This summer, UMBC’s Center for Global Engagement (CGE) is excited to welcome its second cohort of the prestigious Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, the six-week flagship program of the U.S. Government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). The new cohort includes 25 innovators from countries across Sub-Saharan Africa representing education, journalism, tech, health care, and more. The fellows will spend six weeks living at UMBC networking and attending diversity and leadership skills workshops. They will also meet with campus, local, and state leaders, learn more about Baltimore’s LGBTQ+ leaders of color, developmental disabilities at The ARC Baltimore, trauma-informed practices, and more.

“The fellowship is a beacon of hope,” says Jok Thon, M.P.S. ’24, entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership, a 2018 University of Delaware YALI fellow and UMBC’s first Global Peaceworker Fellow. Thon is a father of four and the director and founder of Promised Land Primary and Secondary School and Promised Land College in Juba, South Sudan, which has educated over 1500 displaced students. “As a witness and participant in this transformative experience, I wholeheartedly attest the journey is as profound for the mentors as it is for the fellows.” 

Thousands of leaders ages 25 – 35, across 49 Sub-Saharan African countries covet a prestigious YALI fellowship. YALI hopefuls must condense years of leadership in business, civic engagement, and public management into one application, demonstrating concrete ongoing efforts to broaden access to education, health care, and workforce development. These 700 spots across 28 U.S. educational institutions are considered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, for both fellows and host institutions, to strengthen connections between the U.S. and Africa and establish enduring partnerships between fellows, local communities, and private businesses through their expertise, perspectives, and experiences.

“YALI is a huge deal in my country and Africa. It’s a journey I want to take with my whole community, nation, and the world,” says 2023 UMBC YALI fellow Victoria Merab Akinyi. She is the CEO and co-founder of Streetlights Uganda, a visual and performing arts-based organization empowering children living on the streets with entrepreneurship and life skills to become self-employed and engaged citizens.

“I have a master’s degree in fine arts and two fashion companies. I don’t take my degrees, work with my community, and my YALI experiences for granted because they have all helped open doors for me.”

Creating a Retriever YALI Village

Becoming a YALI host is also an arduous but worthwhile process. It requires developing a six-week international residency program unique to the institution’s resources and the fellows’ needs. When Ryan Sheldon, M.A. ’15, teaching English to speakers of other languages, director of the English Language Institute and special programs within CGE, and Madison Pickard, M.A. ’24, intercultural communication, and assistant director of special programs and co-academic director of the YALI Fellowship, applied to bring YALI to UMBC in 2023, Thon was excited to join the team as a program assistant.

“It was so valuable to our fellowship having Jok as a program assistant and a resource for the fellows while they were here,” says Pickard. “Jok assisted the fellows in leadership activities, accompanied us on on-site visits, and facilitated their weekly feedback and reflection sessions as our leadership coordinator.”

Designing a “Retriever YALI Village” requires many hands. The village was equipped with campus housing, transportation, catering, activities, and a budget for each fellow. Thanks to campus and community partners, it also included workshops, projects, events, and speakers. 

“We invited trusted partners aligned with our fellows, had conversations with them, and created a space for the fellows to choose their level of engagement,” says Pickard. The proposal was a winner.

In summer 2023, 24 young African leaders came to UMBC to share and learn new skills to empower them as critical leaders in addressing issues facing women, girls, and children, mental and public health, education, community organizing, NGO management, sustainability, and more. Fellows engaged in academic sessions, community service, site visits, and networking events and met state and local government leaders, businesses, and community organizations. They also joined in Baltimore’s baseball season at the Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

“Together, we explored the notion that true leadership is rooted in service and that we can drive meaningful progress by embracing diversity and harnessing collective strengths,” says Thon. Due to the program’s success, UMBC was chosen to host again in June 2024. 

All for all

Fellows are often inspired into action by personal experiences. Their superpower is knowing they alone are not the answer. Fellows share their community-building strategies and acquire new expertise to address ongoing challenges. It’s not all-for-one, or one-for-all, but all-for-all.

Leveraging social media for social justice is a key approach for Ellen Kalaputse Nanyeni, a financial modeling and valuation analyst from Namibia. As a survivor of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), she understands the victim blaming and legal hurdles survivors face to access care and protection. Nanyeni promotes equal opportunity rights and the safety of women in Namibia via the #Shutitalldown Namibia SGBV awareness social media movement and through the #Breakfree #Befree support services initiative established by Monica Geingos, the First Lady of Namibia.

In Nigeria, Sunday Emmanuel Onuche networks with schools and disability organizations to further disability justice. Onuche promotes inclusion, leadership opportunities, and self-reliance for people with disabilities like himself via his VisionLink Initiative. 

Skateboarding is John Kabiye Kalenga’s community development tool. As a professional skateboarder and the coach for Zambia’s first Olympic skateboard team at the 2022 Tokyo Olympics, Kalenga lives and breathes the sense of belonging skateboarding has given him. As vice president of the Skate Association of Zambia, he teamed up with more than 30 international skatepark construction volunteers to build Zambia’s first-ever skatepark creating a safe haven for young people. 

CNN World: Zambian instructor empowers kids through skateboarding

These are just a few of the 2023 YALI fellows who connected over the summer of 2023 and returned to their countries with new leadership skills and tools for change.

Implementing the YALI Way

YALI is one summer, but it’s what comes afterward when the fellows return home that the work truly becomes YALI work. Merab Akinyi returned to Uganda intent on expanding Streetlights Uganda’s reach. She fundraised to remodel old houses in areas of high need. The additional classrooms and offices launched the Ntunga project, Changing Lives Through Fashion. It equips women and children with marketable skills to sustain their families. Her team continues to run the Mwalimu Mentorship, an apprenticeship connecting artists with youth, and the Unseen Me children’s exhibition. 

