ROCHESTER -- Twice a week, the students click shut their laptops, wheel aside the group desks and maybe guide an anatomy model to the corner.

Then they tango.

These serious-minded University of Minnesota, Rochester, students are studying the health sciences while devising plans for master's degrees and medical school. But they're also freshmen -- the first class their still-new university has ever had.

Given two floors atop a shopping mall for a central campus, an apartment complex for a dorm and a nearby YMCA for a recreation center, the first undergraduate class members are deciding for themselves what it means to be college students beyond the classroom.

No, there's no football team, fraternity row or student newspaper. But there is ballroom dance.

"It's our first-ever group," said Laura Bogenschutz, one of 49 freshmen and 14 dancers. "We're a bunch of pre-med students, so it doesn't really make sense, but that's OK. It's really fun."

Since its first undergrad class arrived in the fall, the Rochester campus has mined the city around it for facilities other college students find on campus.

"We say -- and we say it with all due respect -- that there's the rest of the campus," Chancellor Stephen Lehmkuhle said, gesturing toward the Mayo Clinic, hospitals, coffee shops and other downtown buildings outside his office window.

Rochester didn't need to build dorms, he said, because there are nearby apartments. A recreation facility? There's a YMCA. A cafeteria? Classrooms are a floor above a food court.

Eventually, the campus will become more campus-like. On Thursday, members of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents reviewed two $1 million offers the university has made on properties in downtown Rochester. Those properties could anchor plans for a five-block campus over the next 20 years, Lehmkuhle told them.

That land would expand the university's web with the Mayo Clinic. This campus' focus on the health sciences -- with its graduate, distance and now undergraduate programs -- is in large part due to its world-renowned neighbor.

'Just for fun'

Lehmkuhle said he expected that the undergraduate program's academics would thrive. Students could do cadaver lab work as freshmen, in part because of Mayo's facilities. They would interact with health care professionals, just a skyway-walk away. They could use data generated in one course to do experiments in another.

But he worried about student life. What would the students do after class?

"I'm less concerned now," he said. "What I have noticed is because they're taking the same courses, because they're so often in group projects, it creates a common connection among students that extends to their social life.

"And did you hear we have about 10 students competing in ballroom dance?"

Yuko Taniguchi is partly responsible.

The writing professor didn't want the students' Halloween party to be "just pizza and music," so she brought a few fellow dancers for a tango demonstration. Inspired, a couple of freshmen formed a club. It's official, with a mission statement and Taniguchi as faculty adviser.

Later this month, they'll compete in Minneapolis -- "just for fun," several students stressed. Practicing the tango, cha-cha, rumba and waltz in empty classrooms, they still step on each others' toes.

Someday, a college town?

Alex Engelbrecht had toured more traditional campuses: South Dakota State University, Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Immediately, he could tell that Rochester was "very, very different," he said. "Totally different."

He based his decision "not on, 'How much do I want to party?'" he said. "I wanted to go to school to learn and get my degree so I can move on." Rochester's small class sizes and health-sciences-based curriculum sold him.

College life is surprisingly like it might be somewhere else, he said. Students bowl, go sledding, see movies and play dodgeball. "We find random stuff to do," he said.

But mostly, they study -- in the library area everyone knows as "the comfy chairs," across the street in their apartments or perched on chairs in the commons area. There, between classes on a recent Thursday, Bogenschutz sat with her laptop open and purple iPod on.

The admissions officials here believe the university attracts first-borns -- students who find the idea of forging a new undergraduate program thrilling rather than frightening. Although she's the youngest in her family, Bogenschutz agrees. As a high schooler in Burnsville, she had been leaning toward the U's Twin Cities campus but then learned about Rochester's program and the fact that it's brand new.

"I just think about how after I've graduated, I'll be able to say I was part of the first-ever class," she said. "That's what keeps me going a lot of the time. I just want to be one of the first ones through."

Sometimes, the program feels too intimate ("We know each other really, really well") and the city's too stale ("It's a lot of older people everywhere"). But like her classmates, she's hopeful about next year's batch of 100 to 150 freshmen and the future beyond that.

"Rochester isn't a college town -- yet," she said. "I feel like it's going to be different one day."

Next year's class also will supply a new crop of students who are now scarce: men. Now, there are just 15, which leads to a lack of dance partners.

Jenna Ross • 612-673-7168