TERP Spring 2019

B R E N DA N I R I B E C E N T E R : A VISION REALIZED

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TRACKING AN A M E R I C A N R E S I STA N C E 16

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S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 / CO N N EC T I N G T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A RY L A N D

OUTWIT, OUTPLAY , DO YOUR HOMEWORK HOW ST UDENTS’ DI Y V ER SION OF “SU RV I VOR” HAS GONE VIR AL ONLINE AND TO OTHER CAMPUSES P G. 3 4

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

As much as with a pair of shoes or a funky hairdo, Terps express themselves by what they display on the universal accessory of contemporary college students: laptop computers. Each as unique as a fingerprint and carefully curated, they signal students’ passions via decals celebrating favorite (and often obscure) bands, TV shows, teams, memes, hobbies, clubs and, of course, UMD.

P H O T O S B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I A N D S T E P H A N I E S . C O R D L E

ON THE MALL

ALUMNI

NEWS

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A Vision, Completed True Colors Gravity’s Garden Speed Up for Good

CAMPUS LIFE

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American Idle By the Book 100 Years of Mastering (and Doctoring) the University An Orchestral Aloha Relative Dominance Sports Briefs

EXPLORATIONS

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CONTENTS 2

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Voices in the Street Making Scents of Data Turning the Heat Up—or Down UMD-NASA Project to Map World’s Forests in 3D Unfair Strike Zone?

Mirrors on the Moon Percussionist With a Full Plate The Big Question

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Alumni Association Speaking of Death Class Notes A Character Sketch Driving Change From the Archives

FEATURES

ONLINE

Prank a Terp The half-court shot that wasn’t. The cow in the elevator. The mass nude runs. We list some of the greatest pranks ever pulled on campus.

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Saving Citrus A researcher has developed a new approach to halt the disease devastating Florida farms—one that puts your morning OJ at risk.

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Backward Broadway at UMD Students upend our expectations of who should sing which songs, belting out showtunes originally written for characters of other races, genders or ages.

24 Growing Concerns Full legalization of marijuana is often considered inevitable. But as the industry takes off, Terp entrepreneurs and academics alike are still wrestling with the implications.

BY LIAM FARRELL

34 Outwit, Outplay, Do Your Homework Dedicated—and slightly obsessed—Terps created their own version of “Survivor.”

Twelve smartphone-shot seasons later, they’ve kept the torch burning, and passed it to castaway communities across the country.

BY ANNIE DANKELSON

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A Start to Healing One hundred years ago, the flu pandemic had an unexpected side effect: a civil rights breakthrough for black nurses. In an upcoming book, a University of Maryland professor will tell their stories.

BY SALA LEVIN ’10

Find new stories every week at TERP.UMD.EDU.

T U R N I M A G I N AT I O N I N T O I N N O VAT I O N

Fearless Ideas Every issue of Terp features examples of how UMD turns imagination into innovation. In this issue, we further highlight those efforts with a “ .” We’ll do the same in future issues on our efforts to discover new knowledge, inspire Maryland pride and transform the student experience.

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FROM THE EDITOR

after a year of sounding like a chain-smoking frog, I’m again belting out Pat Benatar and the Go-Go’s on the drive home.

An ordinary case of bronchitis had reduced my voice to an unappealing blend of croaks, cracks and whispers. That meant no singing in the car or at church. No yelling up the stairs to my kids. No calling out to any of the writers sitting around the corner. (In retrospect, I might be the only person who thought this was a problem.)

I had put off seeing a doctor for months, employing the ever-popular strategy of hoping the problem would vanish on its own.

Knowing this, and that I work at the University of Maryland, the ear, nose and throat specialist correctly inferred that I would be too lazy to seek treatment from anyplace inconvenient. He practically dared me to refuse his offer: a referral to the university’s Hearing and Speech Clinic.

So twice a week last fall, I took the pleasant walk up to LeFrak Hall for vocal therapy at the clinic, housed in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.

There, graduate student Emily Sotzing and clinical faculty helped me recover from vocal nodules and regain my voice. (Welcome back, ’80s guilty-pleasure pop. I missed you.)

It’s been a personal reminder of how the university’s research and service extend beyond campus into the community.

