STUDENTS

Highly Selective Student Body
UMBC is now considered one of the nation's highly selective public universities. The SAT scores for incoming freshmen are consistently above Maryland and national averages; the average score of the top quartile is 1400. The freshman class typically includes approximately 150 valedictorians, salutatorians, and students with 4.0 high-school GPAs, many of whom are attracted by UMBC's merit-based Scholars Programs Artist, Humanities, Public Affairs and Meyerhoff Scholars Programs for high-achieving students.

Student Achievements
In 1998, UMBC was awarded membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's most prestigious scholarly honor society, becoming one of the youngest universities to achieve this status.

UMBC has had several students win prestigious Goldwater Scholarships, the leading award given to outstanding undergraduates in the sciences and engineering, and several Rhodes Scholarship finalists.

Last year, twenty-five students received Provost's Undergraduate Research Awards and research stipends of up to $1,500 each for independent research projects conducted with a faculty mentor. Students are invited to showcase their work at the university's annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day each spring.

Scholastic Competition
UMBC's Chess Team won the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship five times in the past six years. Its record includes victories over teams from Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Princeton. In 1997, the team played host to world-champion Garry Kasparov in a match at UMBC. Kasparov declined to play UMBC's top-ranked player, but did take on the fourteen-year-old Maryland Junior Chess Champion, the recipient of a chess scholarship to UMBC.

UMBC's Model United Nations Team earned "Distinguished Delegation" honors at the 1999 national Model U.N. conference, finishing ahead of such institutions as Georgetown, West Point, Syracuse, Mount Holyoke, and Bryn Mawr.

Athletic Competition
UMBC has won the Northeast Conference Commissioner's Cup four consecutive times -- every year since entering the conference. In 2002, UMBC teams appeared in six NCAA national competitions: Track & Field, Swimming, Men's Tennis, Women's Tennis, Women's Lacrosse, and Softball. Also in 2002, UMBC had seven Academic All-Americans. Fifty-one percent of all UMBC student-athletes have a GPA of at least 3.0, and nearly twenty-five percent had GPAS of 3.5 and higher.

Successful Graduates
One-third of UMBC's graduates immediately go on to post-graduate study, most recently ranging from programs at Yale, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins, to the American Film Institute and the Institute of Archaelogy in University College London.

UMBC's 35,000 alumni, 80% of whom remain in Maryland, include over 600 physicians, 600 attorneys, 525 mathematicians and computer scientists at the National Security Agency, and thousands of other professionals.

Meyerhoff Scholarship Program
Founded in 1988, this nationally recognized program is dedicated to increasing the number of African Americans and other underrepresented minorities earning doctorates in the sciences and and engineering. Students accepted into the program have exceptional retention rates (95%) and GPAs (3.4) and are broadly distributed in scientific fields. Meyerhoff students have impressive research-related internships each year in laboratories throughout the U.S. and abroad; nearly all have presented research and professional conferences, and a number of them have published in scientific journals as undergraduates.

The program has more than 300 graduates, almost all currently enrolled in PhD, MD, or MD/PhD programs across the country (e.g., at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Hopkins, Penn, Virginia, Rice). Currently, there are just over 200 undergraduates in the Meyerhoff Program at UMBC.

Community Service
UMBC's Shriver Center serves as a national model of how colleges and universities can have a direct and positive impact on communities across the country. The Center places 1,000 UMBC students each year in internships and co-op positions throughout Maryland, the U.S., and in dozens of international settings. The Center also has developed a number of community service initiatives involving students and faculty.

Through the Choice Program, UMBC students provide intensive, community-based supervision, mentoring thousands of troubled Maryland youth in Baltimore City and five Maryland Counties. The program has been replicated in San Diego, CA and Hartford, CT.

More than 50 former Peace Corps volunteers are enrolled as graduate students through the Peaceworker Program. The two-year program involves both graduate study and community service.

The Shriver Center operates CLEARCorps, a public-private partnership, which, through education and lead-abatement, is cost-effective in reducing the risk of lead poisoning in inner-city neighborhoods in Baltimore, Charleston, SC, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Austin, TX, and Portland, OR.

It is also affiliated with Maryland Police Corps, which provides innovative training for college graduates who become community-oriented police professionals.

FACULTY & PROGRAMS

Doctoral/Research Mission
In the past five years, UMBC's Graduate School awarded over 250 PhDs and over 1,200 master's degrees. In addition to courses that are offered online, a management track within the master's degree program in Emergency Health Services Management Studies can be completed entirely online.

UMBC has experienced substantial growth in research and training contracts and grants -- from $13.9M in FY-93 to $80.4M in FY-02.

