Important Spring Registration Information! Please read carefully.

Spring 2026 Registration - Advising Appointment Information for Current Students:

Recently, all current UMBC students received notification of an "Advising Hold" on their UMBC account. Students must meet with an advisor to have the hold lifted in order to register for Spring courses.

Spring Registration for undergraduate students will run October 28 - November 14. Your specific date will be based on the number of credits you have earned. Students should plan to meet with an advisor a few weeks before their earliest registration time.

Please read below for more information on how to receive advising clearance:

Computer Science and Engineering Pre-Majors:

Pre-Majors and all first semester transfer students should schedule an advising appointment with their COEIT advisor. Your COEIT advisor is listed on your  myUMBC Profile.  Please click on your advisor's name to access your their appointment calendar. 

All Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering students who have passed their gateway in the last year have been assigned a staff advisor and should have received an email recently titled "Important Spring 2026 Advising Information." Please follow the directions in that email.  

All post-gateway Chemical Engineering students as well as post-gateway Mechanical Engineering students previously assigned a faculty advisor, and post-gateway CSEE students who chose to remain with their faculty advisor should reach our to their faculty advisor for advising. Faculty advisor information is available on your  myUMBC Profile.  

Information Systems & BTA Majors:

All IS & BTA new freshmen (started in Fall 2025) have a COEIT advisor listed in their  myUMBC Profile . You should schedule an appointment with that advisor.

All IS & BTA transfers students and returning students can consult the IS/BTA Advising Information here.  

If you are changing your major to a major outside the College of Engineering and Information Technology, please contact the respective department of your new major for advising appointment instructions. Please remember to complete a Declaration of Major form for your new major.

Winter 2026 Session

Winter registration will begin October 13. Students do not need to meet with an advisor prior to registering for winter courses unless they have questions or concerns. If you intend to take a course off-campus during the winter, a Verification of Transferability Form is required in advance of taking the course.

New Students Admitted for the Spring Semester:

Newly admitted students for the Spring semester may not register for courses until Winter Orientation. Please sign up for Orientation here.

Questions?

Please email coeitadvising@umbc.edu for additional information.

The Dresher Center for the Humanities invites applications for a Residential Graduate Student Research Fellowship for Spring 2026. Funding is intended to support and promote promising research in the humanities by graduate students at UMBC. The fellowships are open to all UMBC doctoral and master's level students working on humanities-related research projects that will culminate in a dissertation, master's thesis, or capstone project.  Proposals will be reviewed by the Dresher Center Advisory Board, with decisions on Spring semester fellowships by mid-November.

Fellows will receive up to $3,000 ($1,500 can serve as a stipend while the other $1,500 should be used for research travel, materials, or other directly-related research expenses). They will present a session as part of the CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now series and attend the Humanities Forum and other Dresher Center events and workshops. The Dresher Center will allow fellows to work in Center office space, as available.

After the fellowship semester, fellows will submit a summary of the work accomplished during the semester, as well as a statement on the progress made toward the completion of their dissertation or thesis.

The application for Spring 2026 fellowships is due November 15. Submit proposals and research advisor letters of support to dreshercenter@umbc.edu.

For more information and guidelines, click HERE. 

As The Retriever barks back to life after several years, Ann Tropea, assistant director for engaged media in the Center for Democracy and Civic Life, and Arpa Shahnazarian, The Retriever's editor-in-chief, are sharing the story of the paper’s revival in The Nutgraf, a Substack newsletter about student journalism, and presenting at MediaFest, the nation’s largest gathering of media students and their advisers.

Tropea, hired in 2023 to advise and help revive The Retriever, heard from students that WMBC, UMBC’s student-run online radio station was also in need of support, and set out to bring them into the Retriever newsroom. Students from Bartleby, UMBC’s creative arts journal since 1972, were looking for more connection to campus and soon became part of a unique student media collective.

In The Nutgraf article, “Three student media groups merged. Their budget tripled,” Tropea and Shahnazarian describe how the Student Media Collective came to be, including the transformation of the abandoned Retriever newsroom and the invitation to WMBC, which Tropea also helped revive, and Bartleby to share the space. Transformed “...into a bustling hub of collaboration….The move not only revived their physical newsroom but also tripled their budget, secured stipends for previously unpaid students and created a unified voice for student media on campus.”

At MediaFest, Tropea and Shahnazarian will share the Student Media Collective’s story in their presentation, “How to build a media center in 547 days”: “Here’s how we turned an abandoned newsroom into a hub of media production through a strategy of relationship building and radical co-creation in order to unite and revitalize three different media groups on UMBC's campus.” 

The Student Media Collective is a charter student organization with a shared constitution. It is governed by an executive board of six students, two from each publication. From The Nutgraf: “There is no hierarchy within the executive board,” said Tropea, who serves as a non-voting advisor. “It’s all collaborative and run on consensus.”

You can also catch Tropea and Shahnazarian’s WMBC show, “AA Batteries,” on Fridays at 3 p.m. 

Read more about the Student Media Collective in UMBC Magazine.

Read more about Tropea in UMBC Magazine’s “Meet a Retriever.”

thumbnail caption: Tropea and Shahnazarian (front) with members of the Student Media Collective and Dr. Renique Kersh, Vice President for Student Affairs