Top Dawgs

“We’re Number One! We’re Number One!”

It isn’t often that UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III’s “State of the University” address is interrupted by an impromptu chant. But this year’s speech – given on Aug. 20 – was something different. Local media flocked to cover the address, and the crowd packed into the University Center was bursting with school spirit.

The press attention and pride was in response to news that the editors of U.S.News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” guide had released only hours before: UMBC was ranked in the top spot for national universities in the guide’s “Up-and-Coming Schools.”

UMBC was also the top-ranked public university in a separate measure of schools showing “unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching” that placed only Dartmouth, Princeton and Yale Universities above the Retrievers in the tally. (Stanford was tied with UMBC.)

The U.S. News guide is one of the most influential such publications in higher education – a resource for parents and potential applicants. UMBC’s recognition “speaks volumes about how the country is looking at our progress,” Hrabowski said. UMBC already had placed fifth in the “Up-and-Coming” category in 2009.

UMBC also was named with 20 other universities as a “Program to Look For” in the category of “Undergraduate Research/Creative Projects.”

Hrabowski noted that the prestigious U.S. News rankings sent a strong message to alumni, philanthropists and politicians: “When you give us the resources we need, we can do great things.”

For more information about the U.S. News rankings, visit www.umbc.edu/bestcolleges.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Exceptional Alumni

UMBC’s alumni excel in a wide range of fields – and in service to the community and the university. That achievement is recognized every year in a very tangible way: UMBC’s Outstanding Alumni of the Year Awards.

In 2009, a committee comprising members of UMBC’s Alumni Board of Directors picked seven award winners whose career success and service make them exceptional examples of what the university can produce.

• James P. Clements ’85, computer science, and ’91 M.S. and ’93 Ph.D., operations analysis, president of West Virginia University, is the Engineering and Information Technology Alumnus of the Year (Clements was profiled in the Summer 2009 UMBC Magazine).

• Jeffrey “Duff” Goldman ’97, history, star of Food Network’s Ace of Cakes, is the Humanities Alumnus of the Year.

• Crystal Watkins ’95, biological sciences, a researcher at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes, is the Alumna of the Year in Natural and Mathematical Sciences.

• Delegate Jon Cardin ’96, M.P.S., policy sciences, a member of Maryland’s House of Delegates, is the Social Science Alumnus of the Year.

• Laura Pasquini ’98, visual arts, director of community programs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is the Visual Arts Alumna of the Year.

• Gustavo Matheus ’90, biological sciences, is the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award. (See profile on page 41.)

• Alicia Wilson ’04, political science, the first UMBC student to win the prestigious Truman Scholarship, is the recipient of the award: The Alumni Association’s new “Rising Star” Award.

For more information about these Exceptional Alumni, visit http://retrievernet.umbc.edu/alumawards.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Ladies First

For the first time in UMBC history, three female students hold the top leadership positions on campus. But Yasmin Karimian ’11 (Student Government Association president), Jen Kent ’11 (SGA vice president) and Gaby Arevalo ’10 (Retriever Weekly Editor) care much more about the tasks ahead of them than any history that they’ve made.

“While I think it’s wonderful that Yasmin, Jen and I are all women and minorities,” says Arevalo, “that isn’t what we’re known for. We’re known for the positions we hold, not for our backgrounds or gender.”

Karimian and Kent are the first female duo in the SGA in the group’s history. But they had no idea they were in a position to achieve that distinction until after turning in their applications to run. Both officers point to generational changes as a reason for their success.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to have grown up in a generation where female leadership is encouraged, and the idea of gender equality is second nature,” says Kent.

While all three women feel lucky to be at a school where it’s not uncommon for women and minorities to hold leadership positions, they also acknowledge that it wasn’t always so common for those who came before them. “We take for granted the support we receive by being women and being able to hold these positions without skeptics surrounding us,” says Karimian. “That certainly was not the case for some of our predecessors, like the first female SGA President, Lisa Dickerson.”

Dickerson ’78, political science (who was profiled in the Winter 2009 UMBC Magazine) gave a speech at the SGA Inauguration in Spring 2009 and noted the struggles she faced 32 years ago.

