Inside Virginia Tech’s limestone, castle-like buildings are learning and social spaces that are anything but old fashioned. If you’re planning to live on campus you can expect to have fully-integrated Wi-Fi in your residence hall. No need to pack a clunky wireless router. Students like to study in Torgersen Hall, which has a peaceful, modern living room vibe with plenty of hookups to power your laptop. Foodies take note: Virginia Tech’s dining hall has won several awards for quality and variety. For instance, College Magazine ranked it number one on the list of “Top 10 Best Dining Halls on College Campuses” in 2015. Whether you’re craving authentic Brazilian cuisine, wood fired pizza, Middle Eastern inspired vegan, or just a cup of coffee made from beans roasted in-house, you’ll find it all in bustling Dietrick Hall. Cheers to that!

Thinking about getting a graduate degree? Virginia Tech offers fully online programs in civil engineering, information technology (ranked the #2 online graduate information technology online program by U.S. News and World Report), agricultural and life sciences, ocean engineering, political science, urban affairs and planning, and more. Or get an online graduate certificate in special education administration, natural resources, information policy and society, local government management, security studies, or nuclear engineering. If you live in Virginia, take advantage of the Office of Professional and Continuing Education’s many conferences, workshops and programs held at their partner facilities in Roanoke and Arlington.

The Virginia Tech Hokies compete at the NCAA Division I level and are members of the Atlantic Coast Conference. The team name originates from the first line of the team cheer written in 1896 (“Hokie, Hokie, Hokie, Hy!”). If you love Virginia Tech athletics, you’ll probably be lovingly referred to as a Hokie as well. Virginia Tech Football celebrates a number of successes. The Hokies have appeared in 29 NCAA bowl games since 1947 and boast 51 All-American players and counting. The Track and Field team has seen its share of wins; athletes have snagged 14 national championships since 2005. Virginia Tech also has over 25 intramural options including bouldering, ultimate Frisbee, innertube water polo, dodgeball, tennis, softball and kickball, so you have lots of opportunities to become a Hokie athlete in your own way.

Virginia Tech is a public research university with seven research institutes and over 100 research centers, labs, and groups dedicated to the study of everything from injury biomechanics (or how injury impacts people and ways to reduce the incidence of injury) to neurotoxicity (or the impact toxins have on the nervous system). But don’t let the university’s status as a major technology and research institution fool you; the arts have a strong presence here too. Art students can choose to study music, cinema, theater, studio arts, and creative writing, and they have over a dozen venues and performance spaces to showcase their artistic abilities. There is even a place where art, science, design, and engineering research come together in perfect harmony—The Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology. In 2015 Professors Joseph Gabbard and Doug Bowman were awarded $100,000 and two Microsoft HoloLens devices, which will be housed in this unique institute, to study collaborative analysis of large-scale mixed reality data. The world of virtual reality is an actual reality at Virginia Tech (and yes, you can study that, too!).