, but don’t know where they’re going yet, it’s nice to be able to show them some updated technology and give them more of a feel that they’re in a college of business,” he said.