The Department of Ancient Studies welcomed more than 120 guests — including 60 alumni — back to UMBC  this month for its annual Reunion Luncheon, which included appearances by all of the department’s founding faculty.

“It was all wonderful seeing so many students from all generations,” said ANCS Chair and Associate Professor Marilyn Goldberg, who counted among her favorite moments of the day watching department founders Walt Sherwin, Jay Freyman, and Rudy Storch reminisce with their students about the early days of the Ancient Studies department.

In addition to a luncheon of Greek fare, the afternoon included plenty of reminiscing by alumni, past and present faculty and staff, and former participants in ANCS’s annual trips abroad (now in its 47th year) — as well as a speech by UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, who quoted Aristotle by heart, Goldberg said.

“Never again will we have so many generations of alumnae/i and friends of Ancient Studies come together in one place to reminisce about their adventures in studying about the Greeks and the Romans!” said Goldberg. “Who said that old stuff is stuffy! Not us.”

In today’s Baltimore Sun, political science professor Thomas F. Schaller writes,

Less than 24 hours ago, an apparent act of terrorism marred this year’s Boston Marathon. It’s too early to know many of the details about this tragic event. Late last night, officials were reporting three deaths and well over 100 injuries; soon we will have a clearer sense of how many were killed and wounded. […] But we don’t need to know every detail to draw a few sad, cautionary lessons about what happened Monday.

Among those lessons is recognizing that “the primary purpose of terrorism is not to kill victims but to terrorize survivors.”

In addition to its horrific impact on victims and their families, writes Schaller, “[t]errorism poisons if not destroys our public spaces and the physical and psychic experiences we share with one another while in such spaces. After incidents like Monday’s, it’s tempting to retreat and turn our public spaces into fortresses.” But to do so, he warns, would be “fatal to our collective identities.”

Constatine Vaporis, director of the Asian studies program and professor of history, was featured in a blog post on the PBS blog “The Rundown.”  The post was entitled “For Hundreds of Years, Cherry Blossoms Are Matter of Life and Death.”

Vaporis said that as seppuku (ritual suicide) became a key part of the samurai’s Bushido code, the samurai “identified with the cherry blossom particularly because it fell at the moment of its greatest beauty, an ideal death.”

In today’s Gazette, Roy T. Meyers, professor of political science, explains his expectation that Gov. O’Malley’s final legislative session will focus on job creation — an issue that will continue to be relevant to any office O’Malley might pursue in the future. Meyers suggests that O’Malley’s decision to run for president in 2016 will likely depend on whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chooses to run, but that in the meantime he should work on building his national visibility on key issues.

For now, the governor’s administration notes that in 2014 he is likely to focus on the economy. Referencing O’Malley’s investments in education, biotechnology and cybersecurity, Meyers says, “He’s adopted a more intelligent job-building strategy, rather than the smokestack-chasing policies of some states.” He continues, “That being said, there are limits to what a governor can do. The reality is it’s going to be a long slog [to recovery].”

Earlier this week, Meyers appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio, discussing the specifics of President Obama’s $3.8 trillion federal budget proposal with CQ Roll Call White House Correspondent Steven Dennis and host Kathleen Dunn.

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, was recently a guest on the BBC World Service program “The Forum” to discuss “Obsessions, new and old, in literature and technology.”  Joining Suri on the show, which was hosted by Bridget Kendall, were internet analyst and cyber-sceptic Evgeny Morozo and Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marias.

Suri discussed his recent novel, “The City of Devi,” in which the main character is obsessed with bringing a pomegranate to her missing husband.

“She feels that having this symbol almost will somehow lead her to her husband. And in a way it does tell her something about her marriage, but in a very unexpected fashion,” he said.

The guests also spoke about our obsession with technology.  “There’s this belief in technology and computers – these are going to really save us from having to think,” Suri said.

Over Spring Break, a group of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering students, Aaron Gibson, Dagmawi Tilahun, Kevin Tran, and Don Wong, led by Professor Govind Rao, and accompanied by Dr. Theresa Good and Ms. Geetha Ram, went to India in order to get end user data for a low cost neonatal incubator the team is developing for use in resource-poor environments.

If you listen to the students, they’ll tell you the project started in Professor Rao’s 2011 Sensors class, a senior elective, where students learned that over 340 neonates die an hour in their first week of life, with 99% of those deaths occurring in low and middle income countries. Most of those deaths could be prevented if appropriate technology were available.

