UMBC Honors and ACHIEVEMENTS

Student Achievements
UMBC students compete with the best for awards, championships, prestigious graduate school admissions and job offers from impressive employers.

UNDERGRADUATE | GRADUATE STUDENTS 

UNDERGRADUATE

UMBC is a leader among Maryland public universities in sending one-third of our students directly to graduate and professional schools. In the last two years, graduates were accepted to prestigious graduate programs at institutions such as Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Duke and the University of Michigan.

UMBC graduates join the private and public sectors in vital roles. Students entering the workforce are recruited by such top companies as Booz Allen, Constellation Energy, DuPont, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Microsoft, NASA, Xerox and T. Rowe Price. Public service-minded graduates go on to join Maryland public school systems, the National Security Administration, the Social Security Administration and other divisions of the federal government. Still others are building start-up companies such as OpenPosting.com, the first online classified advertising community for college students.

Philip Graff, a senior physics major, has won one of the world’s most selective academic awards, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Graff, the second UMBC student to receive the award in the past two years, is one of just 45 U.S. winners chosen from more than 600 applicants and 119 finalists.

English major Alexander Pyles was one of eight students chosen out of a nationwide pool of applicants for Freedom Forum’s NCAA Sports Journalism Scholarship. He also recently won a highly competitive Maryland, Delaware, D.C. Press Association Reese Cleghorn Internship. Pyles was one of only 37 finalists vying for eight paid summer newspaper internships

During his senior year, Isaac Matthews ’07, mechanical engineering, was named the 2007 Arthur Ashe Jr. Male Sports Scholar of the Year. The award is given annually by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine to the U.S. female and male athletes who best combine athletic and academic excellence with community activism. In fall 2007, Matthews will enter the M.S./Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering and M.S. in Technology and Public Policy programs at M.I.T.

Ten additional UMBC student-athletes were chosen as 2007 Arthur Ashe Sports Scholars: Pascaline Cette, mechanical engineering (tennis); Adriana Fonaseca, financial economics (tennis); Brian Hodges, financial economics (basketball); Mehrban Iranshad, political science (tennis); Aaron James, psychology (track); Sarah Ball, modern languages and linguistics (volleyball); Jessica Young, political science (soccer); Robin Babaris, mechanical engineering (soccer); Jenelle Wilson, financial economics (track); and Francine Ward, political science (track).

Three members of the Class of 2007  – Joseph Maher, Political Science and Environmental Studies; Allen McFarland, Political Science and Economics; and Bridget Wessel, Modern Languages and Linguistics – and Kevin J. Mulroe ’98, M.A., Instructional Systems Design, won Fulbright Awards for international graduate study, research or teaching. It is the second year in a row that three current UMBC students received the award.

Biochemistry majors Whitney Fields and Tesia Stephenson received 2008 UNCF-Merck Undergraduate Science Research Scholarship Awards.

UMBC undergraduates participated in a pioneering Digital Storytelling Project which received a Bronze Telly Award. Funded by Retirement Living TV (RLTV), the project is the nation's first three-way partnership between a media company, a university and a retirement community. UMBC students teamed with residents from Charlestown Retirement Community to create a series of 17 digital short movies. The prestigious Telly Award cites the Digital Storytelling Project as being among the world's best in local, regional, and cable television, and video and film production. This year's awards received over 13,000 entries from all 50 states and five continents.

UMBC earned a place in college chess history by winning the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship – the “World Series” of college chess – for a record-breaking seventh time in 2006. UMBC’s Chess Team won its fourth straight President’s Cup or “Final Four” of college chess in 2006. In 2007, the team took first place in the College Chess League tournament.

Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar Shane Spencer won first place in the national KaiserEDU.org 2007 Student Essay Contest in the undergraduate category. Spencer, who is majoring in political science and media and communications studies, tied for first place out of a field of more than 60 undergraduate student entries in the health policy essay competition sponsored by the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Political science student Matt Mainen, a senior policy analyst at the Institute for Gulf Affairs, recently published opinion articles on affairs in the Middle East for several national publications, including the International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Times and Baltimore Sun.

In 2007, UMBC’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers won the National Academic Technical Bowl Competition for the second time in two years, defeating the best teams from around the country.

UMBC won the first annual Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl in November 2006, defeating teams from University of Maryland, Baltimore and the Naval Academy, among others.

UMBC students received the Digital Map Award during the 33rd Annual American Congress on Surveying and Mapping – Cartography Geographic Information Society Map Design Competition in 2006. Under the direction of Tom Rabenhorst, director of instructional cartography in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, students in the Advanced Cartographic Applications class designed and developed the Digital Atlas of Megalopolis, an atlas that analyzes the socio-economic-spatial changes in the region over the past 50 years.

UMBC students are consistently recognized during the annual Goldwater Scholarship national competition. In 2007, Philip Graff, an Honors College student with a dual major in physics and math, and Silpa Poola-Kella, a Meyerhoff Scholar majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology, received Honorable Mention recognition. Adjoa Smalls-Mantey, biochemistry and molecular biology, and Devin Burns, mechanical engineering, were named 2006 Goldwater Scholars. Named for former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, this is the premier undergraduate award of its type, given to outstanding students in the fields of mathematics, natural sciences and engineering.