Inside this issue of Terp, you’ll find several more examples, in stories about how sociologist Dana F. Fisher explains the growth in national protests, such as the Women’s March and March for Our Lives, and about efforts by the School of Public Health’s Marian Moser Jones to share the untold story of black nurses integrating the Red Cross during the flu pandemic a century ago.

And we’ll introduce you to the new home of the Do Good Accelerator, a hub for student and alumni startups with ambitions to tackle social issues like hunger, veterans’ employment and plastic and clothing waste.

Whatever you read, I’m grateful that you’re perusing the magazine and staying connected to Maryland. I’ll tell you so, too, but—as my therapist advised—not too loudly.

Lauren Brown University Editor

Publisher JACKIE LEWIS Vice President, University Relations

Advisers JOEL R. SELIGMAN Associate Vice President, Strategic Communications MARGARET HALL Executive Director, Creative Strategies

Magazine Staff LAUREN BROWN University Editor JOHN T. CONSOLI Creative Director CHRIS CARROLL ANNIE DANKELSON LIAM FARRELL SALA LEVIN ’10 Writers JASON A. KEISLING MATTHEW LAUMANN Designers STEPHANIE S. CORDLE Photographer GAIL RUPERT M.L.S. ’10 Photography Assistant and Archivist JAGU CORNISH Production Manager COLLEEN CROWLEY M.JOUR. ’19 Graduate Assistant CARLY TAYLOR ’19 Intern Production and design by Valerie Morgan.

EMAIL terpfeedback@umd.edu ONLINE terp.umd.edu NEWS umdrightnow.umd.edu FACEBOOK.COM/ UnivofMaryland TWITTER.COM/UofMaryland VIMEO.COM/umd YOUTUBE.COM/UMD2101 The University of Maryland, College Park is an equal opportunity institution with respect to both education and employment. University policies, programs and activities are in conformance with pertinent federal and state laws and regulations on non-discrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

COVER PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

by John T. Consoli

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INTERPLAY Time of Our Lives

Great article. I totally agree with your conclusions based on my experience of being married over 20 years. We’re both whitecollar workers and have three teenagers.

One measure I would have been interested in, however: How does each gender prioritize personal-time activities vs. home chores? I highly prioritize exercise as an example, while my wife will push that down the list while doing something that I consider a low-priority chore, or something that can be pushed off to another day, or perhaps not even necessary at all.

—JEFF JAMER ’89, MENDHAM, N.J.

Damage, Controlled

Thank you, Liam Farrell, for the article about the works of Ron Capps and his research on how creative writing can be a form of treatment for ptsd. Hundreds of thousands of vets can benefit from this creative expression of their thoughts. ptsd is a symptom of our amygdaloid hippocampus gyrus system on overdrive. It helps us survive a firefight during combat, but when it goes on overdrive it causes problems in daily living. Hypervigilance, anxiety, panic attack, fear of crowds, sudden noise, insomnia and relationship issues are some of the problems related to ptsd. Education and public awareness like these articles help everyone understand the special needs of veterans.

—DR. OWEN LEE ’74, NEWARK, OHIO BOARD MEMBER, RESURRECTING LIVES FOUNDATION

I’m also a 2013 alum of Ron’s program. I participated in the prose workshop and found it to be the therapy I needed to address my ptsd and mst. Although I still struggle with large crowds, I’m able to step away, find a place of solitude, and write to release my anxieties. Ron has been a literal lifesaver. Thank you, Ron, for giving your fellow veterans a way of holding on.

—CLARISSA DOUTHIT

Documentation of an Occupation

Gordon Prange was hands-down the best professor I had at Maryland. Although I was an English major, he was the one who made learning come alive for me, with his personal stories as participant-observer to the history of the World Wars and their aftermath. I am so glad his collection is getting the attention and treatment it deserves.

—BONNIE (FELDESMAN) LEFKOWITZ ’60, NORTH BEACH, MD. FORMER EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE DIAMONDBACK

Monumental Change

This is groundbreaking scholarship by someone who knows the terrain intimately– the history of monumental sculpture in the Western tradition, of American art, of slavery, of African-American struggles, of collective memory, of all the complex issues that intersect in these monuments.

Dr. Renee Ater initiated this research long before it became front-page news, and she approaches the topic with a balanced perspective rare in today’s divisive atmosphere.