“I have had the most incredible role models in my two years here, and they shared everything they knew and gave me all the opportunities they could so I would one day be able to serve as SGA president. I hope to do the same for someone else,” says Karimian.

— B. Rose Huber

Co-Creating Campus Citizenry

“Students’ power to create the campus life they want hinges on being able to pull together and express a reasonably unified point of view. When you have student leaders elected in a high-turnout election, the people to whom they speak on behalf of students – campus administrators, public officials and others – know they have to listen. If you don’t vote, you actively make it harder for next year’s SGA to accomplish anything on your behalf.”

When David Hoffman posts on his blog, Co-Create UMBC, about issues that concern students and their role at the university, they (and many others on campus) read and respond.

Hoffman is the assistant director of Student Life for Civic Agency at UMBC, which endeavors to enlarge student participation and empowerment at the university.

He says that Co-Create UMBC is part of a larger effort “to saturate the UMBC environment with opportunities and messages that suggest to students that they have power here. And that being a citizen isn’t just a matter of casting a vote every couple of years. It’s a state of mind that you’re in all the time.”

Hoffman says that the blog gets roughly 1300 hits every week, a number that increased from 600 after the content started to stream from the university’s myUMBC site.

The posts on Co-Create UMBC include candid anecdotes about his own time as a student leader at the University of California, Los Angeles (part of his job at UMBC is to advise the Student Government Association) and a feature drawn from statistics about campus life. (Example: “2 = Number of times UMBC has been closed for an entire day due to snow in the past four years.”)

“‘UMBC by the Numbers’ is an attempt to start a conversation,” he says. “Things that just might wash over you if you see yourself as a customer and not a citizen.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC assistant professor of sociology Zeynep Tufekci investigates how we use Facebook, Twitter and other new social-networking services to define ourselves.

By Joab Jackson ’90
Illustration by Michael Glenwood

UMBC assistant professor of sociology Zeynep Tufekci is not a big fan of technology for its own sake. But if a new electronic gadget helps her get through the day more easily, she is all for it.

Take the baby rocker, for instance. She loves this device. On a summer day at home on maternity leave, Tufekci replaces the hulking C batteries of a pendulous crib that gently rocks her seven-week-old boy to sleep. Babies enjoy an easy back-and-forth motion when sleeping – the rhythmic lull reminds the infant of comfort of the womb. This crib creates a few minutes of space for Tufekci to attend to other matters.

The best technology not only solves human problems, but it can actually change our world – sometimes in ways we don’t fully recognize. And Tufekci has become one of the country’s most called-upon academic experts in explaining how new technologies of social networking—such as Facebook and Twitter—are changing the way we live. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other media outlets about the topic.

Although the term “social networking” is relatively new, the concept has been around since at least the 1980s, when people found that bulletin-board systems (which were nothing more than personal computers that other computers could dial into) provided a virtual meeting ground for exchanging messages, jokes, photos, recipes and anything else of interest.

From those humble beginnings, such virtual spaces are becoming an increasingly large part of our lives. Facebook alone reports having over 200 million users. And these spaces have impacts on external events. In June, thousands of disgruntled Iranians logged onto Twitter, another popular service that allows users to post 140-character messages for others to see, to protest the outcome of their presidential election. The cumulative effect of the angry and informative bursts of information from Tehran and elsewhere in the country not only brought more global news coverage to the election, but also helped protestors evade disruptions of mobile telephones and other messaging services by the government .

“People wonder why these technologies spread so much,” Tufekci says. “It’s kind of like asking: ‘Why do people like foods that are high in salt and sugar?’ Being deeply social is part of being human. It is part of your biology.”

Limits to the Digital Self

Researchers theorize that the average person can, at most, maintain cognitive relationships with about 150 people. Not surprisingly, then, the average number of the people who are “friended” in a typical Facebook user account is about 120, according to the company that runs the service.

Tufekci studies how social networking blurs the boundaries between public and private spaces, a topic she came across almost by accident, thanks to a group of students who “took a short cut they shouldn’t have,” she says.

