Find out how you can be involved in undergraduate research by attending a "How to Get Involved in Research" workshop:

• Friday, October 14, 2011, 12:00 to 12:50 p.m., LH3
  

This year’s Arts and Humanities Afternoon at UMBC Homecoming on Saturday, October 15, 2011 will focus on alumni filmmakers. To whet your appetite for our afternoon discussion on the art of moving images, we’d like to introduce you to some of the filmmakers who’ll be coming to the event, which will be held in the Skylight Room of the UMBC Commons from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. We’re also planning some screenings of the work of these filmmakers on campus in the week before the event. Please stay tuned!

Films by the alumni filmmakers will be shown at the Skylight Room in The Commons on the following dates:
Monday, October 10, 2011 at 7 p.m.: Saved! (Brian Dannelly ’97)

Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 7 p.m.: Films by Richard Chisolm ’82, Steven Fischer ’98 and Daphne Gardner ’09

Read more about these alumni in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Searing waves of heat already ripple through West Baltimore at 9 a.m. on a Friday in July. The streets around 2201 N. Monroe Street – headquarters of the Baltimore-based nonprofit Center for Urban Families (CFUF) – are all but deserted.

Inside the center’s air-conditioned conference room, 40 or so adults – men and women, black and white, some as young as 18 and others old enough to be grandparents – sit in neat lines of metal folding chairs, sweating about their future. Some look anxious, others bleary-eyed. Most of the men wear ties, pressed pants and dress shoes; the women are in heels, panty hose and skirts. Some are ex-convicts. Many have been involved with the drug trade. Others have held jobs but haven’t been able to keep them.

If the room has the solemn air of a funeral, there’s a good reason. Everyone here is preparing to say goodbye to their old lives and start anew through the CFUF’s signature program, STRIVE, which is modeled after a prototype launched in New York City’s East Harlem.

When the center’s founder and CEO, Joseph T. Jones, Jr. ’06, social work, walks to the front of the room, everyone seems to sit up a little straighter. Standing more than six feet tall in a dark blue pin stripe suit, Jones’ imposing stature and deep, authoritative voice command the room. But his story also grabs attention with this audience: He’s walked a remarkably similar path.

“All the things I did suggest I should be dead, incarcerated, or debilitated,” Jones tells the group.

Read the full story by Elizabeth Heubeck ’91 in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

The tale of a successful capital campaign is often told by the numbers. And by that yardstick, UMBC’s Exceptional by Example Campaign was a success.

The campaign exceeded its $100 million goal by $15 million – and strengthened UMBC in ways that improve access to the university, attract and retain the best students and faculty and support vital research.

But look past the spreadsheets and statistics and you’ll find stories of individual people – those who gave to the campaign and those whose lives and education were advanced in the effort.

Read the full story in UMBC Magazine‘s Fall 2011 issue, as well as an interview with four prominent alumni, including past (Anita Maddox Jackson ’80) and present (Bennett Moe ’88) presidents of the UMBC Alumni Board, a long-term donor (Emmerson Small ’74), and UMBC’s vice president of Institutional Advancement (Greg Simmons ’04).

Learn more about the results of UMBC’s Exceptional by Example Campaign here.