UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, takes your questions.

Q. UMBC is about to embark on a major renovation of the entrance to campus that will transform the way that alumni and visitors – and the UMBC community – encounter and perceive the campus. How does this project reflect the university’s continuing journey as we approach UMBC’s 50th anniversary?

— Richard Byrne ’86, English

A. This campus was established at a time when people were not accustomed to creating new universities. It was simply a matter of practicality to create a new institution connecting to the University of Maryland, Baltimore downtown and its professional schools.

The pedestrian-friendly nature of the early design of UMBC’s campus also made it more insular. People who drove through the campus – from I-95, for example – could pass through and never really get the essence of UMBC. It was all “in the loop.”

The new entrance is moving us “out of the loop” in a sense. It is broadening the definition of the loop. It’s saying we are part of a larger community. And, as such, we want people to sense the importance of this institution as they approach, and reflect on its amazing impact on the larger region.

The new entrance is also a way of saying: “Welcome! You are important to us. We care about the environment. We care about the aesthetics of campus. We want people to be safe in how they approach the campus.”

People will realize that we have come to another level. UMBC is not just a practical place now. We’ve had a chance to think about who we are. What we stand for. Why we are so important to this nation.

Whether we are talking about the new entrance, or the opening of the second phase of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building this fall, or the new Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building and the new Events Center in coming years, people will see momentum building at UMBC.

None of this happens without the confidence that our elected officials have in UMBC. It is very significant that our own alumna, Speaker Pro Tem of the Maryland House of Delegates Adrienne Jones ’76, psychology, has been at the center of efforts to help us get these projects approved. We also have had strong support for all these projects from Maryland Senator Edward J. Kasemeyer, who represents our district, and from Maryland Senator James E. DeGrange, Sr., whose daughter, Catharine Liberatore ’96, psychology, is an alumna of UMBC.

Q. You mention the Events Center that will open in 2018. What is the thinking behind that building?

A. First and foremost, the Events Center will be a place for students and the campus community to convene. We don’t have a space right now where a sizeable portion of the university can convene. We usually have to hold gatherings in the Ballroom in the University Center and it is always quickly overflowing.

There will also be pride in hosting parents and alumni for commencements at the Events Center. These commencements will be even more enjoyable than any we have ever had.

We are out of space now in the Retriever Activities Center. The RAC has done what it can do with the help of very supportive staff. But when you think about what students expect from a university, first-rate recreational and exercise facilities are very important.

When I go to visit some campuses, the first buildings that people want to show me are the athletics facilities. Now, we’re the kind of campus where we take great pride in taking people to the Albin O. Kuhn Library, and then walking them through The Commons to meet our students. But it will be great when – at the end of that tour – we also show them an Events Center where students can pursue a great student life.

The Events Center will help shine light on this campus. And we know that when the light is shining on us at UMBC, people will be impressed.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, click here.

Speaker: Aqueasha Marie Martin, School of Computing, Clemson University

Wednesday, July 9, 2014, 11:00 am

Hosted by Amy Hurst

Location: ITE 404, Department of Information Systems, UMBC

Abstract: Each year, thousands die or are injured due to adverse drug events due to medication. Technology such as health records and other consumer-based health applications have been shown to be beneficial for helping individuals manage their health. Despite this growing body of work, little to no research has been conducted to gauge the possible effectiveness of technology created through a user-centered process to assist consumers in understanding over-the-counter medication information.

In this talk, I will discuss research that explores the implications for the design of interactive technology to help older adults understand the possible risk of adverse drug events resulting from taking over-the-counter (OTC) medications. I will briefly discuss three studies that are part of an Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study that was designed to identify current practices and challenges, identify opportunities for technology integration, and examine usable and effective ways to present over-the-counter medication information to older adults.

