Freeman-Asia Scholarship - Workshop 9/29/17 - noon Admin 218

Spend a semester in East and South Asia

Times Higher Education (THE) has again recognized UMBC as one of the world’s top universities in its closely watched 2018 rankings, announced late Tuesday evening. This marks the sixth consecutive year UMBC has appeared on the prestigious international list.

THE describes its World University Rankings as the only university performance measure to assess research-intensive universities on a global scale “across all of their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.”

The 2018 ranking includes 1,000 universities from 77 countries, representing the top five percent of higher education institutions worldwide (see methodology). The list’s top ranks are dominated by the United Kingdom, United States, and Switzerland, with several universities from Germany, the Netherlands, and China also ranked very highly. Of the 157 U.S. universities included in THE World University Rankings this year, three are in Maryland: UMBC, the University of Maryland, College Park, and Johns Hopkins University.

UMBC’s profile in THE lauds the university’s commitment to innovation and impact by noting, “UMBC has always stressed innovation and interdisciplinarity. It has never been afraid to pioneer new models of teaching and research, and new ways of contributing to the regional economy.”

This recognition mirrors UMBC’s recent ranking as the #7 Most Innovative university in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, which also named UMBC one of the country’s top universities for Strong Commitment to Undergraduate Education, alongside Princeton, Brown, and Yale.

In addition to producing annual global university rankings, Times Higher Education now also partners with The Wall Street Journal to produce national college rankings for the United States, across the categories of resources, engagement, outcomes, and environment, and based on a survey of more than 200,000 current university students. The WSJ/THE list for 2018 features UMBC as one of the top universities in the U.S., particularly recognizing UMBC’s diverse and inclusive educational community.

Both the U.S. and international lists continue to be valuable resources for prospective students and their families, in the U.S. and abroad, as they explore higher education possibilities.

Photo: UMBC students walk across campus in fall 2017. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

In the weeks leading up to the Alumni Awards Ceremony, we’ll be profiling each honoree in more detail here on our blog. Today, meet Steven Storck ’08, mechanical engineering, M.S. ’09, mechanical engineering, and Ph.D. ’14, mechanical engineering, additive manufacturing engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and this year’s Distinguished Service honoree.

As a triple alumnus of UMBC, Steven Storck ’08, mechanical engineering and mathematics, M.S. ’09, mechanical engineering, and Ph.D. ’14, mechanical engineering, knows his way around campus, to say the least. In addition to his day job as an additive manufacturing application engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, he still makes his way back to UMBC frequently, both as an instructor and an advisor for the school’s Baja SAE team. This is the place where he first discovered his passion for research, and he says he had a lot of support throughout his academic career. “If you were willing to put in the work and had a good idea, everyone at UMBC seemed to encourage you to take on the challenge, no matter how large,” he writes. Storck began his research during his sophomore year at UMBC, when he took over a project from a graduate student who had left. As he continued his education, he had more and more opportunities to delve deeper into his study of materials science and engineering, and was eventually able to apply for a Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) fellowship as a doctoral student. That funding allowed him to develop a material over four times lighter and six times stronger than the current state of the art, and his findings earned him top honors from the Society of Advanced Materials and Process Engineering (SAMPE). Today, at the APL, Storck heads up research and development for various projects, most notably an additive manufacturing technology demonstration part for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which is hoped to be the first spacecraft ever to “touch” the sun. He’s also lent his considerable project-management skills to the UMBC SAE Baja team; in 2015, he organized UMBC’s first international Baja event. “This was particularly rewarding,” he writes, “because it allowed [our team] to highlight UMBC on a global stage.”

Join us for the Alumni Awards Ceremony on Thursday, October 5!

1 Peter 2:9-10 - “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

“In us and in our communities the Spirit is at work and reproducing the very life of God, so that in our present between-the-times existence, we might live the life of the future, toward which we are walking. This is what lies behind Paul’s command in Philippians 1:27, wherein a wordplay of the fact that Philippi was a Roman colony, whose free people were therefore citizens of Rome, Paul urges them to live out their heavenly citizenship in Philippi in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.  Picking up this same imagery again in 3:20 he says that “our citizenship is in heaven.” God’s people in Philippi were in effect a “colony of heaven” in this colony of Rome. Paul’s point is that if people are to see what heaven is to be like, they should see it now in the way the heavenly citizens live their life together. Obviously, only the Spirit of the living God can pull that off! But that is what it is all about.” (G. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God.  Kindle Locations 2105-2106)

Today pray for your church and ministry group, asking that we will become the heavenly colony in this world.

