Virginia Commonwealth University is located in the heart of the city of Richmond, the state’s capital. Both campuses are located in walking distance from city hotspots such as shops, eateries, capitol buildings and event centers. The Monroe Park Campus houses business, education, art and humanities programs while the MCV Campus houses medical and allied health programs. When you step into the center of the Monroe Park campus the first thing you’ll see is VCU’s signature sidewalk compass. From this spot you are only seconds from your first-year classes in Hibbs Hall as well as the full-service Starbucks in the library. It’s the perfect place to be if you need a caffeine boost before that 8 a.m. English class. Over at the MCV campus you’ll find the VCU Medical Center, a teaching hospital that exposes medical students to a real world clinical setting and provides all students with convenient access to healthcare services.

As an undergrad you have three online program options including the nursing completion program (for full-time practicing nurses who possess an associate’s degree or equivalent), clinical laboratory sciences distance education program, and bachelor’s in clinical laboratory sciences completion program (for those with 40 credits previously earned). But if you’re a soon-to-be graduate student you’ll have no shortage of options at your fingertips. Master’s and doctoral level degrees and certificates are offered in counseling, social work, education, paralegal, sports leadership, occupational therapy, aging studies, mechanical/nuclear engineering and more. Looking to take a class to learn a new skill or pick up new techniques and trends in your industry? The Office of Continuing and Professional Education offers dozens of for-credit and non-credit courses that are open to the general public as well as continuing education courses for professionals in healthcare, counseling, and education.

Men’s tennis is one of the university’s most successful sports teams, winning 13 Colonial Athletic Association conference titles and participating in 20 NCAA tournaments. Students from all over the world flock to VCU to join this top-notch tennis team. In fact, check out the 2015-2016 roster and you’ll find the players hail from places like Brazil, Sweden, Romania, Slovakia, and France. If you see yourself as a future Ram, then try out for one of VCU’s 17 varsity sports like baseball, tennis, cross-country, soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, and basketball. Speaking of basketball, The men’s team is making a name for itself in recent years. They made it to the NCAA Final Four tournament in 2011 and took the Atlantic 10 championship title in 2015.

Virginia Commonwealth University is a public research university that received over 270 million dollars in sponsored research funding in 2015, the highest amount in the institution’s history. In the Massey Cancer Center, one of the university’s 21 research centers and institutes, faculty physician-scientists have made notable breakthroughs, including Paul Dent, Ph. D. and Paul B. Fisher, Ph. D.’s development of a virus-based gene therapy that kills kidney cancer cells. In 2015 a team of VCU researchers in collaboration with scientists at other institutions invented a way to more cost-effectively produce a major AIDS drug, therefore making it more easily accessible to the public. Professor John B. Fenn received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2002 for inventing a more effective method to analyze biological macromolecules.