Bio: Aqueasha Marie Martin is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Computing at Clemson University. She is working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction. She is a member of the Human-Centered Computing Lab under the direction of Dr. Juan E. Gilbert. She received a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics in 2005 from Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, MS. She received an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama, Birmingham in Birmingham, AL in 2007. In addition, she completed one year of graduate study toward Ph.D. in Computer Science at Auburn University in Auburn, AL in 2008 before transferring with her advisor to Clemson University to continue her Ph.D. studies.

A public research university such as UMBC has to be many things at once – and touch as many lives in a productive way as it can.

At the center of its mission is teaching. New generations of students – undergraduates and graduate students, from Maryland and from all over the world – are flocking to UMBC because of its lofty reputation for undergraduate teaching.

But a key part of that teaching experience is research. At UMBC, even undergraduates can become involved in the other key missions of the university – unlocking new knowledge in the social sciences and humanities, expanding the frontiers of science and technology, and furthering expression through the arts. And a growing number of graduate students are recognizing that the research being done at UMBC is a pathway to their own careers as teachers and investigators.

The work that students do with professors and other researchers at UMBC also has a huge impact on some of the most crucial issues of our time.
Two of the feature stories in this issue of UMBC Magazine demonstrate the sort of impact that research conducted at the university is having on global challenges confronting us.

In “Windfall Prophets,” acclaimed science writer Joel N. Shurkin dives deep into the research and policy implications of UMBC’s work on green energy that can be provided by wind power. Using a cutting edge technology called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) that has already been at the forefront of efforts to track air quality, UMBC researchers are helping Maryland policymakers figure out where best to situate an offshore wind farm that may someday help power thousands of Maryland homes.

Another key challenge facing the global community is communication. And as English becomes more and more of a global lingua franca, teachers of English as a second language are increasingly finding themselves teaching much younger students whose parents and governments want them to learn the language at an earlier age. In “Expanding the Map,” David Glenn looks at the work of Joan Kang Shin ’08, Ph.D., language, literacy and culture, who is a professor of practice in the education department and the director of UMBC’s TESOL professional training programs.

Shin is an expert in teaching English to young learners, and has created far-flung networks (partly in collaboration with National Geographic) to help teachers of English around the world do an even better job at this crucial task.

I am also delighted that UMBC Magazine is featuring the work of Ben Marcin ’80, economics, in this issue. Marcin’s photography is not only beautiful and provocative, but it is also becoming a gateway into some of the thorniest discussion topics in contemporary American life – gentrification, homelessness and community – and reveal how we relate to each other and our surroundings.

— Richard Byrne ’86

A GRAND ENTRANCE

The UMBC community – as well as visitors to campus – will have to pardon some dust and altered traffic patterns over the next two years.

But it’s all for a good cause: a reimagining of the entrance to UMBC that will enhance not only the aesthetic beauty and ease of access to the university’s campus – but also enhance the safety of the pedestrians, cyclists and motorists who travel along its roads and paths.

Construction work on the New Campus Entrance Project began in June 2014 on areas familiar to alumni and others in the UMBC community, including Hilltop Circle, Administration Drive, and the plaza between the Retriever Activities Center and the Administration Building.

One aim of the project is to improve the flow of traffic along UMBC Boulevard, which is the main route onto campus for most drivers. A grander roadway circle and plaza will enhance vehicular and pedestrian safety and facilitate better access for service vehicles, easier pickups and drop-offs. Pedestrians and cyclists will also have a more direct route into the center of campus.

Improving UMBC’s aesthetic appeal is also a priority. The present Administration Drive will become a pedestrian walkway that will boast more trees and greenery. The new plaza will be paved with bricks that say “Hello!” in the many languages of our campus. (Plus, of course, a “Woof!” to represent university mascot True Grit, whose statue will be situated in the heart of the plaza.)

The project will enhance UMBC’s appearance in other ways as well. The long rows of parked cars – especially during the fall and spring semesters – on University Boulevard and Hilltop Circle will be gone, without any loss of actual parking spaces on campus. Those who drive to UMBC will have improved and safer pedestrian walkways to use to get from their parking space to campus, and the university’s outward appearance will more closely track the increased growth in its residential character over recent decades.