In an introduction to a sociology class she taught, five students turned in sheets to a quiz with identical handwriting. When she confronted the students about it, they all swore that they didn’t know each other. She already knew they were acquaintances, however, even if they didn’t sit together in class. Each of their Facebook profiles had listed the others as friends. Eventually, they ’fessed up.

After Tufekci disciplined the students involved in the incident, she reflected at greater length on the interaction. “What got me really interested was the fact that these were very smart students, but they did not figure out that their Facebook profile was public,” she says. “I saw that these students are conceptualizing Facebook as a private place, but it is potentially a very public space.”

Tufekci found this peculiar conflation of private and public in digital space revealing. She argues that social networks are a natural extension of our social lives – albeit with some subtle but important differences. When the use of the Internet first became widespread in the mid-1990s, many assumed that users would adopt new roles online, expanding beyond the confines of their physical selves. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” was the caption of a famous New Yorker cartoon of the time.

But this perception that one has the ability to create a new self online largely hasn’t turned out to be the case. Most people use the Internet in general, and social networks in particular, as an extension of their lives, rather than as an alternative to them. “They want to do mundane things. They want to do people things,” she says.

Sam Gosling, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin who also studies social media, agrees with Tufekci. Social media, he observes, “is kind of like the telephone. It’s a new technology for expressing the sorts of things we need to do anyway.”

A Slippery Space

Nonetheless, such online social gathering spots can differ from our normal meeting places, such as a friend’s house or a restaurant, in subtle ways that most users don’t fully appreciate. This disparity in perceptions is what Tufekci’s work centers upon.

In a study published last year in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Tufekci examined the actions and perceptions of 704 college students who used Facebook. A peculiar conundrum emerged: Many students expressed privacy concerns about posting information in a public forum. Yet their concerns did not inhibit them from posting a great deal of revealing information about themselves – including their relationship status, their birth date and their cellular telephone numbers.

What are the dangers of having such information out there? In the real world, two individuals may meet and have a conversation. Both people see each other and the conversation fades into their memories. We traditionally think of this interaction as a private conversation. With social-networking sites, however, those same words can be preserved for the ages, and they are available for others to see.

“Usually intimate interactions are in closed space, and public spaces are civic stuff and they are not intimate. Here we have intimate stuff that is public,” Tufekci says. This “collapsing of the boundaries and conflating of characteristics of private and public spaces” can muddy the way people think about how to use such spaces, such as underestimating how many people will actually see that photo of late-night merriment that you posted only for a few friends.

“I’m a big fan of her work,” says Timothy Finin, a professor in UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department who studies ways to bridge machine languages and human languages. “We’ve developed an understanding about information-sharing based on the physical world. And a lot of those same intuitions don’t apply to the virtual world, and that’s where people can run into problems.”

Talking about Tufekci’s work, Finin is reminded of something called the Wason Selection Task, in which sociologist Peter Wason showed that people may use a different part of their brains for thinking about social rules than they do for solving abstract problems. “Maybe, while on the Internet, you do most of the thinking with your [logical] part of the brain you use with the computers, and not the social part,” Finin says.

Computer Science to Social Science

Tufekci is no stranger to large, sprawling communities. She grew up in Istanbul, which, with about 12 million residents, is the fourth largest city in the world by most estimates. She actually started her career not in sociology, but in computer programming. But she found herself more fascinated by the social effects of technology than with the minutiae of the C programming language.

After taking a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, Tufekci studied the effects of technology on low-income people. As part of her research, she followed a group of people going through a computer-skills training program that held out the promise of high-paying jobs upon the completion of the courses.

“That was a time when people were saying that the Internet would solve everything for everyone,” Tufekci says. “I found it was not so great for people, especially if you are low-income and available jobs are being automated and outsourced.”

Tufekci’s work spans multiple disciplines – sociology, social psychology, computer science, psychology, anthropology and communications. “My work doesn’t fit into an existing discipline. It’s fairly grounded in sociology, but it has been very interdisciplinary,” she says.