Professor Rao challenged the class to develop incubators that would work in these resource limited environments, where electricity might only be available for 8 hours a day, and salaries might be less than $6 a day. A few students from that class have continued to work with Professor Rao on this project funded by National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance which has culminated in the trip to India, where students met with rural health care workers in the Mysore region in Southern India, to ensure that they design a low cost incubator that will meet the needs of the local population. They visited several rural health care providers and have now partnered with an incubator manufacturer (Phoenix Medical Systems) and a health care provider (Karuna Trust) to take the concept to reality. Of course, we couldn’t leave India without seeing a few famous wonders of the world – the trip to the Taj Mahal was a gift from Professor Rao to the students and his colleagues. It was breathtaking.

A new Washington Times commentary critiquing government contracting programs for minority- and women-owned firms references testimony by UMBC professor George La Noue on why federal contacting preferences should be reexamined. La Noue is an expert on education policy, constitutional law and policy, and public procurement policy, and is a frequent witness in Congressional testimony.

Nicole Else-Quest, assistant professor of psychology, is the author of an April 9 post in the “Huffington Post” blog entitled “Contextualizing the Conversation on Women and STEM.”

Else-Quest is the lead author of a recent study that found that female students perform as well as males in STEM classrooms, but report less confidence about their abilities.  It also found that Asian American students outperform other ethnic groups.

In her piece for the Huffington Post, she argued that “the national conversation about women and STEM cannot progress until it considers gender within the context of other social identity variables, such as ethnicity, class, and immigration.”

“We don’t think of ourselves as only having gender or only having race. We think of ourselves as multifaceted and complex individuals – because we are multifaceted and complex individuals,” she writes.

Every so often, we’ll chat with an alum about what they do and how they got there. Today, in honor of National Poetry Month, we’re talking with English teacher and poet Jackie (Vreatt) Regales ’00, American studies, who spends much of the day sharing her love of the written word with the next generation…

Name: Jackie (Vreatt) Regales ’00, American studies
Job: English teacher at Roland Park Country School
Website: A Patchwork Life: Writing, Teaching, and Piecing it all Together

Q:  Tell us a little about why you decided to get into education.

A:  My mother taught high school for 38 years (I even had her for AP U.S. History!), and I always said I wouldn’t go into teaching because I saw how hard she worked, and how difficult her job really was. But then as a senior [at UMBC], I had the chance to be a teaching assistant for Dr. Pat McDermott, who is now a Vice Provost, but was then in the American Studies department. I led a few discussions and activities in her class that semester, and it was such an amazing experience that I knew I had to follow this path further. I went to graduate school on a teaching assistantship, and knew for certain that teaching was the right career for me.

Q:  What do you love most about teaching? What do you find most challenging?

A:  The best moments in my job are when I get to see students fall in love with a book, a book that either changes how they see the world or makes them feel less alone in the world, books like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, both of which I disliked when I first read them, but now adore after getting to teach them. I also feel so fulfilled when a student who previously didn’t like reading or felt like a terrible writer makes leaps and bounds of progress and feels so much more skilled and confident at the end of the year.

What do I find challenging about teaching? Personally, I find that teaching is the kind of job that can suck up every possible minute you let it; there’s always grading to do, or lessons that could be better, new books to consider or research that promises to finally help kids understand grammar better. I know we get the summers off, which I definitely value, but most teachers I know are working way more than forty hours a week during the school year, and many spend summer hours trying to develop themselves more as professionals.

Another challenge is how invested we come to feel in the lives of our students and families, and how vulnerable that makes us. Every teacher has a story about the kid they couldn’t reach or save, the family that broke apart in violent ways and the girl or boy caught in the middle, the realization that we can’t make a kid hear something they aren’t ready to understand yet about themselves. High school kids can really break your heart, and each year, we open ourselves up to a new wave of them!

Q:  You’ve even come back to teach at UMBC, right? What did you teach, and how did it feel to be teaching at your alma mater?

A:  I did! After I earned my master’s degree, I was doing some adjunct teaching when Jason Loviglio offered me a few classes in the newly developing Media and Communication Studies program. I taught a 300-level elective on “Facebook Culture,” as well as a 300-level course for students in the major, and assisted Donald Snyder with the capstone research seminar. This was a wonderful opportunity for me, and certainly the best adjunct experience I ever had! As far as teaching at my alma mater, I loved it; intellectually, it was exciting to have the freedom to develop these courses, and Jason and Donald were welcoming and supportive mentor figures. I definitely put some pressure on myself to succeed so that Jason’s faith in me would be rewarded, because he was an influential professor for me as a student as well.

Q:  You’re also a poet. How do you keep yourself going, creatively, and how do you instill the love of poetry in your students?