The new gateway will be completed in fall 2015.

UMBC also recently announced another addition to the core campus – a new Events Center – that will draw its community closer together as a staging point for commencements and a home for Retriever athletics.

Formally announced at a meeting with members of the communities surrounding UMBC in May, the 5,000 seat Events Center will be constructed directly south of Hilltop Circle. It will be 1,000 seats larger than the current Retriever Activities Center, and be large enough so that the university’s spring undergraduate commencement ceremonies can be moved back to campus from their present home at the First Mariner Arena in downtown Baltimore.

The $85 million Events Center will likely open sometime in 2017 or 2018.

— Richard Byrne ’86

THE POWER OF PARTNERS

Education can blaze a path to a brighter future for kids in underserved communities. Just ask the kids at Lakeland Elementary/Middle School in Southwest Baltimore.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did just that on a visit to UMBC this spring. Sixth-grader NaShaya Maxwell trumpeted her pride in Lakeland’s robotics team. Student Johanna Funes glowed with energy when she described “the many ways to get an answer” in math, her favorite subject.

America’s top education official came to the meeting to see how a powerful new partnership between UMBC and Lakeland is promoting students’ academic success inside and outside the classroom.

UMBC brings two essential pieces to the partnership, which began last fall. The first is a pipeline to teachers from the university’s acclaimed Sherman STEM Teacher Scholars Program. The second is a network of active personal and community interventions spearheaded by two key Shriver Center programs – the Choice Program and Shriver Fellows Peaceworker Program.

Lakeland principal Najib Jammal says that UMBC’s support for the school is already paying dividends. “We believe it will help our students and teachers re-envision what is possible and result in opportunities that allow students to demonstrate their learning,” says Jammal.

The UMBC/Lakeland partnership was created by UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, and George and Betsy Sherman, founders of the Sherman Family Foundation, to enable the university to have a more direct and immediate impact in Baltimore schools.

The Sherman STEM Teacher Scholars Program is a selective scholarship program that identifies and nurtures students who want to become science and math teachers serving high-need communities.

“UMBC is providing a gateway to get these field experiences,” F. Atom Zerfas ’13, mathematics, told Duncan, “and the field experiences made me prepared to teach.” Zerfas is a Sherman program alumnus and a teacher at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women.

AmeriCorps fellows from UMBC’s Choice Program, a national model for sustained personal and academic support for young people who are in contact with the juvenile justice system, are the other key resource for the partnership. These fellows provide direct assistance to 40 Lakeland students identified by teachers and administrators as those who would most benefit from the program’s intensive support – including 24/7 outreach and intervention from mentors who set high expectations for program participants and give them the stability and assistance they need to meet those expectations.

John Martello, vice provost of UMBC’s Division of Professional Studies, was the executive director of the Shriver Center when Mark Shriver, son of Center founders Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, created the Choice Program in 1987.

“There wasn’t a university in the country that did direct service in the way that [the Choice Program] did when it was founded,” Martello told Duncan.

The UMBC/Lakeland partnership is still new, but already there has been a boost in parent participation in the school and focus on health and urban gardening initiatives. The Shriver Center has enlisted scholars in its Peaceworker Fellows Program for returning Peace Corps volunteers to build support for the partnership in the local community, extending its reach even further.

— Richard Byrne ’86 and Dinah Winnick

Mary Volkman ’92, English, is a Baltimore native who writes fiction under the pen name “Margo Christie.” Her first novel, These Days: A Tale of Nostalgia on Baltimore’s Block, relies not only on the author’s time working in show bars on the city’s most notorious stretch of real estate (right under the shadow of City Hall, hon) in the 1970s and ’80s, but also in her careful attention to the reminiscences of those who’d been there during the heyday of burlesque just after World War II.

