During her years as an undergrad at UMBC, Karen Sutton ’97, history, would constantly see Simmona Simmons ’74, American studies, working quietly in the library. Even today, when she stops in the Albin O. Kuhn Library, she sees Simmons and smiles, for even the sight of the librarian still inspires Sutton to pursue her goals.

“I (wanted to) become a librarian vicariously through her,” says Sutton, a lecturer at UMBC. “I plan to use the skills Simmona taught me to inspire others.”

Despite the major impact she tends to have on the lives of others, Simmons has always kept a low profile. Described as modest, quiet, and unassuming, Simmons maintains that people should be measured by their actions. And after more than fifty years of service at UMBC, she certainly has a lot to be measured by, quietly inspiring others – sometimes without even knowing it.

This year, Simmons, along with three other UMBC faculty members will be honored with the Legends of Excellence Award – a tribute that acknowledges faculty members and staff who have made an impact on UMBC’s African and Latino students. Serving on the library staff since the school opened in 1966, and through her role as library liaison, Simmons has had the opportunity to work with countless staff and students.

“My tenure at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery has been rewarding because I have had the opportunity to work with students, faculty, and staff, answering interesting queries and assisting with their research needs,” she says. “I have always loved working with the students; as they discover new information and as they mature, it is exciting to contribute a small part to their success.”

Simmons is also one of the founders of the UMBC Women’s Center which first opened in 1991, serving on its advisory board. Along with other founders, she pressed for the Center to be on the “footpath” of campus, ensuring that it be, as it is now, centrally located in The Commons for students to easily access.

“What I have learned from Simmona,” says Jess Myers, Director of the Women’s Center, “is that the work and its impact is most important and getting credit is less important.” Though she keeps out of the spotlight, Simmons is hardly inaccessible.

Through these various roles on campus she has made herself available to the student body, and she thrives on the role of mentorship in bettering one’s career. She often encourages students to seek out community and role models.

“Coming from a background where your parents aren’t educated,” says Simmons, referring to her own childhood, students need to find people who can help them make their way through academia.

“Identify a person that is doing what (you) want to do and hitch (your) wagon to that person,” she says. “Just go for coffee with them and ask them five questions.”

Simmons cites Dr. Gloria Oden, poet and former professor in the English department, as her professional inspiration even across the disciplines, recalling Oden’s constant encouragement to strategize and read better sources, and even to pursue writing for various publications and encyclopedias as a means to continue on in her professional development.

Everyone relies on the same tools to pursue their goals, regardless of family background or academic interests. And anyone can encourage others to use these tools: a poet from the English Department inspires a librarian in the American Studies department who inspires an instructor in the African American studies department.

Simmons has made sure that she can be a resource for students and even for other faculty, learning from those who have helped her in her career how to best help others.

— Kristen Russell

Danielle Burnett ’00, M.S. ’05, information systems management, wasted no time putting her UMBC degrees to work. In 2001, a newly-minted college graduate, she founded Applied Technology Services (APS), a technology services company serving commercial and government clients throughout Maryland. Since Burnett launched the company, it’s grown exponentially, recently exceeding 10 million dollars in revenue, and earning her a spotlight in the Baltimore Business Journal. Natural business acumen accounts for much of Burnett’s success, as does the preparation she received at UMBC, she says.

“The information systems program I was in at UMBC was very project-management oriented. And those process-driven skills really did help me in dealing with [business] challenges. That’s where I was able to focus to gain my credibility – my ability to execute,” Burnett says. She also credits the availability of certificate programs at UMBC, such as the one she earned in Electronic Government (she was the first student at UMBC to receive it) as useful to honing the skills she’d eventually apply to her company.

Burnett started out small, with one employee and one consultant. In fact, she remains surprised at the rapid-fire pace growth of ATS. She didn’t always see herself heading up a traditional company with on-site employees. But the contracts were coming so quickly that the accompanying paperwork required to complete them drove ATS from a virtual company to a brick-and-mortar one in 2010.