Currently, Streetlights Uganda manages two training centers for women and two for street children. Merab Akinyi and her team of seven organizers have reached over 60 women in the past 3 years and over 400 street children.

Merab Akinyi’s next project is inspired by a YALI fellow who reuses empty bottles for building construction. “Many bottles are lying around. We are looking to develop an awareness campaign on how to use bottles to save the environment,” says Merab Akinyi. “These bottles can be repurposed to fix drainage problems around the centers and add more space.”

Pickard notes this is the goal of the fellowship. “We create opportunities for fellows to learn from each other and for everyone to challenge and develop their personal growth and values.” 

Overlapping hearts and minds

The deep sense of camaraderie drew the attention of UMBC community members outside of YALI resulting in powerful friendships and mentorships that continue to this day. Pickard connected Merab Akinyi with artist Ariel Valéria Barbosa, M.P.S. ’24, community leadership, after noticing Merab Akinyi’s passion for using art as a vehicle for change. Barbosa is the program coordinator for UMBC’s food pantry Retriever Essentials and leads A Gente, an organization that gives opportunities to Black artists to travel to the African Diaspora to co-create free exhibitions for the local community. 

“There are similarities in our surrealist art styles and wanting to use the little we have and our charisma and intelligence to expand impact for our people,” says Barbosa. “Victoria is really good at what she does, and I want her talents to be nurtured and supported.” Barbosa linked Pickard with DewMore, a nonprofit that uses poetry as a platform for youth leadership.

“It was full circle for me to listen to Victoria read a poem she wrote during the DewMore poetry workshop about her experience in Baltimore,” says Barbosa. “She carries herself with a lot of composure and dignity, like a voice for the people. That is just who she is.”

Ariel Barbosa and Victoria Merab Akinyi. (Image courtesy of Merab Akiniyi.)

A smile goes a long way

Lovetta Y. Qualah is the founder and CEO of Positive Actions Driving Safety (PADS), which addresses period poverty by providing free sanitary products to women and girls in Monrovia, Liberia. She found a kindred heart in Namrata Oruganti ’24, biology. As a summer conference assistant, Oruganti helped code keys, fold towels, organize sheets, and prepare comforters for the fellows. “I was blessed to be at that desk,” says Oruganti. The first night, the YALI group organized a party for a fellow who had arrived on his birthday. 

“I couldn’t believe the fellows weren’t familiar with each other. Each person contributed something they already had,” says Oruganti. They invited her to share a meal and, once they learned of her love for Afro-beats, to dance.

Oruganti had no idea they were CEOs or experts. “Not one person made me feel like I was less than them. People in leadership sometimes forget that,” says Oruganti, known to her friends—which now include the fellows—as Smiley. “Sometimes I forget.” 

“Smiley took an interest in me as a person, my work, and my progress,” says Qualah. “Smiley was a really good ambassador for UMBC. She is an image of positive energy. Always checking in on everybody.”

As Oruganti applies to medical school, she keeps her YALI lessons in mind. “The fellows are the most amazing, sweet, and humble people. They taught me how to be a collective,” says Oruganti. “They will always be part of my life story.” The fellows congratulated her on her recent graduation on their WhatsApp chat. “Smiley wasn’t even a part of YALI but she became an integral part,” says Qualah.
(Image courtesy of Oruganti)

Conversation + connection = action

Deep understanding is the goal. Mentorship is the path. To listen, think, share, and reflect is the YALI way. With the help of mentors like Joby Taylor, Ph.D. ’05, language, literacy, and culture, and director of the Shriver Center, fellows build mentorship tools to better communicate with their communities and instill mentorship programs. Taylor led a workshop on place, sense of place, and placemaking as social change in Africa and Baltimore City.

“Jok and I have had a two-year conversation where we have learned so much about leadership from each other and South Sudan and Baltimore,” says Taylor, who is also Thon’s host family. “Living and working with him makes you want to be a better person.” 

Thon put theory to practice by helping fellows complete paperwork and hone their professionalism skills. “This was my favorite part because I saw myself in their work and they saw themselves in my work at UMBC and back home in South Sudan,” says Thon. Heplayed basketball with them every Sunday. “They called me their mentor and big brother.”

Merab Akinyi appreciated the intention, “Beyond the classes, the dedication, and humility of the facilitators—especially Ryan Sheldon, Madison, and Jok—were great lessons to me as a leader and great virtues for me to take back home.”

(l-r): Pickard, Merab Akinyi, Sheldon, David Di Maria, senior international officer and associate vice provost for international education. (Image courtesy of Mirab Akinyi)

A year later, Qualah continues to reflect on the fears she had while at YALI and how UMBC community members helped her overcome this. “While at YALI I had imposter syndrome. I was looking for validation every day,” says Qualah. “Everything changed when I met amazing people at UMBC: President Valerie Sheares Ashby, Sally Scott, Madison Pickard, Ryan Sheldon, Jok Thon, and, my dear friend and YALI fellow, Lillian Ndilwa. They challenged my perspective, highlighting the unique value I bring and the importance of my contributions. Words like ‘You deserve to be here,’ and ‘Your work is needed’ resonated deeply.” Today, Qualah puts these beliefs to work and is a visible and outspoken leader sharing PADS’ success and her UMBC YALI experience on Facebook.

