Invitation to Mentor Baltimore City Youth - Spring Semester

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 15:25:35 -0500

Dear LLC students,

Welcome back for spring semester. I am writing to ask you if you would be willing to participate in a partnership between UMBC and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (Poly), a high school in Baltimore City. Poly is one of the oldest and most prestigious high schools in the country. Although it has a magnet program for engineering and science, it also has a strong liberal arts program. UMBC already has a good relationship with the school. It is a Professional Development School partner with UMBC where our student teachers are trained, as well as hired, to teach (at least twice in recent years). UMBC and Poly have worked together in other ways over the years. Poly students have come to campus for AP exam preparation and for recruitment tours, and we have recently established a partnership through the CollegeBound Foundation to offer scholarships to high performing students from Poly and other city public schools.

Poly successfully competed last year to be one of the schools allowed to offer the new “AP Capstone” class. This class is a part of a national initiative from College Board to “equip students with the independent research, collaborative teamwork, and communication skills that are increasingly valued by colleges.” UMBC is proud to be one of the state’s two official higher education supporters of this initiative.

There are 18 Poly juniors enrolled in the class this year, and UMBC is already supporting these students. During the fall semester, the students were introduced to campus, got library cards, and worked on group projects. In the upcoming spring semester, they will be working on individual research projects producing both a written paper and a presentation. To help them complete their projects, we hope to pair them with UMBC faculty mentors and are asking if you would be willing to serve as one of these mentors.

What would be involved? Your role would be to provide advice and support to one of the Poly students in her or his research. The research paper is to be inspired by one or more of the pieces of “stimulus material” listed below. Students need to produce an annotated bibliography (by March 2), a project outline (by March 23), a rough draft (by April 6) and a practice presentation (by April 18). Mentees will be expected to meet face-to-face with their mentors here at UMBC twice before March 23 and once more by April 1. Additionally, mentors and mentees will exchange a total of 8 substantive e-mails (cc’d to Poly faculty members), about the project in its various phases. We will be having a meet-and-greet kick-off breakfast on Friday, February 19 (9-11am) and students will be presenting their work on April 18. We believe that we are asking, in total, for about twenty hours of your time between mid-February and mid-April.

As far as possible, we will try to match faculty members with students based on the project topics the students choose, but the Poly faculty members do not believe that you will need to be an expert in their students’ areas of interest to be instrumental to their work. They are more interested in having their students receive individual attention and guidance from you, as a university professor, as they work through the steps to develop and carry out a research project.

We think this is a great opportunity to move UMBC’s efforts forward in building community engagement with Baltimore and a chance to support and encourage bright students from the city to attend college (perhaps at UMBC!), by giving them a taste of what the college experience is like.

I know every semester is busy, and that you are involved in many projects. I hope that you will be able to participate in this one, but will also quite understand if your commitments mean you cannot participate.

Please let John Stolle-McAllister (stollem@umbc.edu) know whether you will (or won’t) be able to participate by Monday, February 8.

Simon Stacey (spstacey@umbc.edu) will be happy to answer any questions that you might have about the AP Capstone Course.

Thank you for considering this opportunity.

Best regards,

Diane Lee
Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education
Division of Undergraduate Academic Affairs

List of “stimulus material” for Spring 2016. Students will draw on at least one piece to inspire their research project. (Please note, these texts are embargoed for students by CollegeBoard until February 1.)

Russ Rymer, “Vanishing Voices,” from National Geographic
William Stearns Davis, “Chapter XVI: The Life of the Peasants,” from Life on a Mediaeval Barony
Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait Between the Borderline of Mexico and the United States, 1932
Ferris Jabr, “The Secret Life of Plants,” from New Scientist
James Baldwin, “A Letter to My Nephew,” from The Progressive
Thomas Dietz et al, “The Struggle to Govern the Commons,” from Science