“All these deals we were working, we needed the paper to move through the organization, from the quote to the order to the invoice,” says Burnett, who took advantage of special programs for minority and small business owners to boost her client base. As a woman-owned company with under 50 employees, ATS qualifies for both. So while most of the country was reeling from the effects of the recession, ATS continued to thrive. Between 2006 and 2011, ATS doubled in size every year.

Burnett is proud not just of her business’ growth, but of the measured way she’s nurtured it. “I’ve never had to let a single employee go,” she says.

For now, the company remains small. She has 12 employees and is contemplating hiring two or three more in the near future. While some employees are family members – including her husband, father and sister-in-law – Burnett says she works to extend the feeling of a family business throughout the company.

Of all of her employees, Burnett says, “I make sure they’re treated fairly, and that they know their importance in the business. And I give them the flexibility to do different things.”

One of the benefits of working for a small business such as ATS, notes Burnett, is that employees can acquaint themselves with various aspects of the organization fairly easily. In fact, it’s an element of the business she conscientiously promotes. “Particularly for younger employees, during performance review, more than anything else, it’s about: ‘What else would you like to be doing?’”

While Burnett feels content about the progress she’s made as a businesswoman, she acknowledges that it hasn’t always been easy. Being a female executive in the IT industry, says Burnett, is challenging. “It’s difficult to earn credibility,” she says, as the field is upwards of 80 percent male.

But she’s plugged on, undeterred. Neither her style nor her company is particularly flashy or trendy, and that’s a point she tries to drive home to young college students whom she mentors through UMBC’s Alex.Brown Entrepreneurship program.

“I try to explain to them that you don’t have to come up with the next Angry Birds to find success as an entrepreneur,” Burnett says.

— Elizabeth Heubeck ’91

Bill Ermatinger ’86, political science, grew up in rural Baltimore County, in the (then) small town of Reisterstown. Decades later this small town background comes in handy when Ermatinger describes his work at Huntington Ingalls Industries, the largest military shipbuilding company in the U.S. and our nation’s sole builder of nuclear aircraft carriers.

Aircraft carriers, those behemoths of the ocean, are the most complicated piece of machinery in the world, says Ermatinger. “Imagine you’re creating an entire small town. You have to have clean water and a way to feed all your citizens. You need sanitation and waste disposal, a hospital, a school. Put an airport in there. Now put a nuclear reactor in your town. Once all that is built, you have to be able to move that town anywhere on the planet. Now you have an aircraft carrier.”

As executive vice president and chief human resources officer for Huntington Ingalls, Ermatinger oversees employee health and welfare at the company’s Newport News, Virginia, headquarters as well as other domestic and international subsidiary shipyards. “I get to represent 40,000 shipbuilders of this nation – the men and women building things for our commander in chief,” he says. “They don’t decide where or when these assets are employed, but in the event, they are going to make darned sure they are in a fair fight. I get to represent them and that is simply the coolest thing on the planet.”

When Ermatinger graduated from high school during the Reagan era, he says, his friends all headed to Towson State or Salisbury. However, he says, “I was not looking for a social school. In the early ’80s, if you wanted to be challenged academically, UMBC was your choice.”

Above and beyond stellar academics, Ermatinger says he enjoyed the school’s inclusive environment. “Everybody was treated the same, whether it was race or gender or academic ability, the professors and fellow students made a truly welcoming environment that embraced all students,” recalls Ermatinger. “I visited my friends at other schools and it did not feel the same on their campuses – there were cliques, exclusive sub-groups. At UMBC, I never felt that.”

Upon graduating from UMBC, Ermatinger landed a job at Westinghouse Defense – “right next door to campus,” he laughs – working in human resources. Northrop Grumman bought out Westinghouse in 1996, and Ermatinger worked his way up through the administrative ranks there. “Northrop Grumman went on a buying rampage, like many other defense companies, and bought Newport News Shipbuilding in 2005 along with some other ship makers. They asked me to move down to Virginia to become human resources vice president there, and then when Northrop spun off all their shipbuilding assets into a new company, Huntington Ingalls, I became chief human resources officer for the whole new entity,” he explains.