Gosling observes that Tufekci’s work is “dispersed over many disciplines, many of which have difficulty talking with each other.”

UMBC has been instrumental in helping Tufekci follow this emerging field of study. When she was in the academic job market, she wanted to find a university that was open to her pursuit of a multi-disciplinary approach.

Surprisingly, such schools were hard to locate. While many hiring committees voiced appreciation for the benefits of studying across departmental lines, they were shyer about hiring such a wandering academic.

At UMBC, however, Tufekci says that she found kindred spirits.

“They hired me knowing that I would be cutting across different disciplines,” she says.

It would be a mistake to dismiss social-networking services as a fad. MySpace and Facebook are this year’s popular virtual destinations for many, and their influence may fade within a few years, but chances are they will replaced by other services. Social-networking services have gained their present popularity by reflecting both innate human behaviors and contemporary trends.

By and large, the Internet started out as a male-dominated domain. But in another 2008 study, published in Information, Communication & Society, Tufekci found that the gap has closed. More women than men whom she studied used Facebook, by a slim margin. “What this showed was that if you have the kind of application that is appealing to women, then they are perfectly willing to adopt it,” she says.

In the same study, Tufekci also found that the difference of how men and women used social-networking services reflected traditional gender roles. Men would use services as a search mechanism for finding things on the Internet. (“What they were searching for, we never found out,” Tufekci jokes.)

Women, by contrast, use such services to connect with existing friends. “I thought this is so stereotypical. You think we’re past that – but apparently not,” she says.

At present, Tufekci is working up an academic review that she hopes will explain how social networks fit in the larger picture of how people have traditionally related to one another. For Tufekci, the use of social-networking services represents a return, in at least some aspects, to a time when we lived in smaller and more close-knit communities.

Only in the past 150 years or so have the vast majority of people left their villages to live and work in larger cities, she notes. Such moves to larger urban centers have brought about a sense of isolation and even alienation, to judge from popular analysis from books such as 1950’s Lonely in the Crowd (written by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) and 1956’s The Organization Man (William Whyte). In many ways, the social-networking sites are returning elements of this older way of living to us, for better and for worse.

“That is the kind of environment our species has lived in for the past 100,000 years,” Tufekci says. “We’re not going back to the village, but we’re bringing back some of its aspects. I want to explain why this is an important development in human history. The questions on the table are not trivial.”

Find UMBC Alumni On Facebook.

I am delighted that one of the features in this issue is written by John Strausbaugh ’74, interdisciplinary studies. Strausbaugh has had a successful career in journalism and cultural criticism, and is the author of a string of books that explore fascinating byways of American culture.

But I’m particularly happy to have Strausbaugh in the magazine because I would not have launched my own career without his help. It’s a story that demonstrates the power that alumni have to mentor and shape the careers of those who follow after them.

You might already have recognized the goofy face on the UMBC identification card below. (Though the Social Security number that also served as campus identification back then has been obscured.) I arrived at UMBC in August 1984, having transferred from the University of Pittsburgh, and was interested in becoming a writer.

Thanks to a continuing web of alumni relations between writers and faculty in the English Department in that era, local writers like Strausbaugh (who was writing fiction and involved in local theatre at that time) were often invited back to give readings on campus.

But Strausbaugh’s increasing claim to fame at that moment was his book and music reviewing for Baltimore City Paper – reviews in which he championed his favorites and savaged whatever he thought was inferior.

After a reading that Strausbaugh gave at the English department one semester, we got to chatting about culture. He looked past the big goofy glasses and saw that I might have some future in the journalism game. Not only did Strausbaugh start letting me hang out with him occasionally, but he also eventually brokered a chance for me to break into print at City Paper. My first review – 10,000 Maniacs’ The Wishing Chair – ran in that newspaper in November 1985, while I was still a student at UMBC.

The chance to put clips from City Paper in my portfolio was a great launching pad for my career. I gained a foothold in journalism that eventually took me great places: On tour with Uncle Tupelo. Reporting on media in Bosnia and pop culture and politics in Serbia. Covering national political conventions.

