University of Maryland--Baltimore County | Student Reviews | Best College

Student Profile

timothy

Class: Junior
Major: History
Gender: M

High School: Catonsville High School
Transfer Student:

Big Picture

The best thing abot UMBC is the Humanities Progam; it is a group of studetns with an interest in a discipline in the humanities with some living on their own living/learning community floor. We have fun, do scholarly and non-scholarly activites from poetry readings to historical hikes. I spend most of my time on this floor and after that I would have to say the library. There really isn't too much of a problem that I have with UMBC's size or location. The size is not bad because it is small enough that I see a lot of people that I know some well some not so well just walking to class, and I grew up ten minutes from the school so I know the area real well. As to the administration, it is better than AUCs. Dr. Hrabowski is great and works really hard for our school. The only problem I have with administration is freshmen advising. It is chaotic and exhausting and usually disorganized. The biggest controversy that I can remember was when a UMBC student brutally killed a woman. Thankfully this is very rare and other than that maybe it is the new smoking perimeter, which I am all for. School spirit does kind of lag at sports games but our teams did well this year so maybe next year it will be up. Other non sports related school spirit I guess is fine. For me this is my school, I am proud to be here. One of the few fun things that I can recall are playing jailbreak in Academic row, snowball fights in the middle of the night, freezing while doing Aikido in the winter after dark, getting to know my roommates, drinking coffee in the dining hall, rolling down the hill near the administration building on a perfect late summer early fall night, walking around unlocking campus at six oclock in the morning with no one else around. The most frequent complaints are about the food. Sodexho does a so so job here and thankfully it is being evaluated. (Hopefully it will either improve or be replaced).

Academic Life

Academics for the most part are very personal. In most of my classes (speaking from the humanities disciplines and not the big seminars in science and engineering) the professors establish good relations with the students. I have had many incredible teachers, some so so, and a few bad. Most of the professors will know my name by the end of the semester, know me after the class has ended in the following semester if I make and effort to talk to them outside class, and will usually at least recognize that I was in their class at one point. Students study a lot here; it is a very hardworking school. We have had great discussions in class, always made more enjoyable by the oddballs in the class, and many times the discussions continue or start outside the classroom. I feel UMBC depending on your major trains you for your job and for the sake of learning. As a humanities major, I am receiving skills that will help me get a job that could require strong writing and critical thinking, but most of my classes have a major part that exist for the sake of learning and the professors love to impart that knowledge to us.

Student Body

You will find anyone here at UMBC. Any of those groups listed above will be active and for the most part tolerant. As with any schoool there are always some people with bigoted attitudes but UMBC lets groups express thier views. No one would feel too out of place here because there are so many different people, unless you want extreme personal attention or to be lost in the sea of people as a number.