Jordan Hadfield, ancient studies/political science, is the recipient of a 2007-08 William Donald Schaefer Scholarship. Named for former Baltimore major and comtroller Schaefer, the scholarship was created to encourage Maryland students to prepare for careers in public service.

One undergraduate and three alumni received 2006 GEM fellowships (National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Sciences Fellows). They are: Lenard Williams, computer science, Kyla McMullen ’05, computer science, Nwokedi Ikida ’04, computer science, and Charita Collins ’03, mechanical engineering.

UMBC’s College Bowl Team won the 2008 Regional College Bowl Tournament. The team placed first out of 12 other universities and will compete in the National Championship in May.

Members of the University’s Model United Nations Team received honors at the  2006 American Model United Nations Conference. Sondheim Scholar Greg Winger, political science and history, and Christina Stanley, interdisciplinary studies, were recognized as their committee’s “Outstanding Delegates.”

Megan Jenkins, political science, participated in the 2006 National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NCSC) Distinguished Scholars Program. The program, which includes a full-time summer internship, is a unique opportunity to gain real-world experience prior to graduation and live with fellow NSCS members from more than 85 universities nationwide. Jenkins interned with the Office of the Clerk Magistrate for the Boston Municipal Court.

Douglas Nivens, a political science major, received the National Security Education Program’s David L. Boren Undergraduate Scholarship. This highly competitive award provided Nivens with support for a full year of undergraduate study abroad in 2006-07 at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.

Department of Theatre student productions have been invited to perform six times at the finals of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival – more often than any other university theater program in Maryland.

The UMBC Camerata was invited to participate as one of the college choirs singing at the 2007 Christmas in Washington, which is attended by the President, his cabinet and other important political figures. The program also was broadcast on cable television’s TNT. In April 2007, the Camerata was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall with famed English choral conductor and composer John Rutter.

The NCAA's most recent Academic Progress Report ranked UMBC’s women's swim team and men's basketball and cross country teams in the top 10 percent of
colleges and universities nationally. 

Nine UMBC athletic and support teams posted grade point averages of 3.00 or
higher in the fall of 2007. Forty-nine percent of all students in the program (total of 441) had grade point averages of 3.00 or higher, while 29 percent were over 3.50. Thirty-nine program participants recorded 4.0 grade point averages in the fall.
The women's basketball team has a team grade-point average of 3.32. The only team in the department with a higher GPA is women's tennis, at 3.49.

Men’s basketball has advanced to the 2008 America East Championships. It is UMBC’s first-ever appearance in a league title game in 22 years at the NCAA Division I level. The Retrievers earned their 23rd victory (23-8) of the season, tying the all-time (41 years) school record.  The team advanced to the semi-finals in 2007.

Cornelia Carapcea was named the America East Conference Scholar-Athlete in women’s tennis for the 2006-07 academic year.

Women’s basketball off-guard Kristin Drabyn won the 2007 America East Conference Sportsmanship Award.

The men’s tennis team received the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) National Team Sportsmanship Award for April 2007. The ITA National Team Sportsmanship Award is a monthly award that goes to one men's and one women's team that has exemplified outstanding sportsmanship, character and ethical conduct in the true spirit of competition and collegiate tennis.

Senior softball player Melanie Denischuk is the 2006 NCAA Division I statistical champion for runs batted in per game. 

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Kristi Harris, Ph.D. candidate in physics, is UMBC’s first Department of Energy Computational Science Fellow. The fellowship will fund her doctoral studies through 2010. Harris conducted research in nanowire technology at Sandia National Labs in New Mexico in summer 2007.

Vikas Behl ’04, English, a student in the M.A. in Instructional Systems Design program, received a 2007 Fulbright Award to teach in Turkey.

Christopher Hofmann, a biological sciences Ph.D. candidate, was one of two 2006 American Institute of Biological Sciences Emerging Public Policy Leaders. As a recipient of this award, Hofmann spoke on Capitol Hill about his research.

“In the Land of Milk and Honey,” a film by Neil Van Gorder, imaging and digital arts M.F.A. candidate, was nominated for Best of Show at the 2007 Rosebud Awards.

Mike Novey, a Ph.D. computer science/electrical engineering student, received the best paper award at the 31st International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and
Signal Processing (ICASSP). He received the honor in the Machine Learning for Signal Processing category for the paper titled Stability Analysis of Complex-valued Nonlinearities for Maximization of Nongaussianity co-authored by Tulay Adali, professor of computer science and electrical engineering.

Joan Shin, Ph.D. candidate in language, literacy and culture, was awarded the 2006 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. The award is given to those who show exemplary promise as future leaders in higher education. Shin was one of nine recipients from across the country.

Naresh Sunkara, a Ph.D. student in chemistry and biochemistry, is the graduate student representative of the American Chemical Society’s Graduate Education Advisory Board. Sunkara was chosen from 30 applicants in a nationwide search.

*Last updated 3/14/2008