Particle physicists eagerly await the first 13 TeV collisions at the LHC in the next several months. Our discovery of the Higgs boson was the outstanding success of the 8 TeV LHC, but what comes next? With the Standard Model complete the discovery of new physics could be just beginning. In this talk I will discuss the excitement surrounding current and future searches for new physics, as well as critical upgrades to the ATLAS detector. My focus will be on examples of searches for exotic, vector-like quarks which may be important in understanding the Higgs boson and play a prominent role in many theories of physics beyond the Standard Model. I will also present a detector upgrade for the calorimeter electronics that will allow the ATLAS experiment to keep pace with the increasing interaction rate of the LHC. This upgrade will improve the experiment’s ability to record collisions that might contain new physics.