Take a look inside Samford's remodeled Southern Progress campus

Samford University is welcoming back around 5,400 undergrad and graduate students onto campus for the start of the fall semester this week after a busy move-in weekend..

For students pursuing health-related careers, classes will be held for the first time Monday in the former Southern Progress campus, which was purchased in early 2015 and renovated for the College of Health Sciences.

Buildings 1 and 2 of the campus have been renovated to provide 231,000 square feet of classrooms and office space for the 17 undergraduate and 15 graduate programs that range from pharmacy and nursing to athletic training, speech language pathology and dietetics.

While the former Southern Progress building retains some of its more distinctive features — including an artificial creek running through one lobby — most of it has been redesigned to give students an environment as close to real healthcare as possible.

There are traditional classrooms and study areas, but many classrooms include not only tables and chairs but also nursing beds, pharmacology compounding labs and athletic training equipment. Other parts of the building include speech and respiratory labs and model doctors' offices and operating rooms, complete with medical dummies that can "react" to medication and procedures.

Samford President Andrew Westmoreland said the goal of the new College of Health Sciences was to bring together all the medical disciplines so students can learn how their careers may cross paths in the real world.

To learn more about the College of Health Sciences, visit samford.edu/healthsciences.