Take a look around the Northern Virginia Center

The Northern Virginia Center serves a wide variety of different graduate programs. The building was built in the late 90s. It's about a 100,000 square feet. It's primarily classrooms and offices for our faculty and staff. So we have about 30 classrooms, ranging in sizes from about 10 students up to about 90 students. All of our classrooms are equipped with distance learning capabilities. So we can connect very closely to our colleagues in Blacksburg. And we share a lot of classes in between here and Blacksburg. We have many different degree programs, including both masters and PhD level programs. Some of our largest programs include the College of Engineering's Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering programs and the Masters of Business Administration programs from the College of Business. So students in this location will find a number of amenities. We have the branch of the University Library here at the Northern Virginia Center. We also have a lot of gathering spaces for students where they can meet, they can form study groups, they can work on projects together, or just spend some time relaxing in-between their classes. The Northern Virginia Center is also home to Thinkabit Lab, which is a project with Qualcomm designed to introduce primarily middle school students to the areas of computer engineering and computer programming and also the notion of the engineering design process. Where you think about a problem, you design a solution, and then you test it repeatedly until you can get to a better solution. For many of our students who pursue research projects, we have the advantage of being in the Washington, D.C. area where we work with a number of companies and government agencies that help bring interesting and real-world research projects into the university space. And then we can apply our knowledge and expertise to help solve those problems. In some ways, the Northern Virginia Center is like a tiny model of the university. Lots of different academic programs working together in concert to provide a good experience for our student population here.