- GK

Many of our earliest Retrievers remember fulfilling their physical education requirements in Gym I (above), while students looking for a place to lift weights from 1999 to the present spent that time in the Retriever Activities Center across from the Administration Building. Today, UMBC is mere months away from opening the new UMBC Event Center, a 172,000 square foot multi-purpose facility that will house men’s and women’s basketball and women’s volleyball, as well as provide a venue for a variety of events, such as concerts, featured speakers – and Commencement.

Learn more about the new UMBC Event Center  — set to open in early 2018 — here, and enjoy this slideshow of photos of construction, ranging from Fall 2016 through Summer of 2017.
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It is midnight on Friday and True Grit’s, whose doors have usually long been locked and tables empty, is bustling with students. For the first time, UMBC dining services is offering a Weekend Late Night at True Grit’s.

Late Night is a favorite with UMBC students. Monday through Thursday from 9 p.m. – 2 a.m., after a long night in the library or watching a movie in Lecture Hall One, students can enjoy a quick meal at True Grit’s. But noticeably, Late Night was not available on Friday or Saturday nights. If students wanted food after 7:30 p.m. on Friday, they had to go to the Commons or Outtakes convenience store.

Weekend Late Night will run Friday and Saturday nights from 9 p.m. – 1 a.m, one weekend per month . The menu is exactly the same as the weekday Late Night.

The pilot program is a response to student’s requests for more weekend dining options. According to Tom DeLuca, Resident District Manager for Chartwells, the program has been in development for the past year.

“I got feedback through Residential Life … it came from a couple different directions, so we started to think ‘okay, this is something that might work,’” says DeLuca.

Dining Services also received input from the Student Dining Committee, which consists of around 25 students and several administrators. According to DeLuca, the committee meets monthly to talk about the “good, the bad, and the ugly [about on-campus dining].” The committee has representatives from the Student Government Association, the Student Event’s Board, the Resident Student Association’s Community Action Boards and Residential Life. It also has an athletic representative and students who have dietary restrictions and needs, such as vegetarian or gluten free diets.

“We try to get a good cross section of students,” says DeLuca. “From that committee we’ve done things like change meal plans [and] looked at operating hours.”

Weekend Late Night has not been available in the past partly due to budgetary concerns. “There’s a cost associated with it. It doesn’t generate any new revenue, it’s just moving the meal plans around,” said DeLuca. “You have to look at adding two nights with a full staff throughout the semester so we agreed that we would pilot four weekends this fall.”

“We don’t want to raise meal plan prices,” DeLuca emphasized. “We know what the labor costs are and then there’s the additional food cost.”

DeLuca doesn’t anticipate a reduction in the services already in place, but says that they will be able to make a more informed decision about allocating funding after the pilot program ends.

Over the four weekends, Dining Services will be tracking student feedback about the program to determine whether or not to continue it in the spring semester. “We have a feedback system called HappyOrNot,” says DeLuca. Students can hit a button on a kiosk by the exit to True Grits. The buttons range from a green smiling face to a red frowning face to indicate the students’ level of satisfaction with their dining experience.

The feedback system is not foolproof, however. “We didn’t get any data from the first one because [the kiosk] was only programmed for breakfast, lunch, and dinner [times],” DeLuca noted. “So we have to get some Late Night data for the next three weekends.”

Despite the lack of data, the student attendance spoke for itself. Staff members expected 300-400 students, but over 500 students turned up on both Friday and Saturday nights. A major goal of the program is to increase the number of students who remain on campus over the weekend in addition to increasing overall student satisfaction. 

The next Weekend Late Night will take place on Homecoming weekend and the following on the first weekends in November and December.

Lilly Keplinger, a junior psychology major, SGA senator and marketing intern for Chartwells said, “It was a really successful pilot and gave students a food option they’ve really been looking for.”

As of the Fall 2017 semester, the Salsarita’s on campus began increasing prices for certain food items such as beans and rice, which now cost an extra dollar each when added to nachos and quesadillas.

