Connecting Ideas

Graduate School Without Walls




In the very best sense, Stacey McIntyre has learned by doing. Taking advantage of a remarkable collaboration between the UMBC Psychology Department and the Kennedy Krieger Institute of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, McIntyre was able to earn her master's degree and simultaneously put her classroom knowledge to work with patients. McIntyre graduated this spring in the first class of the innovative new program in Applied Behavior Analysis, which includes a practicum semester at Kennedy Krieger, where UMBC graduate students get real-world experience in how to identify behavioral problems, analyze and develop a treatment intervention, and then evaluate the treatment, under close supervision. The students write up the intervention process in journal format and present it to an audience of UMBC and Kennedy Krieger faculty, supervisors, and peers. Kennedy Krieger faculty also teach some of the UMBC program courses, and some of the students' most novel intervention strategies have become collaborative papers, submitted to peer journals.

McIntyre was a teaching assistant at UMBC, as well as a valued member of the Kennedy Krieger clinical team in the pediatric unit. Thanks to her UMBC degree, her Kennedy Krieger experience, and her professional enthusiasm, McIntyre now is employed at the Ivymount School for autistic children in Montgomery County, Maryland, considered one of the foremost such schools in the nation.

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