Africans for Africa

This year, YALI celebrates its 10th anniversary. Nearly 6,500 leaders have taken YALI’s multi-tiered mentorship approach across all sub-Saharan countries. Thon notes convening 20-plus African leaders in one room is a feat on its own. “It’s hard bringing people together in Africa,” he says. “I can have connections in Congo or Kenya because those are my neighboring countries, but you cannot really know what the young people are doing in South Africa from South Sudan or a West African country.”

This summer Thon will extend the YALI ripple effect, working as a partnership associate at CorpsAfrica, a non-profit organization focused on engaging youth and helping rural communities overcome extreme poverty.

“Every little act of peace and kindness gets us closer to building a just and prosperous society where there is no weak or strong, poor or rich,” says Thon, “but a society that thrives on the basic principles of living a dignified life guided by empathy.”

Neurodiversity inclusion and representation have been at the forefront of Michael Canale’s 20-year career in the disability services and education field. Canale, M.A. ’24, intercultural communication, is the assistant director of UMBC’s Office of Student Disability Services and teaches the first-year seminar Introduction to Disability Studies. “Sometimes parents of neurodivergent students worry that their child is incapable of learning another language,” says Canale. “I work with parents to ease their fears by showing them how their child can excel in college with the proper individualized accommodations.” These can include note-taking software, counseling services, tutoring, time management support, and more.

When Canele, who also received his post-master’s certificate in college teaching and learning science, heard that UMBC’s first Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, Jules Buendgens-Kosten,would be teaching Language Learning and Special Education – Advanced Special Topics in Education, he was quick to enroll. The course, part of UMBC’s teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) master’s program, was designed for anybody planning to work with heterogeneous groups of learners, including those of different neurotypes, both in special education and mainstream education settings. 

Buendgens-Kosten, a research assistant at the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany,began theirpartnership with UMBC as a research collaboration with Shannon Sauro, associate professor of education.Sauro recognized that Buendgens-Kosten’s expertise in English language teaching and teaching neurodivergent populations in Germany would add an international and non-U.S.-based perspective to UMBC’s TESOL program and education department. 

My uni (@UMBC) just got so much geekier and cooler.

Grant Clifton 

Degree: M.A., Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
Hometown: Fresno, CA
Post-grad plans: English language educator in Indonesia

For Grant Clifton, teaching English effectively requires a combination of intensive technical training in English language instruction and a passion for building community. Prior to enrolling at UMBC, Clifton taught English at a school in Indonesia for several years. He has a long-standing commitment to service and community engagement, which included being a Peace Corps volunteer in Indonesia from 2017 to 2019, where he taught English to high school students.

After returning to the U.S., Clifton continued his combined focus on learning and community impact through UMBC’s Shriver Peaceworker Fellows program. Additionally, he worked as a writing tutor at the English Language Institute (ELI) and facilitated in-person and virtual conversation clubs with ELI’s English Conversation Partner program. Clifton shares that leading the conversation clubs was important to him because he was “able to see English learners gain more confidence and improve their conversational skills through the community I’ve built with them.”

As a TESOL research assistant, Clifton worked with Jiyoon Lee, associate professor of education, exploring issues of English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers’ and learners’ language assessment literacy. He recently presented this research at the 2023 American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting. After graduation, Clifton will return to Indonesia to teach English at an international school. 

Has there been a mentor or fellow student who influenced your time at UMBC?

“My supervisor at the English Language Institute, Ryan Sheldon, has been a mentor to me during my entire time at UMBC. He has provided me with a lot of opportunities for professional growth and supported me through some really tough times. Few can say that their boss has made their life easier!”

Is there a particular academic achievement you’re most proud of?

“Being accepted to the Shriver Peaceworker Program at UMBC is the achievement I am most proud of. We were able to act as a support group for one another and exchange ideas in weekly practicum seminars on topics related to social engagement and ethical reflection. I learned so much and grew significantly as a person, thanks to the program. I don’t think I would have been as successful or would have made as much personal growth if I had not been part of the Shriver Peaceworker Program. 

Additionally, I am proud of completing and successfully defending my thesis after a long series of delays and mishaps, which left me feeling discouraged at times, all while being a full-time student and working 30-40 hours a week.”

Students come to UMBC for many reasons—to find community, to explore a passion, to make change in the world. Once they figure out the “why” that truly drives their interests, the Retriever community is ready to kick in with the “how” to help make those plans a reality. Part of that looks like the traditional classroom experience with a professor, of course—but just as important are the experiential-learning moments that help many students actively connect the knowledge to careers they hope to pursue after graduation. 

UMBC students pursue applied learning in huge numbers. Despite the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of our recent graduates engaged in applied learning, including internships, research, co-ops, and service learning during their time at UMBC. An impressive 91 percent of new grads head directly to a job, advanced degree, or both within six months of graduating—and of those, more than half interned or worked for their employer as a student. 

“When it comes to impact, there is nothing more valuable than engaging in applied-learning opportunities to help clarify one’s career direction, build professional skills, and increase one’s professional network,” shares Susan Hindle, the Career Center’s assistant director of internships and employment. 

For students pursuing experiential learning through internships, campus jobs, research, and community engagement, it’s not just about learning how to do the thing they want to do. It’s about connecting the work to the passions that brought them to UMBC in the first place. These students and alumni working in their chosen fields tell the whole picture—what hands-on learning looks like when it comes full circle.

Essential Connections 

The desire to help people comes from deep within. But knowing how to do it successfully on a large scale—and understanding the systems and politics that  can make the job more or less challenging—takes more than  just compassion. 

