Virginia Tech is going even bigger with a new graduate school campus in Northern Virginia.
Back when Amazon announced it would be locating its new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia Tech announced a new innovation campus on site in Alexandria known as the Oakville Triangle. Now leaders at Virginia Tech are abandoning that location and moving across the street to a much larger site: Potomac Yard, formerly the home of one of the busiest rail yards in America. The 65-acre site currently has a strip mall that’s about to be demolished and redeveloped.
Senator Mark Warner says that offers an opportunity for all kinds of potential businesses and research facilities that can partner with the graduate campus.
“Around cybersecurity, around artificial intelligence, around quantum computing — a host of areas where right now I see competition, candidly, coming from abroad, particularly countries like China,” says Warner.
Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands says the graduate campus will also offer the university some room to handle a growing number of undergraduates.
“We’re going to see hundreds of students who are undergraduates in Blacksburg rotate in for a semester or perhaps a year pursuing their curriculum here while they are engaged in experiential learning with our partners,” Sands explains.
The first class of the innovation campus master’s students will enroll in the fall of 2020, temporarily housed in space adjacent to where the new academic building will be constructed.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
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