There’s roughly 1,360 days until The Commonwealth Medical College graduates its first class. The Scranton school’s president and dean, Robert M. D’Alessandri, is counting, and considering how quickly the school has grown from concept to reality, the first new medical school in Pennsylvania in 40 years figures to be ready.
The school began operations in June, 2007 with two employees. This week, 170 employees were on hand as the school’s inaugural group of 65 students began classes.
“We moved with great rapidity,” says D’Alessandri. “It might well be a record.”
Orientation for the first class, which was joined by 35 students pursuing Master’s degrees, was covered heavily by local media. “We are feeling a little like celebrities,” D’Alessandri says. Seventy-five percent of the school’s students are from Pennsylvania, a higher rate than any other school in the state.
The school is borrowing space from Lackawanna College, but D’Alessandri says there’s plenty of room in its fully equipped classrooms and labs, including a simulation lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and an anatomy lab D’Alessandri says is comparable to any in the country.
“Our students will not be disadvantaged at all,” he says. “They’ll have the most modern learning technology.”
The school, which also has campuses in Wilkes-Barre and Williamsport, has also applied for its first patent and is in discussion for a licensing agreement, both ahead of schedule. Eventually, the school plans to add more than 400 doctors and 1,000 jobs to a region where health care is among its top sectors. Class size expects to grow to 100 by the summer of 2011, when the school expects to move into its own facility in downtown Scranton.
Source: Robert M. D’Alessandri, Commonwealth Medical College
Writer: Joe Petrucci