On the morning of the monthly food delivery from the Maryland Food Bank, the brigade of students who keep the Retriever Essentials food pantry running see all sides of the work. Together, they unload and shelve staples like rice, pasta, and huge crates of broccoli for the more than 2,100 visits to the pantry so far this year. At the same time, they work with community members to understand what might make life better—halal meats, for one; more campus job opportunities, another biggie—and then put their heads together to try to make those changes happen.

For Ariel Barbosa, a grad student in UMBC’s community leadership program, working in this space is part of a journey that started with her trying to understand her Brazilian father’s immigrant experience better. As she works with Retriever Essentials, she’s learning about the complexities of these experiences in a way that will help her as she carves out a career in service. “There are so many signs showing me that I’m supposed to be right here, right now. I feel like I’m preparing,” she says. “Right now, I feel like I’m in a confidence-building, skill-building phase where I’m just trying to pick up as many skills as I can to be able to create what I feel I need to create at the right time.” 

As a student, Matthew Dolamore ’08, modern languages and linguistics, caught a first glimpse of what would later become a service-based career when he tutored Spanish-speaking clients for an immigration services office in Baltimore. After graduating, he went on to serve with AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and earned a master’s degree in community planning before pulling all of those skills together into a full-circle career in Baltimore. 

Today, Dolamore is program director for the Esperanza Center, a project of Catholic Charities that assists more than 3,000 individuals each year with walk-in immigration services, including healthcare, legal assistance, and education tools. Dolamore serves as a connector between people and solutions, helping people get what they need when they need it and looking for ways to help improve the system. 

“Among our managers we have a nurse practitioner, a managing attorney, a licensed social worker, an individual who got their master’s in teaching English from UMBC, and a woman who oversees our one-touch client services desk who’s a former immigrant and just has a really dynamic background. And just those five people alone is symbolic of what I love about my job,” says Dolamore. 

“I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a legal professional. I’m not a social worker. I’m something myself of a generalist nonprofit manager at this stage in my career, but I get the opportunity every day to come in and out of these really focused professional engagements and try to help all five of them think of each other as teammates, and that’s the part of my job I really enjoy.” 

Lydia Sannella, a Peaceworker and grad student in applied sociology at UMBC, also enjoys the organizational aspect of her job with Retriever Essentials. As she looks ahead to her post-academic career, she’s already thinking about how she can continue to marry her values with her career—knowing that it won’t likely be quite the same as what she’s experiencing at UMBC. 

“I find that, whenever we want to do something, there are supportive, knowledgeable experts who want to help,” she says. “There’s just hoards of students who want to be involved and engaged and do any variety of work, from physical lifting to technical projects. And it’s just this canvas for creativity and possibility. It’s very reciprocal. What I’m able to contribute ends up being more significant and then what I get ends up being more significant.” 

— Jenny O’Grady

Becoming part of the solution

Students come to higher education for a variety of reasons, and among them, many have the goal of learning to create new things—from innovative water-quality solutions to entire companies. For many students, in fact, learning while doing is an integral part of going to college. 

If you ask Premal S. Shah ’98, biochemistry and molecular biology, however, he’ll tell you that there’s a world of difference between learning while doing and learning from doing. 

That’s not to say that Shah, who earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology on his way to founding and leading a string of successful healthcare-related companies, doesn’t believe in academics. But from his vantage point as CEO at MyOme, a genomics firm based in northern California, classroom-based learning is only a part of the puzzle. 

Shah said he’s always had a practical streak, but he found out how much experiential learning can boost classroom learning thanks to a hands-on internship and fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, beginning while he was a student at UMBC.

“When I got to grad school, there were a lot of people who hadn’t really worked in a lab or done stuff,” he said. “I had a huge head start, just because I was able to pick up a pipette and actually use it. I knew what a DNA extraction protocol was. I knew how to use certain machinery.” 

It was a vivid object lesson—one Shah has carried forward into his career. “When you start building companies, there’s always that challenge…of analysis paralysis, right?” he said. “There’s a notion of, ‘We could do this or that. Let’s read and learn more or get additional inputs in search of the perfect answer.’ Or we can actually go build something that will benefit people and iterate even faster as we learn more to make it much better.” 

That’s the big difference between studying science and, for example, running science-based companies, Shah says: “The hypotheticals are great. The theories are great. But you’ve got to get [things] done.” 

Getting things done is Matt Stromberg’s perennial modus operandi. Being a Ph.D. student studying environmental engineering means he is very much both an environmental scientist—someone who studies environmental problems—and an engineer: someone who works to solve those problems. “I always knew I was a passionate environmentalist, but I also knew I liked to build things,” he said. 

In fact, Stromberg, who graduated in 2019 from the University of Virginia with bachelor’s degrees in both environmental engineering and environmental science, is a literal embodiment of learning while doing. Working as both a graduate research assistant and a researcher in the jointly run University System of Maryland Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), he sometimes finds himself simultaneously running experiments and keeping the experiments running. 

A few months ago, Stromberg said, the night before an experiment was scheduled to start, a pump failed in IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center, a 1,800-square-meter facility with hundreds of fish tanks. 

“It was a large pump, and it needed to be replaced—and it was eight o’clock at night,” Stromberg said. “I had already worked 12 hours that day, [but] I realized that there’s no way this experiment is going to run if I don’t have a pump tomorrow. So…I got the wrenches and I got all the fittings I needed,” and found a way to fix it. 

Stromberg’s ability to save that experiment is part and parcel of his approach. One of his main research projects is unclogging a major bottleneck that prevents more farm-raised fish from getting to market: purging them of an unsavory flavor that’s sometimes characteristic of fish that aren’t caught in the wild. As Stromberg put it, “You’re not going to sell the fish if it tastes like dirt.” 