A:  One of my assets as a writer has been surrounding myself with encouraging resources. My husband has always my biggest fan, and I’m also lucky to have Seth Sawyers ’99, history, a writer friend in my life I can ask for feedback; we actually met when we were both tutors at the Writing Center at UMBC. As far as keeping going creatively, the wisest decision I made was to let go of any pretenses about what I needed in order to write: a room of my own, uninterrupted spans of time, the structure of a formal writing program, unlimited childcare, a personal chef or housekeeper, etc. I would still love to have some or all of those things at some point in my life, but what I realized is that I don’t need them—what I need is to write, to make some space in my life whenever possible to get the words down onto the page. Writing is part of how I process the world, and is integrally part of how I approach my life. Therefore, postponing writing until I had more time, money, peace, whatever was never really an option, so I learned how to weave it through my life as best I could.

One of my favorite ways to help my students love poetry is to encourage them to simply stay open to it; so many students (and adults!) see poetry as this mysterious and indecipherable code that makes them feel stupid or ignorant. During National Poetry Month, I give my students extra credit for public poetry projects on campus; they choose poems, I approve them, and then they do something public to introduce that poem to our community. This year I’ve got students eager to read poems with first-graders, make bulletin board displays of Russian poetry and decorate our campus bathrooms with Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” to help encourage self-esteem in their classmates. Explicating poetry is a valuable skill, but I also want to surprise students into finding something valuable and beautiful in poetry without necessarily understanding anaphora or trochaic tetrameter.

Q:  Tell us about some of your writing projects!

A:  Right now, I’m part of an exciting project involving found poetry, which is basically the literary equivalent of a collage, taking words and phrases from existing texts and using them to form and inspire new pieces of writing. I’m one of 85 participating poets in the Pulitzer Remix project, sponsored by The Found Poetry Review. Each poet was assigned a book that has won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, and each day during National Poetry Month, we are writing/posting poems we created from the text of our prize winner. By the end of the project, we will have created over 2500 found poems! I have participated in poetry month challenges for the past few years, writing a new poem each day in April based on various prompts, but this has been a big leap of faith for me, and it’s been invigorating and inspiring to challenge myself in this way.

Q: In honor of National Poetry Month, what poet/poem would you like to share with your UMBC alumni friends, and why?

A:  One of my favorite poets is Pablo Neruda; his work is clear, simple, powerful and beautiful, rich with metaphors and similes, with such range and passion that it’s difficult to resist. He was a deeply political poet in many ways, and wrote movingly about the landscape of his native Chile, but it’s his love poetry that really makes me swoon. Try “I can write the saddest verses,” “I like it when you’re quiet,” or my absolute favorite, “I don’t love you as if you were a rose” and see if you don’t get a little smitten with Neruda too.

Normally, a spring soccer match would not garner a tremendous amount of attention, even in a soccer-crazed area like the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. corridor. But UMBC’s contest vs. Georgetown, a.k.a., “Kicks for Chase,” on the evening of Saturday, April 13, at Retriever Soccer Park should be an exception.

First off, the game pits a pair of great programs coming off magical 2012 fall campaigns. The Retrievers won their second America East title in three years, advanced past Old Dominion and played defending national champion North Carolina to a scoreless draw in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. (The Tar Heels advanced on penalty kicks.) The Hoyas stunned the collegiate soccer world by making it to the national title game, falling, 1-0 to Indiana.

But the real importance of the 7:00 p.m. match-up at RSP is the cause it supports. The teams are raising funds to benefit children born with Down Syndrome in the memory of Chase Bugarin.

In September of 2012, former UMBC soccer player Bryan Bugarin ’97, psychology, and his wife Amy welcomed a son, Chase Ryan Bugarin. Chase was born with Down Syndrome along with other serious complications. After an 11-week fight, Chase passed away and though he is no longer with us, his memory lives on. He is survived by parents Bryan and Amy along with siblings Jordyn (9) and Brayden (2).

Admission to “Kicks for Chase” game is free, but donations are being accepted for The Arc Foundation of Harford County (Northern Chesapeake Region). Patrons may donate the day of by cash or check. Checks can be made payable to The ARC Northern Chesapeake Region and donators can mark “Kicks for Chase” in the subject line. If you cannot attend the game, but would still like to donate, please mail checks to: UMBC Athletics, c/o Kelly Fahey, Assistant AD for Student-Athlete Affairs, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, Md. 21250

In addition, 100 percent of all t-shirt, food and beverage sales will be donated to the ARC.

Read the full story here, originally published on UMBCAthletics.com.