But it happened largely because an alumnus helped out a student. And while it’s a story that no doubt has been repeated thousands of times at UMBC across many disciplines and schools, it’s also a reminder that we, as alumni, can help shape futures by becoming actively involved in the lives of those who attend UMBC after us.

Want an easy way to get started? Sign up to be a Professional Network mentor. The joint effort between UMBC’s Career Services Center and Alumni Relations allows students to connect with professionals in their desired fields. Go to www.careers.umbc.edu to see what it’s all about and sign up.

— Richard Byrne ’86
byrne@umbc.edu

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III takes your questions.

Q. What book do you recommend that every young person read before they go out into the “real world?”

— Shivonne L. Laird ’99, biological sciences

A. Right now, I think it’s important for students to be constantly reading. And to read even more when they go into the real world, because life is changing in so many ways.

Now if I were forced to choose a book, I would say Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded today. Because it focuses on the need for a green revolution, the impact of technology, the critical role that research on energy will play and the need for innovation and nation-building. It puts America into the global context.

Q. I am impressed by UMBC’s growth, but it seems like the arts are getting the short side of the stick. Are there plans to increase the budget for the arts at UMBC or to expand course and degree offerings in visual arts, theatre, writing and music?

— Maria E. Watters-Mahone ’87, English and M.A. ’00, instructional development systems

A. It’s a great question. The arts and humanities are very much alive here. The fact that we have a new College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) has to do with our continued commitment to build those disciplines. And our number-one capital project – a $150 million facility – is the new performing arts and humanities building for which we have gotten planning funds, and hope to receive construction funds, in order to break ground in 2010.

I spent time today presenting our proposal for construction funds for that facility. And we’ll be spending time every day with legislators and people representing the Governor’s office, about the importance of that building. The fact is that the arts and humanities building, over the next few years, will transform the campus physically and aesthetically.

The development of our Humanities Scholars Program and our Linehan Artist Scholars program is especially significant in attracting high-achieving, talented students in the arts and humanities and getting them support here. Building a community of scholars. And the Dresher Center for Humanities itself is a very strong intellectual initiative on our campus, focusing on research and teaching in the humanities.

More and more is happening in those areas. I invite alumni to come back to some of these activities. And to serve as mentors to our current students.

I’m especially excited about the Kauffman entrepreneurship grant, which is heavily focused in the arts. People expect it to be in economics and engineering – and while those programs are involved, we have a lot of faculty in the arts and the humanities involved in entrepreneurship initiatives, with the thought that we should be preparing students through infusion of entrepreneurship into the curriculum, to be businesspeople. Because if you think about it, when someone starts a photography studio or a dance studio, it is a business that is designed to elevate people culturally, but also to make money. We are being creative about connecting entrepreneurs and the arts.

Q. Aesthetically, where do you think the university will be in five years? What kind of campus should I look forward to seeing when I visit a few years down the line?

— Elan Schnitzer ’06, political science

A. The greening of UMBC. That is our theme. Every time alumni come back, they will see more trees, bigger trees, more shrubbery, more flowers and more initiatives focused on the environment…. An emphasis on making the campus physically and aesthetically appealing to newcomers and alumni as well as faculty, staff and students.

With $400 million in new construction – and with the new arts and humanities building, it will be half a billion – it has been important to focus on the well-being of the environment. I think the biggest difference between the campus today and the campus 20 years ago is grass and trees. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the concrete and laid down grass. And there are never enough trees. The growth of the trees is symbolic of the growth in the stature of the university itself.

Many theatre companies are born out of a mixture of inspiration and frustration. Take The Venus Theatre in Laurel, for instance.

When its founder, Deborah Randall ’94, theatre, graduated from UMBC, she pursued a career as a playwright and a performer in Washington, D.C. Like many recent graduates, Randall had a desire to succeed in a challenging profession. But she also found some of the roles she played and the theatrical atmosphere that surrounded her to be stifling her creativity. She craved a theatre that valued women and living playwrights.

Randall recalls UMBC theatre professor Wendy Salkind’s advice to her. “Every time I would gripe to her,” Randall recalls, “she’d say: If it doesn’t exist, create it. That was her mantra to me.”