That’s a problem not only for aquaculture companies—which have to use lots of water, time, money, and energy to purge the fish of this taste—but also for the planet. That’s because the only alternative to aquaculture is fishing in the wild, which can destroy ecosystems but is still cheaper than aquaculture, due to the expensive purging process. 

He’s working with advanced oxidative processes and a technology of his own that would effectively create a shortcut, making it more cost-effective to farm fish and thus helping to protect wild habitat in the process. And Stromberg aims to eventually put his Ph.D. to work in a similarly practical way: His goal is to create a company that performs chemical analysis and remediation of water contaminants. 

“I’ve learned a lot from my time here,” he says. “Especially not to over-engineer things!” 

— Scott Cech

Community-centered art

Visual art is all around us—in flyers, television commercials, and even clothes. And while many of us may never know the artists creating work behind the scenes, their lives and experiences certainly do shape their work. 

For instance, earlier this year, Jennifer White-Johnson ’08, visual arts, designed a collection for Target’s national Latino Heritage Month campaign, including a tumbler with stacked text reading sonando vivamente vividly dreaming and a T-shirt proudly proclaiming piel canela pelo rizado (brown/cinnamon skin curly hair). As a disabled, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina designer from Baltimore, White-Johnson sees her inclusion as an opportunity to highlight and provide a voice to communities that often aren’t heard or represented.

“I am really honored to have been chosen and included in this year’s Target Latino Heritage Month collection and campaign,” says White-Johnson. “Using art and design to celebrate and elevate my cultural stories, the strength, and legacy of my ancestors, felt like something that was meant to be!” 

Living with undiagnosed ADHD as a student, White-Johnson often felt like her intensity, excitement, and point of view were unwelcome or just too much. That changed when she transferred to UMBC, where she immediately felt at home. In particular, her time as director of promotions for the Student Events Board [(seb)] gave her her first taste of how graphic design could marry with communit-ycentric work. 

Working closely with the Office of Student Life, White-Johnson and other members of (seb) volunteered during an alternative spring-break trip to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. White-Johnson also designed the T-shirts. 

“This was in 2007, so we could help offer some sort of relief from Hurricane Katrina,” says White-Johnson. “It was life-changing because I was able to surround myself with other like-minded scholars that were serious about academic life but who also understood that school is about self-discovery.” 

Enter Patch Hatley, a sophomore visual arts major with a concentration in animation. Fresh from a session learning how to create stop-motion animation puppets from paper, she is excited to test out some of what she’s learned on the job at commonvision, the student-driven print and design center in The Commons. On any given day, one might find her working on anything from animating cute countdowns for student activities to designing stickers. 

“I’m always constantly learning in an environment like commonvision,” she says. “Each new skill helps transition to the next project, and each project creates new and exciting opportunities. You’re always surrounded by a team who are all community-driven, so I always feel like I can ask for help or constructive criticism. commonvision supports, drives, and motivates me to keep reaching for the stars and will always be an important part of how I’ve grown—not just as an artist but as a team player.” 

Hatley finds work at commonvision particularly helpful because it stretches her creative muscles and opens up her craft to new programs, tools, and mediums, and also because other creators surround her. After spending a decade in animation and illustration before becoming a Retriever, Hatley loves the opportunity to expand her craft in a place that has fostered the foundation for budding designers for years—and getting to bring her personal perspective into work for clients. 

“At the end of the day, you’re drawing for yourself and for the people around you whether you realize it implicitly or not,” says Hatley. At the core of both artists’ practices is community. Both White-Johnson and Hatley recognize that their art doesn’t live in a vacuum but exists as a letter of inspiration, solidarity, and encouragement to their respective communities. Both artists, years apart in their practice, found similar communities to nurture and invest in them. 

“Being given the space to bring visibility to themes of cultural intersectionality, specifically the parts of our natural beauty that aren’t always celebrated, our caramel brown, cinnamon skin, and our natural curls,” says White-Johnson. “I hope my work can culturally inspire others to center what they want to see more of.” 

— Sharéa Harris

Taking experiential learning to the next level

Developing high-level skills in a highly technical field like computer science is difficult enough. But the ability to both master and successfully teach those skills to others takes the challenge to a whole new level. 

Fortunately, Amina Mahmood and Zach Margulies thrive at that level. With their dedication to passing along computer-science knowledge, these Retrievers amply demonstrate that doing while teaching and learning while doing are just different parts of the same equation. 

As Mahmood ’21, computer science, tells it, she started learning while doing quite literally. Just weeks into her first year at UMBC, Mahmood found herself working 20 hours a week as a junior malware analyst at Huntress, a cybersecurity firm that was then still in the startup phase at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

“I didn’t really have any experience, but I was pretty ambitious, so I learned everything on the job,” she said.

Mahmood, part of UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, quickly learned how to run different types of malware on a virtual machine, dissect the particulars of each, and create mitigation reports. The nascent company’s culture also helped boost her confidence. If she ran into a problem, she said, the people she worked with were glad to bring her up to speed. 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you don’t know this—let me teach it to you.’ And then I picked up on it and then I was like, ‘OK—I can do this,’” Mahmood said. Mahmood was quick to apply such on-the-job learning to her academics, even persuading an academic advisor to allow her to add her to his overenrolled, graduate-level software reverse-engineering course at the same time she was enrolled in an undergraduate prerequisite class. 

