On August 1, 1957, the newly minted university president and his secretary Ann Strickland moved into a borrowed office in the Hillsborough County Courthouse and went to work. According to "The Tampa Tribune", Allen brought with him a note pad, a box of pencils, an ashtray for visitors and "great hope." When Allen arrived in Tampa in 1957, the fledgling university did not have a name, physical plant, faculty or students. He and his newly assembled administrative team began to build a modern state university from scratch. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, Allen toured American universities, scouting modern academic facilities and curriculums for ideas to build a better university, and he began to recruit administrative staff and future faculty members. Allen's plans were ambitious; to open a completely new university in three years with 1,500 students and to expand to 10,000 within ten years thereafter. The Florida Legislature appropriated $1.2 million in 1957 and another $5 million in 1959, and construction of the first three buildings began in earnest on of largely empty sandy brush land located nine miles (14 km) north of Tampa. Thereafter, the university expanded rapidly, the first undergraduate classes were held in the fall of 1960, and the first master's degree program began in 1964, and the first doctoral program in 1967. In 1965, USF expanded to a second campus on the bayfront in St. Petersburg, located on the site of the old Bayboro Maritime Base. In September 1960, there were 1,997 undergraduates enrolled at USF. Ten years later, when Allen retired, USF had over 14,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Notably, the Florida Legislature authorized the Allen administration's proposal to establish a new medical school in 1965—the second publicly supported medical school in the state—and the first USF medical students began their studies in 1971.