The theatre company that Randall founded in 2001 is dedicated to filling what she sees as a gap in the Baltimore-Washington region, presenting shows with a decidedly female perspective and recent work by contemporary playwrights.

The company is in the middle of its current season, which features new plays that include a fresh look at the experience of women characters in Shakespeare and a contemporary retelling of Medea set in Los Angeles. The series concludes this coming fall with a new World War II memory play called Why’d You Make Me Wear This, Joe? by acclaimed writer Vanda and a comedic look at a very difficult Helen of Troy in a new play called Helen of Sparta.

Randall says that the emphasis on new work – especially by women playwrights – is important to her. A steady cultural diet of reality television and revisiting the classical repertoire, she observes, has meant that “there are so many writers who are not getting an opportunity.”

Finding and nurturing new work, she says, “is part of the life of the theatre…. Finding the pulse in a new work is kind of what I wake up in the morning to do.”

Creating what ultimately became Venus Theatre took time, however. Randall started small, crafting one-woman shows for herself that played in various venues in Washington, D.C. She also started a reading series for women writers and tried her hand at children’s theatre before settling on more adult fare.

After a series of misadventures and mishaps, including one show that had its last week in a D.C. theater interrupted by a street explosion that rendered the space unusable, Randall decided that she needed to find a more permanent home.

The constant scrapping and hustling for space to rent “was not cute anymore,” says Randall, especially after the street explosion. After a long search, she finally settled on a storefront space just off Laurel’s Main Street, which she dubbed “The Venus Theatre Play Shack.” She and a dedicated crew of volunteers transformed the place into a black box theater that’s become a new home base for the company, perched halfway between Washington and Baltimore and drawing from both cities and the surrounding community.

Randall recalls her time at UMBC fondly. “I was a nontraditional student,” she says. “So I was a few years older than everyone else. I had been to community college, worked for three years, sown some wild oats…. I wanted to squeeze everything I could out of the experience.”

Along with Salkind, she counts professors Xerxes Mehta and Alan Kreizenbeck as influences on her current career path. Randall also recalls that her roles in a production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade (directed by Mehta) and in Cinders – a play by Polish playwright Janusz Glowack, directed by Kreizenbeck – were particularly memorable.

Though Randall still writes plays (one of her works, Molly Daughter, is included in Anthracite! An Anthology of Pennsylvania Coal Region Plays, which was published by the University of Scranton Press), she says that she “has ended up more of a producer and a director than a writer and actor anymore.” Running a theatre company also involves a lot of logistics and fundraising.

But Randall’s commitment to helping produce new works by playwrights – especially women playwrights – remains a primary challenge that she’s happy to take on. With the classics, she observes, “all the kinks have been worked out in a way.” New work, she says, is where the sizzle and satisfaction is.

“If it has been done too often,” she says, “it doesn’t interest me.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

For more information about Venus Playhouse, visit http://www.venustheatre.org/.

From UMBC Magazine Summer 2009, Early Risers, featuring Crew Club practice, ROTC morning routine, True Grits dining hall, and other UMBC voices — including one hungry squirrel.

Video by Jim Lord.

From UMBC Magazine Summer 2009, How to Purify Water With Simple Tools.

Video by Jim Lord.

We Are Commonvision

There’s a Quadmania T-shirt hanging on the wall, photographs of squirrels and a flyer about baked potatoes. There are smaller note cards, large posters and textured frames that come out from the wall. The area is covered from top to bottom with art and design – and also with creativity and hard work.

“We are commonvision” is the first-ever exhibition from commonvision (a full-service print, copy and marketing center in The Commons) and showcases work from the 2008-2009 staff designers and artists. The exhibition explores the staff’s creative process, individual and group aesthetics and the way they combine their various UMBC educational experiences to create their work.

“This exhibition is really our chance to showcase our work, not just as individuals, but as a collaborative group of designers, co-workers and friends,” said Adam J. Kurtz ’09, exhibit curator and organizer. “commonvision allows us to take our visual arts lessons and apply them to real-world situations, and we’re excited to share our work with the rest of campus.”