Indeed, Ermatinger is almost uniquely positioned to weigh and compare the outcomes of various institutes of higher learning. He oversees hiring for his company, which is the largest industrial employer in Virginia (as well the largest private employer in Mississippi, where Huntington Ingalls builds non-nuclear military ships). At the same time, he is also looking at schools as a parent. By both standards, he says, “UMBC is a first-choice school, not a school of option.”

Ermatinger has reached this conclusion after hiring “tens of thousands of kids” over a 30-year career in HR. “I’ve seen a wide range of the skills and qualities needed to be successful, and UMBC excels at instilling the soft skills,” he says. According to Ermatinger, these essential, yet too often un-nurtured, skills include the ability to work with others and to be a good listener. The willingness to persist. To be comfortable in charge: those are skills and attributes that employers are ultimately trying to hire. “The GPA is important, the program they graduated from is important, but in an interview we are also looking at intangibles. The whole person, not just their transcript,” says Ermatinger.

(In fact, Ermatinger credits this “whole person” recruitment approach as one reason Huntington Ingalls’ employee attrition rate is below 3% when the manufacturing industry as a whole averages 13.3% attrition annually).

“That is what my professors at UMBC taught me. It’s part of the culture. And I am very proud of that, as an alumnus.”

— Michelle Gienow

For 25 years, the Women’s Center has provided co-curricular programming, support services, and advocacy for marginalized individuals and communities, along with campus-wide activities such as Take Back the Night, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Critical Social Justice, and more. UMBC Magazine talked with center director Jess Myers, Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs Patrice McDermott, and special projects coordinator Amelia Meman ’15, GWST, for their thoughts about the center’s mission.

What do you see as the role of a women’s center on a university campus in today’s environment?

Jess Myers: There are so many women in higher education. But just because there are more women, doesn’t mean that there is the quality of experience. There’s still sexism. There’s still racism. There’s still able-ism. I think what women’s centers have been doing is really expanding that notion of which women, and really thinking about all the different kinds of women and their experiences in higher education and what can we do to expand the net in regards to reaching them and supporting their experience here at UMBC, but also in higher education as a whole.

Amelia Meman: It’s also about sort of empowering many different sorts of women. So you talk a little bit about gender equity on campus. But that looks like many different things. So supporting survivors of sexual assault because their stories don’t often get told and also supporting women of color, which has been a renewed focus of the Women’s Center in these past years. Critical Social Justice is also important because it is a way of expanding the notion of what activism can look like, and expands the notion of what women can do and what anybody can do really. The Women’s Center tackles all of these things in the broadest way, but also in the most grounded and people-centered way, which is really special to me. We not only do feminism, we not only do stuff for women, but we try to make social justice a priority. It’s something that we take very seriously.

The Women’s Center, in its early years, didn’t always have an office. As an early advocate of the center, Dr. McDermott, how has the place changed since taking up permanent residence in The Commons?

Patrice McDermott: When [The Commons] was created, a lot of the academic student and staff community around these issues fought to get this location and to get a full-time director. And then, we had this space…and what was done with this space, it’s amazing. We never imagined that this is what this would be, physically as well as it’s the hub of not just those sort of traditional issues that you would associate with women – the sort of expansion into a more nuanced understanding of gender rather than just in the body. It’s not a surprise that the Critical Social Justice work is – that this is one of the anchors on campus for that, because even before we used the word in academia – intersectional – that was the ethos of this space.

Myers: When we’re talking about who we are, what we do, we say we’re a place and we’re a space: a space for people to come out and take a deep breath to feel like their home away from home, but also a place of learning and activism and support. So we really do mean it as an active place that is doing things, but also a space to just take a deep breath and be a community and reconnect and be with people.

