The Roanoke Times | File June

Construction of a $59 million building for the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine is on schedule for the school's inaugural class next year.

About 1,200 people have applied to be in the inaugural class of Roanoke's new medical school.

With the deadline still six weeks away, officials at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine are expecting between 1,700 and 2,000 applications.

The candidates will vie for 42 spots in a class that will begin studies in August at VTC, which is part of the Riverside Center medical complex near Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

School officials say they are pleased with the quality of applicants selected for interviews that will begin this weekend.

But the number of projected applications falls short of the national average. Last year, new medical schools received an average of 2,800 requests for admission, according to Gwen Garrison of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Part of the problem at VTC was that the school could not begin recruiting students until early June, when it was granted preliminary accreditation by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.

"In the perfect world we would have started getting the word out in January and visited schools though the spring," said Steve Workman, director of admissions at VTC.

Another challenge is attracting students from across the country who may know little about Roanoke and Southwest Virginia, Workman said.

Launched two years ago as a joint venture between Tech and Carilion Clinic, VTC was envisioned as a small, four-year program that will emphasize medical research in addition to the basics of treating illnesses and injuries.

The goal is to combine the medical expertise at Carilion with the science acumen at Tech. "Leadership has managed to integrate research throughout the entire four-year program, a defining characteristic of the school," VTC spokeswoman Cheryl Valentine said.

Forty-two candidates have been selected for interviews that will be held Saturday.

Although more interviews are planned, the school will begin accepting students in about a month as part of a rolling admissions process.

"The folks that we've screened to interview so far are very well qualified," Workman said. "Interviewing qualified students won't be the problem. It will be after the interview, have we hooked them and are we going to land them?"

Top applicants are often drawn to schools with established reputations and a large pool of scholarship dollars -- two things that VTC must work to build in the coming years.

Earlier this year, the school estimated it would receive between 1,000 and 4,000 applications by the Dec. 1 deadline. While the number to date falls on the low end of that range, there seems to be no shortage of potential applicants.

About 42,000 people applied for 18,000 positions at the country's 131 medical schools last year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The average medical school candidate applied to 14 colleges.

The three medical schools in Virginia averaged 5,200 applications last year.

Of those who have applied to VTC so far, about a third are Virginia residents, Workman said. About two-thirds are currently enrolled in an undergraduate program.

"We're confident that once the students come in to interview, they'll see the area and feel a little more comfortable about what it has to offer," Workman said.

Meanwhile, preparations for the first class are continuing.

Construction of a $59 million building for the school, to be paid for with public money and owned by Virginia Tech, is on schedule and a little more than half completed.

The school also has appointed 319 faculty members, most of them doctors at Carilion and professors at Tech.