Mahmood not only aced the graduate-level class, she also started using what she had learned to complete the experiential-learning cycle at her new part-time job at Parsons Corp., a technology-focused defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructure engineering firm. 

“One of my mentors at Parsons—he really supported me, and he said, ‘You know a lot about reverse engineering. Why don’t you just make a course and teach coworkers?’” That’s exactly what Mahmood did— and now does for new summer interns as a full-time reverse engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. 

Recently she found herself completing the circle, coming back to UMBC for the same kind of career fair where she’d found her first job as a first-year student. “But [this time] I didn’t go as a student,” she noted. “I went as an employer.” 

Margulies ’14, biological sciences, is completing his own trajectory: Nearly a decade after earning his first bachelor’s degree, he has returned to UMBC to earn a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in education, with the goal of teaching computer science to Baltimore high school students when he graduates in 2024. 

Margulies started his career pivot before diving back into academics immersing himself in on-the-job data science and programming—including a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing internship at the Maryland Department of Health after starting in the computer science program. Because of this, he’s able to pursue his studies with a greater sense of perspective.

“I feel like it inspires confidence and it builds your self-esteem, taking what you’ve learned in the class and not even a semester later applying it in a real-world setting,” he said. 

Margulies noted that, as a teacher, he’ll also be able to fully address high schoolers’ perennial classroom question: ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’ 

“It’s really important for teachers to know what the practical application of [schoolwork] is going to be and what working in a computer science job will look like,” he said. 

A case in point, Margulies said, was the work he did as part of a Maryland Department of Health internship last summer, reviewing and finding improvements for data collection, including the creation of a data dashboard. 

“Last semester, I took Computer Science 201, and we learned the programming language Python, and I really wanted to start applying that language at the internship,” he said. Because he’d had both practical experience and formal training, Margulies said, he was able to see that he’d have to adapt what he’d learned to suit the task at hand. 

“[I had] to figure out a way that I could take Python and apply it to developing the database because that’s not something we necessarily learned in the class,” he said. “I had a lot of fun taking the thing that I learned academically and not just applying it, but also taking it to the next level.” 

— Scott Cech

Students come to UMBC for many reasons—to find community, to explore a passion, to make change in the world. Once they figure out the “why” that truly drives their interests, the Retriever community is ready to kick in with the “how” to help make those plans a reality. Part of that looks like the traditional classroom experience with a professor, of course—but just as important are the experiential-learning moments that help many students actively connect the knowledge to careers they hope to pursue after graduation. 

UMBC students pursue applied learning in huge numbers. Despite the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of our recent graduates engaged in applied learning, including internships, research, co-ops, and service learning during their time at UMBC. An impressive 91 percent of new grads head directly to a job, advanced degree, or both within six months of graduating—and of those, more than half interned or worked for their employer as a student. 

“When it comes to impact, there is nothing more valuable than engaging in applied-learning opportunities to help clarify one’s career direction, build professional skills, and increase one’s professional network,” shares Susan Hindle, the Career Center’s assistant director of internships and employment. 

For students pursuing experiential learning through internships, campus jobs, research, and community engagement, it’s not just about learning how to do the thing they want to do. It’s about connecting the work to the passions that brought them to UMBC in the first place. These students and alumni working in their chosen fields tell the whole picture—what hands-on learning looks like when it comes full circle.

Essential connections 

The desire to help people comes from deep within. But knowing how to do it successfully on a large scale—and understanding the systems and politics that  can make the job more or less challenging—takes more than just compassion. 

On the morning of the monthly food delivery from the Maryland Food Bank, the brigade of students who keep the Retriever Essentials food pantry running see all sides of the work. Together, they unload and shelve staples like rice, pasta, and huge crates of broccoli for the more than 2,100 visits to the pantry so far this year. At the same time, they connect with community members to understand what might make life better—halal meats, for one; more campus job opportunities, another biggie—and then put their heads together to try to make those changes happen.

For Ariel Barbosa, a grad student in UMBC’s community leadership program, working in this space is part of a journey that started with her trying to understand her Brazilian father’s immigrant experience better. As she works with Retriever Essentials, she’s learning about the complexities of these experiences in a way that will help her as she carves out a career in service.

“There are so many signs showing me that I’m supposed to be right here, right now. I feel like I’m preparing,” she says. “Right now, I feel like I’m in a confidence-building, skill-building phase where I’m just trying to pick up as many skills as I can to be able to create what I feel I need to create at the right time.” 

As a student, Matthew Dolamore ’08, modern languages and linguistics, caught a first glimpse of what would later become a service-based career when he tutored Spanish-speaking clients for an immigration services office in Baltimore. After graduating, he went on to serve with AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and earned a master’s degree in community planning before pulling all of those skills together into a full-circle career in Baltimore. 

Today, Dolamore is program director for the Esperanza Center, a project of Catholic Charities that assists more than 3,000 individuals each year with walk-in immigration services, including healthcare, legal assistance, and education tools. Dolamore serves as a connector between people and solutions, helping people get what they need when they need it and looking for ways to help improve the system. 

“Among our managers we have a nurse practitioner, a managing attorney, a licensed social worker, an individual who got their master’s in teaching English from UMBC, and a woman who oversees our one-touch client services desk who’s a former immigrant and just has a really dynamic background. And just those five people alone is symbolic of what I love about my job,” says Dolamore. 

“I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a legal professional. I’m not a social worker. I’m something myself of a generalist nonprofit manager at this stage in my career, but I get the opportunity every day to come in and out of these really focused professional engagements and try to help all five of them think of each other as teammates, and that’s the part of my job I really enjoy.” 