McDermott: It has a presence that you feel when you walk in the door, but it also has a presence on the campus for people and it’s a very dynamic space. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we saw a parallel, but quite different sort of explosion, in the gender and women’s studies department. These are the pillars if you will, on the campus. It’s one of the reasons I’m at UMBC.

See a collection of historic items from the Women’s Center’s history at bit.ly/womenscentercollection.

Students come to UMBC’s Emergency Health Services program for many reasons. Some already work as EMTs or as physicians, while others hope to get into health policy or disaster relief. What brings them together, says program chair and professor J. Lee Jenkins ’97, biological sciences and EHS, M.S. ’99, EHS, is a shared desire to help people in need.

“The students here are very altruistic, and they are the classic ‘Wanna change the world, wanna make it a better place,’ people with big ideas,” she said. “Being able to help people immediately and make a difference at a very stressful moment in their lives is really meaningful for us.”

Founded in 1980 at the request of Dr. R. Adams Cowley, a pioneer in the development of the trauma center concept and the namesake of Baltimore’s main shock trauma center, the EHS program at UMBC is one of the oldest emergency medical baccalaureate programs in the nation. Alumni of the program can be found all over the world, providing leadership in clinical and disaster settings, determining policy at all levels of government, and teaching the emergency health professionals of the future.

With an aging population and increasingly complicated primary care options, the emergency medical services community has diversified over the years to meet changing demands, Jenkins said. Partnerships with local rescue outfits allow EHS researchers and workers to integrate health units through better use of data and communication between parties, making service more efficient and targeted by client.

Looking ahead, the EHS department is also embarking on more interdisciplinary research, and recently launched a joint Ph.D. program with the department of public policy, which offers the choice of a concentration in emergency health services. With nearly a thousand EHS alumni currently in the field, Jenkins knows the department is making an impact across the globe.

“We really do have leaders and policy makers all over the world at this point. We have physicians. We have state EMS medical directors. We have people working in ASPR,” or assistant secretary for preparedness and response, at the federal level, she said. “It’s pretty incredible.”

Read about the EHS Search and Rescue excursion.

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

Q: With the success and momentum from events around the 50th celebration, what are the best lessons learned in how to engage and develop new generations of UMBC alumni for the next 50 years?

— Nate Dissmeyer ’07, information systems management

A: The number one lesson comes from the faces of the alumni who came back. So many were surprised to see how UMBC has developed and evolved over the years. The lesson was that we have to find ways of getting graduates back to campus—not simply to see the growing beauty of the physical setting, but, even more important, to talk with students and faculty and staff; to see other alumni; and to see how much this setting represents community and family in the best senses of those words.

During the celebration, alumni remembered when they were younger. Whatever the age, there’s that sense of nostalgia, and it’s also satisfying to connect to one’s alma mater. Some people were surprised to hear us saying anybody who graduated in the first 50 years would be considered a part of the founding group. Well, whether one graduated in the ’70s or the ’90s or in 2010, all are part of that founding group because we forget how short a period 50 years really is.

The fact is that years from now, when we are 150 years old, people will look back at that first 50 years and say, “Those people helped to found that place.” They had faith that the place was going to be better and better and better. And so there’s a sense of pride people can take in being a part of the foundation of the university. It’s not every university that can talk about its founding graduates or founding alumni and founding faculty and staff, but we are fortunate in that way.

So our graduates have helped to create the institution. The university is only as impressive as its alumni. Universities are fortunate to have superb faculty and staff, but the fact is alumni are always part of the university. That’s the most important message from them—that this is always their university, and will always be their alma mater.

Q: Knowing your intense schedule and commitment to our university, when do you get the time to just be Freeman Hrabowski? How do you kick back and relax?