But Margo Christie wrote the book. So let her tell it:

It’s often said first novels are autobiographical, inspired by the author’s coming-of-age and family of origin. Just as often, it’s said the best literature rises out of adversity. When I sat down to write a first novel, I was a step ahead of the game, having lived a tough life, and having not one, but two, families upon which to build my colorful characters. The first was, naturally, my family of origin – which included an alcoholic, disabled dad, nostalgic for his finer days; and a jazz musician grandfather, rumored to have played trumpet in “houses of ill repute.”

I fell into my second “family” when, at age 16, my first family broke up and (of necessity) I became a stripper on “the Block” – Baltimore’s once-stylish but by then seedy burlesque strip. My adopted Block family included burlesque-era strippers working as barmaids, and a strip-joint manager rumored to have consorted with the mob.

Milton Carter had been on the Block since the 1930s. During the heyday of burlesque, the 1940s and 1950s, Milton had been a “straw man” club owner, holding the liquor and cabaret licenses for the actual owners, mobbed-up guys who, owing to their criminal records, couldn’t get such licenses in their own names.

I met Milton when he was in his 70s and managing the Stage Door, a side-street joint housed within the rearmost portion of the historic Gayety Theater on Baltimore Street. Milton liked to tell the tale of the Stage Door in the old days, when it was “regular” bar where Gayety performers would relax between shows, drinking and carousing with their wealthy admirers, known as “Stage Door Johnnies.” Yet he was quick to also point out that no customer, regardless of how much he spent, had the right to assume anything about his Stage Door girls.

On my first day there, I was drinking with a guy who, having spent a considerable sum on champagne, thought that earned him the right to bully me into the back room. Milton intervened, pulling me aside to tell me I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. If I didn’t like how things were going with any customer, he said, I should tell the barmaid and she’d remedy the situation. This was important to know, as most Block clubs were fronts for prostitution in those days, and I was too green – just a month past 16 years old – to yet have a clear idea of what going in the back room really meant!

In this and other ways, Milton was like the father that my real father wasn’t, guiding me away from compromise and toward self-preservation. He regularly got on me about smoking cigarettes and advised me to stay away from certain dancers, those with drug habits and pimps for boyfriends. A health-conscious diabetic, he neither smoked nor drank. For his birthday and for Christmas, myself, the barmaid, and one or two other reliable day-shift girls, would chip in and buy him a big box of diabetic cookies.

Birthdays and Christmases were always celebrated at the Stage Door. The owner’s wife, a busty stripper who worked a “circuit,” like the burlesque queens of yesteryear, knew everyone’s birthday and never failed to provide a card and store-bought, personalized cake. On Christmas, the club was closed, but those of us without families showed up anyway. A cold-cut platter was spread across the bar, courtesy of the boss, and a gift exchange was organized by his wife. An overweight bartender who worked nights donned a Santa suit. A chair was placed onstage, names were drawn out of a hat, and every girl in attendance took her turn on Santa’s lap to receive a gift. Lacking in familial closeness as I was, rituals like this one kept me grounded, out of the path of drugs and pimps, as Milton often advised me to stay.

It’s unfortunate that in this modern age, American writers know so little of struggle. Not only have many of us never known it firsthand, but we live in a glib, image-obsessed world where sadness gets stuffed in favor of social media trends and “Likes.”

Studying English at UMBC in the early 1990s, I was fortunate to learn writing from Tom Nugent, a retired newspaperman who knew that to write about life one needed to immerse oneself in it. In the 1970s, he lived at Baltimore’s flea-bag Congress Hotel while writing an exposé about its welfare-roll inhabitants.

My advice for writers today? Live life on the edge, but with a safety net of “family,” real or adopted, to keep you on track when you drift into harm’s way.

Find out more about These Days and Margo Christie at her website: www.margochristienovelist.com

Photo by William H. Mortimer, October 22, 1973 – Baltimore Street also known as “The Block.”

KEEP THE PERFECT BEAT

With Steven McAlpine, assistant director of interdisciplinary studies and percussionist with Straight Up Tribal

Back in 2008, Steven McAlpine decided that UMBC needed a beat. Right at the heart of the campus.