Lydia Sannella, a Peaceworker and grad student in applied sociology at UMBC, also enjoys the organizational aspect of her job with Retriever Essentials. As she looks ahead to her post-academic career, she’s already thinking about how she can continue to marry her values with her career—knowing that it won’t likely be quite the same as what she’s experiencing at UMBC. 

“I find that, whenever we want to do something, there are supportive, knowledgeable experts who want to help,” she says. “There’s just hoards of students who want to be involved and engaged and do any variety of work, from physical lifting to technical projects. And it’s just this canvas for creativity and possibility. It’s very reciprocal. What I’m able to contribute ends up being more significant and then what I get ends up being more significant.” 

— Jenny O’Grady

Becoming part of the solution

Students come to higher education for a variety of reasons, and among them, many have the goal of learning to create new things—from innovative water-quality solutions to entire companies. For many students, in fact, learning while doing is an integral part of going to college. 

If you ask Premal S. Shah ’98, biochemistry and molecular biology, however, he’ll tell you that there’s a world of difference between learning while doing and learning from doing. 

That’s not to say that Shah, who earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology on his way to founding and leading a string of successful healthcare-related companies, doesn’t believe in academics. But from his vantage point as CEO at MyOme, a genomics firm based in northern California, classroom-based learning is only a part of the puzzle. 

Shah said he’s always had a practical streak, but he found out how much experiential learning can boost classroom learning thanks to a hands-on internship and fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, beginning while he was a student at UMBC.

“When I got to grad school, there were a lot of people who hadn’t really worked in a lab or done stuff,” he said. “I had a huge head start, just because I was able to pick up a pipette and actually use it. I knew what a DNA extraction protocol was. I knew how to use certain machinery.” 

It was a vivid object lesson—one Shah has carried forward into his career. “When you start building companies, there’s always that challenge…of analysis paralysis, right?” he said. “There’s a notion of, ‘We could do this or that. Let’s read and learn more or get additional inputs in search of the perfect answer.’ Or we can actually go build something that will benefit people and iterate even faster as we learn more to make it much better.” 

That’s the big difference between studying science and, for example, running science-based companies, Shah says: “The hypotheticals are great. The theories are great. But you’ve got to get [things] done.” 

Getting things done is Matt Stromberg’s perennial modus operandi. Being a Ph.D. student studying environmental engineering means he is very much both an environmental scientist—someone who studies environmental problems—and an engineer: someone who works to solve those problems. “I always knew I was a passionate environmentalist, but I also knew I liked to build things,” he said. 

In fact, Stromberg, who graduated in 2019 from the University of Virginia with bachelor’s degrees in both environmental engineering and environmental science, is a literal embodiment of learning while doing. Working as both a graduate research assistant and a researcher in the jointly run University System of Maryland Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), he sometimes finds himself simultaneously running experiments and keeping the experiments running. 

A few months ago, Stromberg said, the night before an experiment was scheduled to start, a pump failed in IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center, a 1,800-square-meter facility with hundreds of fish tanks. 

“It was a large pump, and it needed to be replaced—and it was eight o’clock at night,” Stromberg said. “I had already worked 12 hours that day, [but] I realized that there’s no way this experiment is going to run if I don’t have a pump tomorrow. So…I got the wrenches and I got all the fittings I needed,” and found a way to fix it. 

Stromberg’s ability to save that experiment is part and parcel of his approach. One of his main research projects is unclogging a major bottleneck that prevents more farm-raised fish from getting to market: purging them of an unsavory flavor that’s sometimes characteristic of fish that aren’t caught in the wild. As Stromberg put it, “You’re not going to sell the fish if it tastes like dirt.” 

That’s a problem not only for aquaculture companies—which have to use lots of water, time, money, and energy to purge the fish of this taste—but also for the planet. That’s because the only alternative to aquaculture is fishing in the wild, which can destroy ecosystems but is still cheaper than aquaculture, due to the expensive purging process. 

He’s working with advanced oxidative processes and a technology of his own that would effectively create a shortcut, making it more cost-effective to farm fish and thus helping to protect wild habitat in the process. And Stromberg aims to eventually put his Ph.D. to work in a similarly practical way: His goal is to create a company that performs chemical analysis and remediation of water contaminants. 

“I’ve learned a lot from my time here,” he says. “Especially not to over-engineer things!” 

— Scott Cech

Community-centered art

Visual art is all around us—in flyers, television commercials, and even clothes. And while many of us may never know the artists creating work behind the scenes, their lives and experiences certainly do shape their work. 

For instance, earlier this year, Jennifer White-Johnson ’08, visual arts, designed a collection for Target’s national Latino Heritage Month campaign, including a tumbler with stacked text reading sonando vivamente vividly dreaming and a T-shirt proudly proclaiming piel canela pelo rizado (brown/cinnamon skin curly hair). As a disabled, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina designer from Baltimore, White-Johnson sees her inclusion as an opportunity to highlight and provide a voice to communities that often aren’t heard or represented.

“I am really honored to have been chosen and included in this year’s Target Latino Heritage Month collection and campaign,” says White-Johnson. “Using art and design to celebrate and elevate my cultural stories, the strength, and legacy of my ancestors, felt like something that was meant to be!” 

Living with undiagnosed ADHD as a student, White-Johnson often felt like her intensity, excitement, and point of view were unwelcome or just too much. That changed when she transferred to UMBC, where she immediately felt at home. In particular, her time as director of promotions for the Student Events Board [(seb)] gave her her first taste of how graphic design could marry with communit-ycentric work. 