— Ron Pettie ’82, English

A: This is going to sound really nerdy: Studying French. Literally reading French literature and philosophy, talking with students on campus in French, and having them correct my pronunciation is as relaxing as anything I could possibly do because I’m learning. I’m always learning new vocabulary and new structures of sentences and new ideas. I’ll give you just one idea that will give you the point. I’m studying the differences between American culture and French culture. One of the differences is the French understand that you will cut them off before you finish a sentence. There’s a rhythm to it, where having an exciting conversation means you never finish your sentence. Somebody gets the point, and they just cut you off, and it goes back and forth.

In America, we think it’s disrespectful to cut someone off, and the French would use the word “boredom.” They think it’s rather boring that we wait until one person finishes talking. These are things that we would not think about without having a chance to study those differences. The  reason I enjoy relaxing that way is that I enjoy learning new things, and I enjoy students seeing that there’s so much I don’t know—and that they can correct me! I think that’s a lot of fun. It really is.

The other thing I would say is I enjoy reading in different centuries. I particularly like the pace of the 19th century, whether it’s British or French literature. I love studying different centuries, getting away from the fast pace, being able to slow down and think about an envelope and the smell of a letter. I need that. I need the slowing down process. I also meditate. I both pray and meditate. Very different things, but people don’t know it and I’m not ashamed to say it. I pray all day for all of us. I think we need it.

And finally, I will tell you the most fun thing I’ve done is working with children. I love going to third or fourth grade and sitting on the floor working on math problems with children. I really enjoy that. I enjoy kids because they will always say, “Please don’t go.” You go to leave, and they take your heart. I love it. I’m still thinking about Lakeland Elementary when the little girl said, “Please don’t go.” I told Greg [Simmons ’04, vice president of institutional advancement], “I just may stay.” It’s that innocence of a child that gives me such hope. It really does.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, visit umbc.edu.

Dear Retrievers,

There’s nothing quite like snow seeping through your boots to wake up the brain and tune you into what’s really important. This happened for me in April, when staff photographer Marlayna Demond ’11 and I traveled to western Maryland to witness UMBC’s 33rd annual weekend-long Emergency Health Services (EHS) “Search and Rescue” wilderness training workshop.

We arrived to find ourselves in less-than-spring-like conditions. As I stood freezing my toes off on a snowy hillside of trees, waiting for a group of students to appear over the ridge where they were conducting a practice grid search, I realized three major things:

1. My sad, leaky boots were not made for anything other than Baltimore weather. More importantly, though…
2. Despite the bone-chilling wind, these students were smiling, seemingly oblivious to the cold. They were doing their work with the gusto of people who know how important it is and would continue to do so again and again all weekend, without complaint, long after Marlayna and I had departed for the warmth of our beds, because – quite honestly – they love helping people.
3. That love extends past their work and into the EHS community. More than twenty former search and rescue alumni from the program’s nearly 40-year history stood in the woods and the cabin as volunteer trainers beside them, many of them coming back for the second or tenth or twentieth year in a row because they share that same guiding desire to help people.

This is not just an EHS attribute, of course, but one that runs through UMBC. During my twelve years working in the loop, I’ve been knocked over time after time by the sheer selflessness that drives our community to learn, perform, and make positive change. In this issue of UMBC Magazine, you’ll see numerous examples. Researchers working to understand the brain in ways that will help Alzheimer’s patients and astronauts and children. People from all disciplines at UMBC working to connect with our neighbors in Baltimore. You’ll meet this year’s winners of the Legends of Excellence award – including one staff member and alumna who has served UMBC’s students since 1966. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of our Retriever community near and far.

In my new role as editor of UMBC Magazine, I look forward to continuing the work of capturing and sharing the best of these stories with you. Standing on that snowy hill in western Maryland reminded me yet again of just how lucky I am to get to see it all up close.

— Jenny O’Grady
Editor, UMBC Magazine

P.S. Thank you to the hundreds of you who shared your thoughts about UMBC Magazine via our web survey this spring. Your voices will help us continue to share the types of stories you love best.