Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or Virginia Tech for short, is a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, in the New River Valley of western Virginia near the Appalachian Mountains. Virginia Tech is known for its programs in agriculture, engineering, and veterinary medicine.
History
Virginia Tech was originally founded in 1851 as a Methodist academy called the Olin and Preston Institute. After the passage of the Morrill Act, the institution became a state-supported land grant military institute called the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1872; the modern school considers this to be its founding date. Under the 1891-1907 presidency of John M. McBryde, the school reorganized its academic programs into a traditional four-year college setup (including the renaming of the mechanics department to engineering); this led to an 1896 name change to \Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. The "Agricultural and Mechanical College" section of the name was popularly omitted almost immediately, though the name was not officially changed to Virginia Polytechnic Institute until 1944 as part of a short-lived merger with what is now Radford University. VPI achieved full accreditation in 1923, and the requirement of participation in the Corps of Cadets was dropped from four years to two that same year (for men only; women, when they began enrolling in the 1920s, were never required to join).
Throughout the early 20th century, a school rivalry developed between Virginia Tech and Charlottesville's University of Virginia (founded 1819). Today, the two universities are the largest public institutions of higher learning in the state of Virginia. The rivalry continues, both in academics and athletics.
President T. Marshall Hahn (1962-74) was responsible for many of the changes that shaped the modern institution of Virginia Tech. The merger with Radford was dissolved in 1964, and in 1966, the school dropped the two-year Corps requirement for male students (in 1973, women were allowed to join the Corps; Tech was the first school in the nation to open its military wing to women). One of Hahn's more controversial missions was only partially achieved; he had visions of renaming the school from VPI to Virginia State University, reflecting the status it had achieved as a full-fledged public research university. As part of this move, Tech would have taken over control of the state's other land-grant institution, a historically black college in Ettrick, Virginia south of Richmond then called Virginia State College; this failed, and that school eventually became Virginia State University. As a compromise, the school added "and State University" to its name in 1970, yielding the current formal name of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The new acronym of VPISU was derisively spoken as Vippy-sue by students and Hahn detractors. In the early 1990s, the school quietly authorized the official use of Virginia Tech as equivalent to the full VPI&SU name; most school documents today use the shorter name, though diplomas still spell out the formal name. Similarly, the abbreviation VT is far more common today than VPI or VPI&SU, and appears everywhere from athletic uniforms (most notably on football helmets) to the university's Internet domain vt.edu.
Academics
Bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs are offered through the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, the College of Architecture & Urban Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, the Pamplin College of Business, the College of Engineering, the College of Natural Resources, the College of Science, and the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences offers the only two-year associate's degree program on campus, in agricultural technology.
Campus
The Virginia Tech campus is located within Blacksburg; the central campus is roughly bordered by Prices Fork Road to the northwest, Duck Pond Drive to the west, Main Street to the east, and Southgate Drive to the south, though it has several thousand acres beyond the central campus. The university also has several commonwealth branch campus centers: Hampton Roads (Virginia Beach), Northern Virginia (Falls Church), Richmond, Roanoke, and the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon.
On the Blacksburg campus, the majority of the buildings incorporate Hokie Stone as a building material.
Athletics
The school's sports teams are called the Hokies; the school's mascot is the Hokie Bird. They participate in the NCAA's Division I (I-A for football) and in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which the school joined in 2004 after leaving the Big East Conference.
The word "Hokies", which originated from the Old Hokie spirit yell, is often used interchangeably with "Fighting Gobblers" to refer to the sports team, fans, students, or alumni, although the former is the official usage. The word "Hokies" originated in the 1890s; see Hokies for more information.
The stylized VT (the abbreviation for Virginia Tech) is used primarily by the athletic department as a symbol for Virginia Tech athletic teams. The "athletic VT" symbol is trademarked by the university, and appears frequently on licensed merchandise. The logo is available on the university's website [1].
Virginia Tech's fight song, which was created in 1919, is Tech Triumph. It remains in use today, although the Old Hokie spirit yell is more widely known.
Affiliated institutions
The Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, founded in 1978, is a separate institution on the same campus, paid for by the two US states of Virginia and Maryland and jointly operated by VT and the University of Maryland. VMRCVM and VT jointly operate an equine center in Leesburg, Virginia, and VMRCVM has a small operation on the University of Maryland's College Park, Maryland campus.
In 2003, a school of osteopathic medicine called the Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine opened in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, an office park adjacent to and owned and operated by the university as a local business incubator. VCOM is incorporated as a private, non-profit institution with no state interest, but is very closely affiliated with Virginia Tech on an operational level.
In 2002, a biomedical engineering program, called the School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (SBES), was created as a cooperative venture between Virginia Tech and Wake Forest University. SBES offers opportunities to undergraduates and grants M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering.
Research computing
In 2003, Virginia Tech created a supercomputer which ranked as the 3rd fastest in the world. The system was made from 1100 dual processor Power Macintosh G5s and cost US$5.2 million. The supercomputer, called System X, was disassembled shortly after it was ranked in order for it to be replaced with Apple's rack-based servers which consume both less space and power.
Internet Networking research and connectivity is an important part of Virginia Tech's history, it has particiatpion in Suranet, Internet2, Abilene, the Lambda Rail and others. Virginia Tech also participates in the management of several key parts of the East Coast Internet including Net.Work.Virginia, and the Mid Atlantic Crossroads.
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