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IVINS, Washington County — Construction for Utah’s second medical school is set to begin this week.
The Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine, a for-profit school based in Colorado, is working to get its new campus in Ivins up and running quickly. Construction will start with the main building, located at Center Street and 200 East, and last through about June 2017 with the first class of students arriving that fall.
The school expects to admit 125 people the first year, according to the school’s executive director of admission and marketing Julie Rosenthal. The two-story main building is 104,000 square feet on a 30-acre campus.
Rocky Vista’s dean and chief academic officer, Thomas N. Told, grew up in southern Utah. Rosenthal noted that a large number of students at the school’s Parker, Colorado, campus are from Utah.
“We have an interest in creating opportunities for medical students in the mountain west region, and we saw that the greatest need was in the state of Utah because it is significantly medically underserved,” she said.
Applications for the first class of students will open in May. The school expects to start interviewing potential students in September at the medical office building across the street from the new campus in Ivins.
Rosenthal said the initial response to the new program has been positive. She attended a conference for pre-med students at the University of Utah on March 26.
“There was a great deal of interest there,” she said. “Primarily most of those candidates would have had to go out of state to pursue their medical education, since obviously the only other medical school is the University of Utah and they have a limited class size. This is our way of being able to keep more of Utah residents in state for their medical education.”
