Maria Rosales-Terceros spends most of her week elbow-deep in calamities in a Woodbridge emergency room. The nurse loves the hands-on excitement, but has bigger career ambitions. To reach her goals, she needs a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree.

“A BSN allows you more leadership opportunities in hospitals; you’re able to acquire more leadership roles,” she said. “If you want to become a nurse practitioner and things like that, you need your bachelor’s to do that. So, it opens up a lot of doors for you, career-wise.”

She wanted a college close to home. She also wanted some in-person classes instead of the all-online options she’d seen elsewhere. And as the daughter of immigrants who helped her with her associate’s degree, she needed some financial aid.

Enter the University of Virginia. Specifically, UVA Northern Virginia’s new Fairfax campus.

The Fairfax campus – the first all-UVA satellite location – officially opens Feb. 28, but Rosales-Terceros is already taking classes there. Soon hundreds of other working professionals pursuing advanced degrees or industry certificates will join her in the new 55,000-square-foot space spanning two floors in the Inova Center for Personalized Health. The campus includes six classrooms, two multi-purpose rooms, several meeting rooms and quiet rooms, plus a café.

“For me, the best part has been the community,” she said. “The professors are very understanding and very kind. They understand we’re different from typical full-time students because we have our jobs, and some of the people in my program have children and families. But the UVA professors are just so flexible and understanding. They understand you have other things outside of school and they really work with you.”

That, according to UVA Northern Virginia Dean and CEO Greg Fairchild, is exactly the idea.

“From the very beginning, I recognized there were a set of learners who love UVA, who know UVA and are excited about UVA, but not everyone has the ability to pack up and move to Charlottesville for a year or two years,” he said.

A ream of market research told him there were enough adult learners in Northern Virginia to justify the endeavor. Fairchild, who formerly taught on Grounds at the Darden School of Business, said long ago he noticed most of the students in the Charlottesville-based Executive MBA program lived in Northern Virginia and had to trek south for classes.

Greg Fairchild, UVA Northern Virginia’s dean and CEO, says the typical student will be a professional seeking an advanced degree or certificate and would really love that to come from UVA. “But not everyone has the ability to pack up and move to Charlottesville for a year or two years,” he says.

“So, then the question came, if you move the program closer to them, would you find even greater yield for people in that footprint who would find it very interesting to be a part of the program?” Fairchild said. “The overwhelming response was, yes, this is something we should do.”

The notion of a dedicated Northern Virginia campus has been kicked around for at least a decade, Fairchild said, noting that some UVA staff members lived and worked in the area even longer. The Darden School of Business operates a facility in Arlington, but the offerings are specific to that school and the McIntire School of Commerce. The Fairfax campus is the first one offering education from multiple UVA schools – nine to be exact.

Although the space is sleek and modern, it still nods to UVA traditions. Orange and blue are the primary campus colors and wall murals of iconic locations on Grounds fill the classrooms.

The campus in the Inova Center for Personalized Health features six classrooms, but also open space for students and professors to work and collaborate. (Photo by Matt Riley).

“What we are trying to do is say, you’re not in Charlottesville,” Fairchild said. “But we didn’t forget that Charlottesville is our home. You’ll see it echo throughout.”

Another echo will be the instructors themselves. The Fairfax campus will be staffed in part with a cadre of professors and lecturers who leave Grounds on Friday to teach students on the weekends in Fairfax.

“This allows us to expand our educational audience to Northern Virginia,” Matthew Gurka, chair of UVA’s Department of Public Health Sciences, said. “We have had a very strong Master of Public Health program for 20 years now, and a lot of alumni are from Northern Virginia. When I told them we’re now going to be expanding our educational offerings up here, the excitement was palpable. It’s exciting to be able to educate folks in public health and research methods up here.”

Matthew Gurka, chair of UVA’s Department of Public Health Sciences, says a lot of the program’s alumni live in Northern Virginia. “When I told them we’re now going to be expanding our educational offerings up here, the excitement was palpable.”

The two floors are designed with professional students in mind, Fairchild said. There are spaces to work before and after classes, quiet rooms to make and take phone calls, and a flexible schedule that mixes in-person learning with online instruction.

“This is for the person who is building a life here, who may not be able to disconnect from that life,” Fairchild said. “This may enable them to get the learning with fewer frictions.”

The location also puts the campus in the thick of a health district – a busy hospital corridor runs right through the space – and engineering and aerospace industries, commerce headquarters and the political machinery that runs the nation.

“We have learning projects with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and several corporate clients,” Fairchild said.

Fairchild said he and his staff are exploring the possibility of offering January term classes for UVA students at the campus and expanding the already-established summer programs for local high school students.