Working closely with the Office of Student Life, White-Johnson and other members of (seb) volunteered during an alternative spring-break trip to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. White-Johnson also designed the T-shirts. 

“This was in 2007, so we could help offer some sort of relief from Hurricane Katrina,” says White-Johnson. “It was life-changing because I was able to surround myself with other like-minded scholars that were serious about academic life but who also understood that school is about self-discovery.” 

Enter Patch Hatley, a sophomore visual arts major with a concentration in animation. Fresh from a session learning how to create stop-motion animation puppets from paper, she is excited to test out some of what she’s learned on the job at commonvision, the student-driven print and design center in The Commons. On any given day, one might find her working on anything from animating cute countdowns for student activities to designing stickers. 

“I’m always constantly learning in an environment like commonvision,” she says. “Each new skill helps transition to the next project, and each project creates new and exciting opportunities. You’re always surrounded by a team who are all community-driven, so I always feel like I can ask for help or constructive criticism. commonvision supports, drives, and motivates me to keep reaching for the stars and will always be an important part of how I’ve grown—not just as an artist but as a team player.” 

Hatley finds work at commonvision particularly helpful because it stretches her creative muscles and opens up her craft to new programs, tools, and mediums, and also because other creators surround her. After spending a decade in animation and illustration before becoming a Retriever, Hatley loves the opportunity to expand her craft in a place that has fostered the foundation for budding designers for years—and getting to bring her personal perspective into work for clients. 

“At the end of the day, you’re drawing for yourself and for the people around you whether you realize it implicitly or not,” says Hatley. At the core of both artists’ practices is community. Both White-Johnson and Hatley recognize that their art doesn’t live in a vacuum but exists as a letter of inspiration, solidarity, and encouragement to their respective communities. Both artists, years apart in their practice, found similar communities to nurture and invest in them. 

“Being given the space to bring visibility to themes of cultural intersectionality, specifically the parts of our natural beauty that aren’t always celebrated, our caramel brown, cinnamon skin, and our natural curls,” says White-Johnson. “I hope my work can culturally inspire others to center what they want to see more of.” 

— Sharéa Harris

Taking experiential learning to the next level

Developing high-level skills in a highly technical field like computer science is difficult enough. But the ability to both master and successfully teach those skills to others takes the challenge to a whole new level. 

Fortunately, Amina Mahmood and Zach Margulies thrive at that level. With their dedication to passing along computer-science knowledge, these Retrievers amply demonstrate that doing while teaching and learning while doing are just different parts of the same equation. 

As Mahmood ’21, computer science, tells it, she started learning while doing quite literally. Just weeks into her first year at UMBC, Mahmood found herself working 20 hours a week as a junior malware analyst at Huntress, a cybersecurity firm that was then still in the startup phase at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

“I didn’t really have any experience, but I was pretty ambitious, so I learned everything on the job,” she said.

Mahmood, part of UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, quickly learned how to run different types of malware on a virtual machine, dissect the particulars of each, and create mitigation reports. The nascent company’s culture also helped boost her confidence. If she ran into a problem, she said, the people she worked with were glad to bring her up to speed. 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you don’t know this—let me teach it to you.’ And then I picked up on it and then I was like, ‘OK—I can do this,’” Mahmood said. Mahmood was quick to apply such on-the-job learning to her academics, even persuading an academic advisor to allow her to add her to his overenrolled, graduate-level software reverse-engineering course at the same time she was enrolled in an undergraduate prerequisite class. 

Mahmood not only aced the graduate-level class, she also started using what she had learned to complete the experiential-learning cycle at her new part-time job at Parsons Corp., a technology-focused defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructure engineering firm. 

“One of my mentors at Parsons—he really supported me, and he said, ‘You know a lot about reverse engineering. Why don’t you just make a course and teach coworkers?’” That’s exactly what Mahmood did— and now does for new summer interns as a full-time reverse engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. 

Recently she found herself completing the circle, coming back to UMBC for the same kind of career fair where she’d found her first job as a first-year student. “But [this time] I didn’t go as a student,” she noted. “I went as an employer.” 

Margulies ’14, biological sciences, is completing his own trajectory: Nearly a decade after earning his first bachelor’s degree, he has returned to UMBC to earn a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in education, with the goal of teaching computer science to Baltimore high school students when he graduates in 2024. 

Margulies started his career pivot before diving back into academics immersing himself in on-the-job data science and programming—including a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing internship at the Maryland Department of Health after starting in the computer science program. Because of this, he’s able to pursue his studies with a greater sense of perspective.

“I feel like it inspires confidence and it builds your self-esteem, taking what you’ve learned in the class and not even a semester later applying it in a real-world setting,” he said. 

Margulies noted that, as a teacher, he’ll also be able to fully address high schoolers’ perennial classroom question: ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’ 

“It’s really important for teachers to know what the practical application of [schoolwork] is going to be and what working in a computer science job will look like,” he said. 

A case in point, Margulies said, was the work he did as part of a Maryland Department of Health internship last summer, reviewing and finding improvements for data collection, including the creation of a data dashboard. 

“Last semester, I took Computer Science 201, and we learned the programming language Python, and I really wanted to start applying that language at the internship,” he said. Because he’d had both practical experience and formal training, Margulies said, he was able to see that he’d have to adapt what he’d learned to suit the task at hand. 

“[I had] to figure out a way that I could take Python and apply it to developing the database because that’s not something we necessarily learned in the class,” he said. “I had a lot of fun taking the thing that I learned academically and not just applying it, but also taking it to the next level.” 

— Scott Cech