In the past five years, UMBC has jumped from 200 to 153 in the National Science Foundation's national ranking for Federal science and engineering R&D expenditures.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute
UMBC is the home of the first HHMI Investigator at a public university in Maryland -- Chemistry Professor Michael Summers, who is conducting ground-breaking research on AIDS, with assistance of undergraduate and graduate students. Summers' lab contains an 800 MHz NMR, the largest in any American University.

National Recognition
Faculty include National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigators and DuPont Young Investigators; Fulbright, Cottrell, and Dreyfus Foundation Scholars; Fellows with NASA, NIH, National Endowment for the Humanities, Congress, and the Robert Wood Johnson, Getty, and Mellon/Pew Foundations.

The campus has gained recognition for the strength of its programs not only in science and engineering (especially molecular biology, structural biochemistry, photonics, and signal processing), but also in the arts and humanities -- UMBC is home of the Maryland Stage Company, Phoenix Dance Repertory Company, Shakespeare Association of America, and an outstanding Fine Arts Gallery.

Performances by UMBC's Department of Theatre has been selected to perform at the American College Theatre Festival five times.

The American Chemical Society recently ranked UMBC's Chemistry Department 25th nationally in number of undergraduate chemistry degrees granted by programs meeting ACS standards, placing UMBC ahead of MIT, Duke, and Harvard in this category.

In a recent survey, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) ranks UMBC among the leading producers of chemistry and biochemistry degrees, especially those awarded to minority students. UMBC ranked 1st nationally in the total number of undergraduate chemistry and biochemistry degrees awarded to African-American students (21), well ahead of any other institution. UMBC ranked 2nd nationally in the total number of undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biochemistry awarded to minorities (45). UMBC ranked 3rd nationally in the total number of chemistry and biochemistry master's degrees awarded to minority students (6), along with Yale and Creighton Universities.

UMBC made a strong showing in a recent book, The Rise of American Research Universities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), by Vanderbilt Professor Hugh Graham (formerly at UMBC) and UMBC Policy Sciences PhD candidate Nancy Diamond. Measuring the per-capita faculty research achievements of American research universities, the book identifies a number of rising institutions whose reputations have not yet caught up with their considerable achievements ­ among them UMBC.

Their findings illuminate UMBC's strengths across the range of academic disciplines: UMBC ranks 13th among all public campuses in the nation on major awards in the arts and humanities (e.g., NEH, NEA, Guggenheim). UMBC scores higher than such public universities as UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and higher than such private universities as Vanderbilt, Emory, Georgetown, Rice, and Washington University.

UMBC's Social Science score, which measures per-capita publications in top-rated social science journals, is close to those of Virginia and Dartmouth, and it exceeds those of Georgetown and Tufts.

PARTNERSHIPS & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Multi-Level Partnerships
UMBC has developed partnerships with Silicon Graphics, Apple Computer, BGE, Bell-Atlantic, Danaher Corporation, RWD Technologies, Computer Sciences Corporation, NASA/Goddard, NIH, and the Maryland Departments of Health & Mental Hygiene, Education, and Juvenile Services. These partnerships involve employment and training, student internships, placement of graduates, student scholarships, faculty research, and equipment donations.

Center for Health Program Development & Management
Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene selected UMBC as its partner in an innovative program to improve the quality of care and cost effectiveness of Maryland's Medicaid program. DHMH and UMBC are collaborating on the Maryland Medicaid High-Cost User Initiative, the first program in the nation to explore proactive ways to meet health care needs of the highest-risk, highest-cost Medicaid patients. The program is expected to save Maryland as much as $135 million over five years and has attracted approximately $30 million to the campus in contractual support the past three years.

Technology Development & Commercialization
Between FY-92 to FY-99, UMBC increased its invention disclosures from 3 to 26, patent applications from 1 to 12. UMBC research has generated such patentable items as fiber-optic switching devices, anti-cancer drugs, and bio-sensors as well as copyrighted software and course ware.

Research Park
The campus has received substantial commitments of financial support from federal, Maryland, and Baltimore County sources to develop the Research Park's infrastructure, which was completed in early 1999. The Park will encourage technology development and transfer through cooperative research and training and promote economic development.

UMBC Technology Center With assistance from the State of Maryland, UMBC acquired a 170,000 sq. ft. research complex from Lockheed Martin, which UMBC has fully leased. It now houses high-tech training and emerging technology companies and is helping to stimulate economic development in the region and state.

Recent National Visitors
NASA head Saul Goldin; NSF Director Rita Colwell; HHS Secretary Donna Shalala; NIH Director Harold Varmus; U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno; former SSA Commissioner Shirley Chater; Nobel Laureate & Biochemist Thomas Cech; Silicon Graphics CEO Ed McCracken; America Online CEO Steve Case; Pulitzer Prize Winners Taylor Branch and Lisa Pollit; scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould; Special Olympics founder Eunice Shriver and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver.