College is a balancing act, but you don’t have to walk the tightrope alone.

From dedicated counseling services and campus wellness initiatives to informal peer networks, taking that first step towards supporting your mental health at UMBC might just be the most important move you make this semester.

Read the full piece here!

Retriever Essentials partners are committed to providing the help and care UMBC students, faculty, and staff members deserve. All of these organizations work toward ensuring academic and career success of UMBC members. They actively strive for enhancing social justice and equity within and outside the community.

Community Partnership is an integral pillar of Retriever Essentials’. Without our partners we would not have been able to reach to the point where we are. We are able to assist the UMBC community because of their contributions. It is through many offices and departments across the campus that Retriever Essentials is able to collect and distribute food items, personal care products, and meals swipes. 
 
Our partners support our efforts to meet the students where they are in order to ensure their well-being and success. This Giving Day, February 27th, please support Retriever Essentials and its partners so we all can better serve our UMBC community. 

Save-a-Swipe is a partnership between Retriever Essentials, Chartwells, and Campus Card Services which allows you to donate 5 or 10 swipes from your meal plan that can be used by students who are experiencing food insecurity. Please share your extra meal swipes with your peers in need before the swipes expire.

Sign up to donate your excess meals until Feb 14, 2020, Friday. 

Click here or go to the link below to make your donation. 

Save-a-Swipe is a partnership between Retriever Essentials, Chartwells, and Campus Card Services which allows you to donate 5 or 10 swipes from your meal plan that can be used by students who are experiencing food insecurity. Please share your extra meal swipes with your peers in need before the swipes expire.

Sign up to donate your excess meals until Feb 14, 2020, Friday. 

Click here or go to the link below to make your donation. 

Fehintola Elizabeth Bright-Awonuga: Coming to UMBC as a freshman last school year I became affiliated with Retriever Essentials through the Shriver Center’s PRAC 096. I have volunteered with Retriever Essentials for two years now and I am now a part of the Student Leadership Board. I have the growth over the past two years and the impact it has had on the lives of fellow faculty, staff, and students. I do not regret my decision of joining this team because I have seen the first-hand the seed this organization has sown. The seed is continuing to sprout, grow, and blossom into something bigger than it once was.

Alex Gwizdala: Volunteering with Retriever Essentials was a great way for me to feel connected to the UMBC community. As a first-semester freshman, I was feeling out of place on campus when the semester started. When I started volunteering, I felt much more involved in the community. Being able to meet so many great people and knowing that my work was having an impact was an amazingly rewarding experience.

Stephen Isabell: Retriever essentials is a necessity. Retriever Essentials is full of love, teamwork, and community. While volunteering for Retriever Essentials, I felt every one of those things I felt so empowered that I am apart of the solution to ending food security. No one should have to go hungry in this world.

Stephanie Koshy: I started volunteering at Retriever Essentials at the beginning of my first semester at UMBC. When starting college, I wanted to find an organization that I could volunteer at that was similar to the volunteer work I did at my high school. Luckily, I was able to find that Retriever Essentials, I have enjoyed working with Retriever Essentials to help other students on campus overcome food insecurity. I learned a lot about food insecurity and how we can combat this worldwide problem through Retriever Essentials at UMBC. I look forward to volunteering in the Spring.

Brian Lynch: Working with Retriever Essentials made me feel fulfilled. Everyone I worked with was part of a larger community helping those in need. I enjoyed sauntering around campus in the crisp fall air to deliver and pick up food bags. Moving shelves to the new pantry was an exciting time as well. Retriever Essentials made me realize the problem of food insecurity on campus and how to address it.

Zara Mahmood: Retriever Essentials has been a great group to work with in my first year as a UMBC student. Working with them has made me feel integrated in the school. Being a part of such an amazing group that impacts so many lives has been a wonderful experience. Everyone in Retriever Essentials is very welcoming which makes it better.

Dera Osuigwe: Have you ever felt the love of a community? Have you ever seen people from different works of life come together to tackle a problem? Have you ever seen people so passionate about what they do? Well, let me tell you, I HAVE!! Retriever Essentials is a place where people give their time and joy. It is a place where students come from a community to help the community. Retriever Essentials is a program that shows unity, love, and gratitude.

Sabtain Saroya: Retriever Essential is a community of like-minded individuals influencing the broader UMBC community in an impactful way. This amazing organization is setting a precedent for what it means to/how to fight the issue of food insecurity.

Zoe Smith: Retriever Essentials is an incredibly unique experience. Although the distribution of the food bags is anonymous and done by campus partners, rather than the pantry itself, it is still incredibly easy to see the impact of the program. From seeing food fly off the shelves as campus partners request more bags to deliver the bags and seeing how excited the staff are for the new bags the appreciation for Retriever Essentials is evident and helps you feel that you really are helping to make a difference in your own community.

This post was written by Special Collections student assistant Jen Wachtel. Thank you, Jen!

The Retriever Weekly, our university’s proud student newspaper, began publishing as UMBC News in 1966. Special Collections and the University Archives maintain the print copies of all issues of the Retriever, and a large section of the issues (1966-1981 and 2002 to the present) are available online in UMBC's Digital Collections. With monetary support from UMBC's Office of Institutional Advancement, students and staff have been preparing to send the remaining issues to Creekside Digital, a digitization vendor located a short drive away in Glen Arm, MD. This project is a part of the Lyrasis Digitization Collaborative.

I conducted an inventory of the issues of the Retriever dating from January 1983 to May 1997, totaling over four hundred newspapers. Along the way, I found insights into some of UMBC’s hot-button topics of the 1980s and 1990s, including contentious construction projects and students’ demands for increased parking spaces (ed. note - complaining about parking is a long-standing UMBC tradition!). I particularly enjoyed following the timeline of the university administration, including the appointment of one Freeman A. Hrabowski III to Vice Provost at UMBC and his later position as Interim President for a “full academic year and possibly longer.” Of course, no inventory of The Retriever would be complete without the satirical Deceiver. Published annually on the week of April 1^st, the Deceiver  featured such choice headlines as “Giant Terrapin attacks UMBC” (referring to College Park’s mascot) and “SCHPORTZ” (1993).

Jen Wachtel working in Special Collections.

I also noticed some strange anomalies in The Retriever’s numbering system. From miswritten Roman numerals (XXVIV for 29 and IXX for 24) to a startling continuity error, the Retriever always had special surprises in store. The most bizarre circumstance was that in the academic year 1995-96, the Retriever accidentally published two separate versions of Volume 31 – one for fall, and one for spring, before continuing with Volumes 32 and 33 in 1996-97. This means that since spring 1996, every volume of The Retriever has been one number short!

Special Collections is located on the first floor of the library behind the gallery. We are open Monday through Friday from 1-4pm, on Thursdays from 1-8pm, and by appointment.