Each year, UMBC’s Baja SAE team designs and constructs a vehicle that is built to withstand challenging terrain and weather, while also keeping budget, vehicle weight, and agility in mind. The team ended this year’s season strong, finishing in the top 12 overall at each of three competitions across the country.

“After placing eighth in the world in 2018, the team aimed to build a lighter, faster car that would allow us to finish the year with a higher overall finish,” says Rob Sherwood ‘20, mechanical engineering, a member of the team. “The biggest challenge we faced this season was the increased level of competition among the top-tier schools.”

UMBC’s team, now celebrating its 30th season, competes against institutions from across the country that have strong Baja SAE teams and innovative vehicles. While many of the students who have worked with Baja SAE over the years come from engineering backgrounds, team have also included members from other majors, making it a truly interdisciplinary project. 

Leading up to the first competition, the team dedicates hours to making adjustments to the vehicle to prepare for the season. At each competition, teams are scored based on a range of criteria including cost, design, sales, and endurance. Their performance in the cost categories at each competition proved to be their strongest.

“While we know the car had the potential to do even better, we are still extremely happy with our results,” says Sherwood. “We had the second most successful season since our establishment in 1989.”

The first competition of the 2019 season was held in Tennessee, April 11-14. The team finished fifth overall, and earned first place in the cost category.

On the west coast, the team competed in California in May. The team’s strength in developing a cost-effective vehicle was recognized again, earning them second place in the category, and 11th overall out of the 99 teams from across the country that participated.

The final competition of the season was held in Rochester, NY, in June. UMBC’s team again earned second place in the cost component of the competition, and 12th overall. 

Sherwood shares that the team finished the season with 2,337 points, the second highest number of points in the history of the UMBC Baja SAE team. “The team is young and has a lot of potential,” he says, adding that he is looking forward to next season. 

Banner image: A member of the Baja team working on a part of the vehicle. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

There will be a schedule change on the Penn Line effective Monday, August 5, marking the completion of Amtrak trackwork south of Baltimore.  We thank our passengers for their patience during this necessary work.  Amtrak trackwork will now shift to the area of Martin Airport north of Baltimore.

Most of the schedule changes are minor, but passengers should note that several trains will be earlier than they currently operate.  Full information on the new schedule, including links to download PDF copies of the new schedule, is on the MDOT MTA website at: www.mta.maryland.gov/marc-schedule-change-august2019

Thank you for riding MARC Train.

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Saturday, August 3rd and Friday, August 9th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Saturday, 8/3/2019 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Friday, 8/9/2019 between 5pm and 10pm (most systems will only be down for a shorter period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks!

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT

Maryland Art Place is seeking Fall Interns!

Interns are responsible for assisting MAP in a variety of ways, ranging from programming to administration, with opportunities for special projects depending on skills and professional interest. Intern duties include: performing research; assisting with gallery preparation and installation; photo/video documentation, coordinating events, gallery sitting, social media, and community outreach.

Required: High interest. Positive attitude. Professional demeanor. Reliability.