Show off your Retriever Fever and volunteer! Alumni are invited to share their experiences at UMBC with prospective students and their families. Help future students establish themselves as a fellow dawg! Dates and locations vary, so find the one that is perfect for you:

Rockville/Strathmore Reception
Tuesday, March 24, 7 – 9 p.m.
Strathmore Music Center
Rockville, MD

Reception for Academically Talented African American Students
Thursday, April 2, 7 – 9 p.m.
UMBC

Reception for Academically Talented Hispanic & Latino Students
Tuesday, April 7, 7 – 9 p.m.
UMBC

New Jersey Reception
Tuesday, April 21, 7 – 9 p.m.
Olde Mill Inn & Grain House Restaurant
Basking Ridge, NJ

New York Reception
Wednesday, April 22, 7 – 9 p.m.
The Carltun, Eisenhower Park
East Meadow, NY

Pennsylvania Reception
Thursday, April 23, 7 – 9 p.m.
The Mercer Museum
Doylestown, PA

Click here to volunteer!

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of three posts from Lexi, our summer intern here in the Alumni Communications office, about her experiences as a new-to-Baltimore student.

Even though everyone on the East Coast eats relatively the same things – meat, seafood, corn, potatoes – there are two foods that are incredibly underestimated by those not from the Delmarva and Pennsylvania area: Old Bay and scrapple.

I grew up with Old Bay as a seasoning for anything and everything crab. Crab bisque, steamed crabs, crab cakes, even on some sushi that had crab in it. You could say I liked it. I didn’t have an obsession with it, but I thought it tasted good on crab dishes. Then I came to Maryland, land of crabs and Old Bay. I soon found Old Bay on my potato chips, in my burgers, and on my french fries. I didn’t complain; I thought, Maybe this was just a Baltimore thing. They gotta live up to the “Crab Capital of the World” standard. Sure, it’s good, but I didn’t see the need to put Old Bay on every meal I ate. Until one day, not too long ago, I was feeling creative, and put Old Bay in my mac ‘n cheese.

Holy crab, I have never been more pleased with my cooking. It was salty, yet refreshing. Spicy, yet savory. The cheese and Old Bay mixed perfectly. I’ve been missing THIS? I thought to myself. I finally understood. It was amazing, and after that fateful dinner, I never looked back. I keep a small shaker of Old Bay in my purse now for special occasions. Don’t judge me, I’m sure some of you do it, too.

But there was a small curve ball to some of my more foreign friends: scrapple.

One of my roommates is from Massachusetts. They have similar seafood, meat, and vegetables to us here in the mid-atlantic, but she had never heard of scrapple. I take it some of those reading this won’t know what it is, either. Well I’m not going to tell you, and I would suggest you don’t ask. Scrapple is meat, and that’s all you need to know.

For Easter during my sophomore year, my roommate came home with me to Delaware soshe didn’t have to stay at school for the holiday. My mom is an excellent cook, which no one who has eaten anything she’s ever made can deny. So when she put down a plate of scrapple in front of us for breakfast, in all its square, brown, squishy, burnt-looking glory, my Bostonian roommate was very skeptical. She poked it, picked one up, and put it on her plate. I did the same, but took three slices. I love scrapple. She asked what it was after dissecting it. I just smirked. I tried to tell her gently that it tastes really good, but if you know what’s in it, you won’t want it.

I think she had decided she didn’t like scrapple before she even tried. The instant it touched her tongue, her face turned green and she spit it back out onto her plate. I’ll admit, depending on how it’s cooked, scrapple can have a pretty weird texture to it. But put a little dab of syrup or a dollop of ketchup on it, and that’s one of the best breakfast sides you can make. Heck, even a scrapple sandwich is good (a specialty of the Delaware State Fair).

When we got back to school, I was still a little shocked my roommate had never heard of scrapple before. So, I asked around. Turns out, scrapple is very much a Delaware and Pennsylvania thing, and isn’t common in Maryland. A lot of people are missing out on this loosely-dubbed delicacy.

In one short year, my food world had been nearly turned upside-down. Old Bay goes with anything, not just crab-related foods. Scrapple is either considered gross and disgusting or simply isn’t offered. In a few short months, my culinary mind had been fried. I bet if someone put Old Bay on scrapple, more people in Maryland would eat it.

-Lexi Coon

Every morning when Lisa Kakavas ‘94, psychology, gets ready for work, her dog Zildjian (or Z for short), inspects her outfit of choice. “[He] gets excited when I pull certain pants out,” says Kakavas. That’s because Z knows that when search and rescue gear comes out, he gets to go to work, too.

Kakavas and Z–a German shepherd–volunteer with the Mason-Dixon Rescue Dogs (MDRD), an organization that trains dogs in search and rescue of both live and deceased people. She learned about the organization years ago when her husband got involved with MDRD. At first, she says, she thought it was a little crazy that he was driving an hour to “play with his dog,” but it wasn’t long before she started training her first search and rescue dog, Cleo. And Z, of course, followed in Cleo’s footsteps.

The first year or two of a dog’s life in the MDRD is spent training. “For the first full year we build that drive [to search and recover], and we do that by building the paycheck,” says Kakavas. After every hard period of training, Z is rewarded with a good game of tug of war and sometimes a treat.

Now, 14 years after joining MDRD, Kakavas is a lead trainer and the president of the group. As the president, she arranges training dates and locations, schedules certification tests for the dogs, and tracks the progress of each member (both two- and four-legged). In between calls for a search and rescue group and training, Kakavas holds down her job in retail at the UMBC bookstore.

“I fill up my calendar with training and fill in around it,” she said, mentioning that nearly every weekend — both Saturdays and Sundays — through summer was already scheduled with training. Luckily, Bookstore Bob, or the Director of the UMBC Bookstore, doesn’t mind. “[He] is very supportive, and he likes to hear the stories, too,” Kakavas said. And with five years of experience under Z’s collar, he and Kakavas have over 50 search stories to tell.

The cases can range anywhere from a
few hundred square feet to 80 acres of land, and the number of dogs sent out depends on the situation. Her longest search was in Pennsylvania, searching for an infant. Kakavas said the trip took 13 hours of searching spaced out over two days. She and Z have also traveled as far away as Peru, called in by local law enforcement to search for a missing hiker. “The search area was the side of an entire mountain,” she said, recalling the stress of the event. Other trips have included night searches for missing persons in natural disaster areas.

Although Kakavas and Z have worked through nights, spent countless hours training together, and hiked hundreds miles over the years, it doesn’t seem to be phasing her, or her dog. “The reason they work so hard is because we make it fun,” she said.

Do you have an awesome story to share? Submit a class note!