At the peak of his power, Alexander the Great wept when he saw he had no more to conquer. Today DCU has a similar problem, if on a somewhat smaller scale.

From its humble beginnings, it has all but filled the once prairie-like 50-acre site it started on; it has more than 10,000 under and postgraduate students. The National Distance Education Centre on its campus has a further 3,000 students on its books, many of whom do courses exclusively provided by DCU.

Barry Kehoe, director of student services, says that at the moment the college is in the middle of a major building programme. The total cost of buildings under way and recently completed will come to around £90 million.

Pride of place among these will go to the North Dublin Arts Centre, with a price tag of £20 million. The centrepiece of this will be a concert hall with space for 1,200 people. It will also have exhibition and workshop space. Parking problems should be alleviated by the £6 million multistorey car park, which will be connected to the hall by a tunnel.

"Our arts profile will be further enhanced by the recent announcement that the national performing arts centre will be based on the DCU campus," says Kehoe.

Student life in DCU has long had the reputation of being boring and dominated by work and travel to college. Overcrowding and bored students should hopefully be things of the past with the opening of a new £4 million student centre.

"The introduction of semesterisation in 1996 knocked us down big time socially and we are just getting back on our feet now," says students' union president Daibhi O Donnabhain. With the new centre and the appointment of a societies' development officer, he says things are looking up.

O Donnabhain particularly welcomes the new concert hall and smaller theatres, which he hopes students will be able to use. "It will be something different for them to do other than to go to the pub," he says.

The college continues to come up with innovative degree courses, such as its common entry into science programme, sports science and health and science and education courses, all of which began last autumn.

The college is also strong in research. "Relative to our size, we were allocated by far the largest amount of HEA funding," says Kehoe. Specialities in scientific research include cell and tissue culture, fibre optics and plasma physics, but Kehoe is keen to stress that this is not all they do.

"We don't simply identify research with science," he says, pointing to DCU's strong school of communications and media as one area of the humanities where a lot of work is being done.

O Donnabhain has no problems with DCU's academic achievement. "Teaching standards are quite high," he says, and there is a programme under way to try and make the timetables, which can be very full, more "student friendly".

The new university president seems to have high standards to live up to in terms of relations between college administration and the students' union. O Donnabhain singles out DCU's interim head, director general Albert Pratt, for praise: he was "extremely student friendly". In general, O Donnabhain says manangement is mindful of students and up front in its dealings with them.

DCU has expanded so rapidly that O Donnabhain says he believes it "needs to take stock of itself and consolidate". Recent examinations showed up understaffing in the registrar's office due to the increase in numbers and courses; functions such as cleaning and maintenance also need time and resources to enable them to do their jobs properly.

Still a few small things for the new president to conquer?