<p>I doubt the medical school is going to add too much prestige to Virginia Tech. It’s supposed to only matriculate a class of only 40 I believe. VT does have a plan though over the next few years to continuously expand research expenditures. Dr. Steger seems much more focused on that metric than anything else. This, if anything will expand the prestigiousness of the university. The real keys to VT’s future prestige will be research on critical issues. Hence, ICTAS (and the new ICTAS building on campus), the Bioinformatics Institute, the expansion of the Life Sciences, the doubling in size of the Corporate Research Center over the next decade, and most importantly, the engineering program. The engineering program is going to take a boost from ICTAS, which will provide researchers with state of the art facilities and equipment, as well as the new signature engineering building which hopefully will be equivalent in looks to UMD’s engineering building. Virginia Tech definitely has the potential over the next decade to become the Georgia Tech of the mid-atlantic.</p>