The exhibition came along by accident, said Kurtz. He was walking down the hall of the visual arts department when a few professors approached him. Knowing he had curated UMBC ArtWeek 2009 just two months earlier, they asked if he’d be interested in showing more work.

“I immediately thought it would be a great chance for all the commonvision staff to show our collective work, and we took it from there,” he said.

It’s more than just work for these student designers. Working under the guidance of commonvision Coordinator Laura Schraven and Copy Center Supervisor Stephanie Hemling, the staff learns about print production, file management, marketing concepts and tactics, design methods and customer service. Students are able to combine their visual arts education with hands-on experience, putting course materials into action to produce tangible design pieces for real clients.

“What’s truly unique about commonvision is the creative freedom afforded to student staff,” said Kurtz. “Whereas an internship with a design firm might only allow for a limited creative experience, commonvision staff regularly complete projects from conceptualization to production, learning to perform each step of the design process. Every voice is heard and taken into account.”

The exhibit is on display through October 2 in the UMBC Fine Arts building, First Floor Gallery. Included is work by Katie Heater ‘10, Andy Hsu ‘06, Emily Jenkins ‘11, Saira Khan ‘10, Adam J. Kurtz ‘09, Sean Maykrantz ‘09, Tazuko Sugajima ‘10, Erin Surrock ‘10 and Jenna Ullrich ‘10.

For more information, click here.

(9/11/09)

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, takes your questions.

Q. How does UMBC prepare students for the real world? What is UMBC doing to instill a work ethic in students?

— Monique Jones Cephas ’92, information systems management

Q. I’m curious to know what UMBC is doing for its students and alumni in helping them to bridge the “backpack to briefcase” gap between the academic world and the professional world? How is UMBC helping students to prepare for professional careers even while they are still students? And, is it enough? What more can be done?

— Tom Briggs ’05, psychology

A. I think the most important strategy we’ve been using for years is getting students involved in internships. Students who have the opportunity to work in companies, in national agencies, and in schools get a sense of what’s important in the workplace. They also learn how to deal with other people. They come to understand that getting an “A” is not enough. You have to be able to collaborate.

And most important, they have the opportunity to see the relationship between expectations in the workplace and the work they’re doing in the classroom – whether it’s in computing or in the broad liberal arts. Students who work as interns or in part-time jobs are far more realistic about what’s possible after college – and far more proactive in seeking interviews for possible jobs. What’s really exciting is that a large number of our students who work as interns are offered full time work even before they graduate.

As far as preparing students, we have the Shriver Center – which encourages students to take advantage of resources on campus for developing a resume, knowing what jobs are available, and for discussing with advisors what kinds of positions one might apply for. And we have the Office of Career Services, which works with people in obtaining both full-time and part-time opportunities. Both offices are very important. They are involved in building partnerships. They can be very helpful to students – and to alumni, who in many cases are coming back for career days and other services.

The Social Security Administration was on campus on April 29. That agency is hiring 5,000 people in the next five months. Twenty percent of the jobs will be on Security Boulevard. It’s an exciting prospect.

Q. What are your feelings on the Obama administration’s initiatives related to science and how do you think they will impact the ongoing programs and initiatives at UMBC and the current graduating class?

— Camelia Owens ’99, chemical engineering

A. I’m fortunate now to be chairing the National Academies of Science Committee on Underrepresented Groups and the Expansion of the Science and Engineering Workforce Pipeline. So I get a chance to see the official papers of this administration, and to listen to the different national agencies talk about particular initiatives designed to broaden participation in science and engineering. I also had the privilege of reading President Obama’s April 29 speech on investment in science fairly early.

What’s very clear is that the president and his advisors agree that we will need to do much more to encourage students to excel in sciences. We need to strengthen math and science teaching at the K-12 level. We need to get more people to think about becoming math and science teachers. And we need to strengthen teaching and learning at the college level to ensure that students remain in science. Our Chemistry Discovery Center, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the UMBC Annual Fund, is designed exactly for that purpose.