Salsarita’s — a Tex-Mex food chain — can be found in The Commons along Market Street. Customers can order burritos, burrito bowls, quesadillas, tacos or nachos, and then choose additional ingredients to fill it with, ranging from various meats to salsa and cheese. Many ingredients are included in the price of the menu item, but some, such as queso (cheese sauce) and guacamole cost extra. Prior to this semester, rice and beans were included in the price of burritos and bowls, as well as nachos and quesadillas, the latter of which is included in a “meal deal” offered to students who have purchased meal plans.

Word of the recent price hikes quickly spread among the students. In a popular post on one of the MyUMBC discussion boards, one student lamented the apparent “nickel and diming,” noting that the increased prices amounted to “around a 25% increase in price for the same items we got last semester.” Other students also conveyed similar dissatisfaction in the comments section.

Talk of the price increases was common around campus as well. Daniel Peña, a sophomore business technology administration major, frequents Salsarita’s and stated that he thought the extra charges for the rice and beans were “excessive,” while also mentioning, “then again, the nachos are $8 — what do people expect?”

Tom DeLuca, UMBC’s Resident District Manager for Chartwells — the food-service provider for the school — addressed these circumstances in the comments of the MyUMBC post. He wrote, “In the spring, the Salsarita’s representative was here to do their routine check on us and noticed that we weren’t charging extra for rice and beans on certain items. It is Salsarita’s policy to do so, and we, as a franchisee, are obligated to follow their pricing structure.”

There were other areas of concern as well. For example, Salsarita’s menu does not explicitly mention which ingredients are included or not included with each menu item. This made the price increases not immediately apparent to students, surprising many.

To address this situation and possible future grievances, DeLuca stated, “We are working on a way to clearly communicate to you what is and isn’t included on all items, as they are different for each menu item.” He adds, “We hope to have a communication piece up at the station in The Commons soon so there is less confusion about the policies, and so our customers know exactly how much everything is before ordering.”

In the meantime, students and customers can voice their concerns through the Guest Feedback section of Salsarita’s website.

Dr. Jerome Adams, UMBC alumnus and former Indiana Health Commissioner, was confirmed as U.S. Surgeon General last August by President Trump.

During the U.S. Senate hearing for Adams’ confirmation, Adams stated that he understood the “importance of picking science over politics.” He also said that he has a strong desire to “make wellness and community and employer engagement a centerpiece of my agenda” and to tackle issues like the opioid epidemic, obesity and healthcare, among other things.

Adams attended UMBC through a Meyerhoff scholarship and was a double major in biochemistry and biopsychology. “We were really happy for him,” said Keith Harmon, director of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. “I think it’s a testament to the foundation that folks get here at UMBC and where that education can take them. 

After graduating, Adams studied in Holland and Zimbabwe. When asked about Adams by the “Baltimore Sun,” Dr. Freeman Hrabowski said that “[Adams] was a kid from a small town competing with students from around the world, but he held his own … He was always concerned about other people, he always wanted to help others with the difficulties and challenges they faced.”

Adams believes that the U.S. “won’t be able to solve these problems from Washington, D.C. Our health starts in the communities where we live, learn, work, play and go to school. We need to get out into those communities, learn about their obstacles and successes, share best practices and help empower them to implement local solutions to their toughest problems.”

After graduating from UMBC, Adams attended medical school at Indiana University and earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley.

Before becoming Surgeon General, Adams was a practicing anesthesiologist and the Indiana Health Commissioner under Governor Mike Pence. During the Senate hearing for Adams’ nomination, Adams described his actions as Indiana Health Commissioner, where he “oversaw [Indiana’s] response to Ebola, Zika and a rural HIV outbreak related to injection drug use, and also oversaw Indiana’s tobacco cessation efforts, the State’s Public Laboratory and its Health Care Quality and Regulatory division.”

While serving as the Indiana Health Commissioner, Adams was responsible for dealing with one of the largest HIV outbreaks in recent history. During a testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Adams said that “in rural Scott County, we are dealing with the largest injection-drug-use-related HIV outbreak in decades, with what CDC Director Tom Frieden described as a higher incidence of HIV than any country in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Adams, whose brother was an addict, is an outspoken advocate towards solving the opioid epidemic. He has stated that “the addictive properties of prescription opioids is a scourge in America and it must be stopped.”

With three children of his own, Adams also stated before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that “when making decisions, I literally have no choice but to think about both the immediate impact on our nation’s children — my own children included — and the world I am leaving for future generations.”