So the director of UMBC’s interdisciplinary studies program sat with his djembe (an African drum) on the UMBC Quad and started to play. He didn’t expect anyone to join in. But his beat proved irresistible and the weekly drum circle that formed around McAlpine quickly grew past double digits. On some Fridays, the gathering of rappers, hoop dancers and other percussionists gets as high as 20 performers.

“We just showed up and didn’t ask permission,” McAlpine says. “But maybe we should have. Some people would stop and listen. Some people would leave quarters in our hats. The best part would be people saying, ‘If I bring a drum next week, can I join in?’”

A more formal ensemble, Straight Up Tribal, has also emerged from the drum circle. McAlpine has fashioned his own drum kit for that group, consisting of an orange Home Depot bucket (bass), two water coolers (toms), and his wife’s bike tire rim (high hat).

“Building your own instrument affects your perception of beat,” he observes.

So whether it’s on a high hat or a hat box, how do you keep the perfect beat?

Tools of the Trade

1. Orange Home Depot bucket

2. Two water coolers

3. Bike tire rim

4. Spirit of adventure

5. A pair of ears to listen

Step 1: DON’T BE OPPRESSED BY PERFECTIONISM

Before starting the Quad drum circle, McAlpine says he was a slave to the metronome and craved precision and planning. He used influences to guide his style rather than allowing himself to play freely.

Since beginning the drum circle and finding the dynamism in playing with a group, he says he has made a much needed shift from “mathematical to soulful.”

One key to keeping a great beat is overcoming the idea that there is only one way to play a song. Depending on what McAlpine plays – the djembe, a traditional kit, or his buckets – the sound comes to him and emerges differently.

The challenge, he says, is to “keep it fresh, but really hone your skill.”

Step 2: FIND THE PULSE IN EVERYTHING

Just as painters find inspiration in the world around them, McAlpine hears a beat in his footsteps or in the ring of someone’s cell phone.

“Beat is in everything,” he says. “We just shape it. In the noise, I hear a pattern, and think, ‘I wonder what that sounds like on the drum.’”

Hear it, feel it, and then make it, McAlpine says.

Step 3: CREATE SPACE

Once you establish a beat, you might think that there’d be no more room for another rhythm or percussive element. But if all the space in a performance is taken up by one driving force, it leaves no room for collaboration.

McAlpine says keeping a great beat is about “filling the spaces, then leaving spaces. Beat is both a prompt as well as a constraint that sets us free.” When collaborating with others, he says, “It’s about an invitation for other people to join in.”

Step 4: WATCH THE AUDIENCE

Any perceptive percussionist is also tuned into the audience. If people start to sway, beat on the table or tap their feet, he knows it’s affecting them. “Does it make you want to dance? To me, that’s the test. It’s about connection.”

McAlpine prefers playing with a large band because of the dynamism that comes with doing so, and the same goes for playing in front of (and sometimes with) an audience.

“If no one’s watching,” he says, “then what’s the point?”

Step 5: GET AMBITIOUS

Even a seasoned percussionist like McAlpine says that there are challenges in collaboration. A singer may start a song with a rhythm that’s not as intuitive as most, so McAlpine waits. And he listens. And then he finds his opportunity and dives in.

“The right way is to play together, to find some common ground,” he says. “We are pattern-making and pattern-detecting people, and the pulse is what allows for creative collaboration.”

— Sarah C. Truckey

By The Numbers

These are the three most influential songs that inspired me as a drummer – delicious puzzles for me that inspired hours of practice and song analysis in the hopes of “mastering” the drum set. I am still working on the mastery part.

1. The Edgar Winter Group, “Frankenstein” (the first drum solo I ever learned note for note, from the album They Only Come Out at Night).

2. Led Zeppelin, “Good Times Bad Times” (from Led Zeppelin I)

3. Rush, “Tom Sawyer” ( from the album Moving Pictures. This song inspired me to use a double bass drum pedal).
— Steven McAlpine