UMBC is uniquely positioned in our country right now to contribute in two broad ways. We produce the highest percentage of students in science and engineering in the University System of Maryland – and the highest of any school, private or public, in the state with the exception of the U.S. Naval Academy. Forty-five percent of our bachelor’s degrees are awarded in science and engineering.

At the same time, UMBC is producing hundreds of liberally-educated students across disciplines. Our society will need both to ensure that America’s future is bright.

According to Google Maps, it takes a little over three hours to get from Catonsville to Morgantown, West Virginia. For James P. Clements ’85, computer science, and ’91 M.S. and ’93 Ph.D., operations analysis, the journey has taken a little bit longer than that – about 27 years, in fact.

But the destination has been worth the drive, which also took detours through The Johns Hopkins University (where he took an M.S. in computer science in 1988) and Towson University, where he has served as provost and vice president for academic affairs for the past two years. On June 30, Clements will arrive in Morgantown to become West Virginia University’s 23rd president.

It’s not hard to see why West Virginia University tapped Clements, whose career as a scholar and researcher took wing quickly after he received his Ph.D. from UMBC in 1993. He was tenured at Towson University only two years after receiving his doctorate.

His ascent in academic leadership has been even more dizzying – including stints as vice president of Towson’s Economic and Community Outreach division, as provost, and a key role in devising and monitoring that university’s 2010 Strategic Plan.

Clements says that the first strides of his time on the fast track began at UMBC. Like many students of his era, he chose UMBC for factors of proximity and cost – and found an unexpectedly rich academic experience in Catonsville.

Clements says that he realized the quality of the education he got when he went out into the workforce. “When I came out, and went to work for industry – I worked for a company called General Physics, which is run by Robert W. Deutsch, who has been very generous to UMBC – I felt so prepared. I was working with people who’d been at some of the top institutions in the country, and I felt that I had an equal level of education to anyone in that building.”

A job in industry after his graduation in 1985 did not sidetrack Clements from his dream of becoming a professor, however. “I started right away on graduate school,” he says. “I didn’t take a semester off.” But he did so at nights and on weekends – at one point even cutting a deal with his employer for reduced hours to obtain his Ph.D. at UMBC.

In a happy coincidence, Clements received his Ph.D. from UMBC on the same day – and in the same ceremony – that his brother Joseph H. Clements Jr. ’85 computer science and M.S and Ph.D., mathematics, received his doctorate. “We were side-by-side on the stage,” he recalls. “It was one of my mother and father’s happiest days.”

When Clements did finally end up in academia as a professor at Towson University, he says that he found it to be “probably the best job in the world. I love to teach. I love writing papers. I love doing research. I love working with the students.”

Yet he soon acquired the itch to try his hand at administration. Clements discovered that he had a knack for the coordination and fundraising that goes along with academic leadership – and also that he liked it. And those talents led him all the way to Morgantown.

The challenges of being president of any flagship state university are immense. They’ve been made even more difficult at West Virginia because of a scandal involving the improper awarding of a degree that rocked the university and forced the resignation of its president, Michael S. Garrison, last year.

Clements acknowledges those unique challenges. He credits West Virginia University’s interim president, C. Peter Magrath, for calming the waters before his arrival. “That has really given me an opportunity to come in and say, as I did when I interviewed on the campus: ‘WVU has been around since 1867. It has a great history. It’s going to have a great future. We just have to get past where we’ve been stuck right now and think about who we want to be in 10 and 20 years down the road.’”

Looking back at UMBC from across more than two decades (and across town from his perch at Towson University), Clements feels a lot of pride and appreciation at the growth of his alma mater.

“Let me put it this way: Every time I see [UMBC’s president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III], I thank him for raising the value of my degree,” Clements says with a laugh. “It’s true. Freeman is so dynamic and so charismatic. And it’s not just him. The institution has great faculty members. Great administrators. It has just continued to climb up and up and up. And for me, even though I work at Towson, I love UMBC. It’s been great watching it skyrocket into one of the hottest universities in the country.”

— Richard Byrne ’86