It should be mandatory reading in universities (and elsewhere) across the nation.

—JUNE HARGROVE, PROFESSOR EMERITA, ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

I live in Virginia. Just about every county seat has a memorial in their courthouse square

dedicated to its deceased Confederate soldiers. I have seen similar memorials to Union soldiers in front of courthouses in Pennsylvania and New York. They all had something in common: They were erected in the 1890s.

Think of what was happening in that decade. The United States was moving past the Civil War, becoming a world power and expanding its presence around the world.

Most Civil War veterans would have been deceased or aging without too many more years to live.

The monuments were likely erected so that the tremendous sacrifices made by veterans on both sides would not be forgotten.

—CHUCK WOODS ’70, SPRINGFIELD, VA.

Did One of Our Moms Write This?

As a life member of the Alumni Association residing in Europe, it takes a while for my publication to reach me. However, I am most happy when it does! I just wanted to say that, in my humble opinion, the Winter 2019 publication (which just arrived today) is possibly the best edition to date. Frankly, I found it to be a compelling read, and I will keep this copy around for a long while. It’s been a good number of years since I have been to College Park, but I feel like I am right there with my Terp magazine. Keep up the great work!

—RICHARD STEINBERG ’70, KOSHARITSA, BULGARIA

WRITE TO US We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments—and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback@umd.edu or Terp magazine Office of Strategic Communications 7736 Baltimore Ave. College Park, MD 20742

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ON THE MALL

NEWS

The Maryland Blended Reality Center uses augmented and virtual reality in partnership with the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine to improve surgical training and practice, among other projects.

A Vision, Completed

Brendan Iribe Center Opens to Advance Computer Science and Engineering A GLEAMING, MODERN NEW building at

student-focused makerspace, the center

the main entrance to the University of

houses the Department of Computer

Maryland trumpets a message: This is

Science—which offers the biggest and

where the future is happening.

fastest-growing major on campus—and

The Brendan Iribe (pronounced

the University of Maryland Institute for

ee-REEB’) Center for Computer Science

Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS),

and Engineering was dedicated on

a group of 80-plus faculty and research

April 27, Maryland Day, to assist

scientists from 10 departments and six

groundbreaking research and innovation

schools and colleges across campus.

in fields such as virtual and augmented

What’s going on inside now? It’s easy

reality, artificial intelligence, robotics,

enough for visitors to see, through the

algorithms, programming languages

striking floor-to-ceiling windows through-

and systems, and computer vision. It’s

out the building designed by architectural

named for the co-founder of virtual reality

firm HDR. But you can also take a look at

company Oculus, who donated $30 million

right, and you don’t need to strap on a

to launch the project; the state also

pair of goggles, either. —LB

provided significant funding.

In addition to its tech-infused classrooms, spacious labs and a

See a photo tour of the new Iribe Center at terp.umd.edu.

Breakpoint Café was named by computer science major Ashwath Krishnan ’22, using the term for pausing computer code while debugging.

The Maryland Robotics Center advances all areas of robotics, including components, novel platforms and autonomous systems such as drones for applications including rescue missions, environmental monitoring, surveillance and agriculture.

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P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

Building Innovation

Reisse Park, a rooftop garden with benches, is named for 2001 UMD graduate Andrew Reisse, who died in 2013. Reisse was an Oculus co-founder and lead engineer, nature photographer, and friend of Antonov and Iribe.

The Iribe Center will house futuristic yet practical research such as:

The Antonov Auditorium, with 298 seats, is named for 2003 UMD graduate and Oculus co-founder Michael Antonov, who donated $3.5 million toward the project.

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Devising tools to quickly screen synthetic DNA strands that might be altered into a biological threat.

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Building a language technology system with Columbia University experts to find, translate and summarize information from almost any language.

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Using NASA satellite data to predict and halt major outbreaks of waterborne diseases like cholera.

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Pioneering new technologies and protocols to protect financial transactions involving cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

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Creating computational tools with UMD hearing and speech scientists and cognitive scientists from Rutgers University to predict which interventions are most effective for a common childhood language disorder.

The Iribe Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing, supported by a new $1 million gift from Iribe, will offer tutoring and mentoring, hackathons, clubs, speakers, summer camps and after-school programs to support current and future computer science students.

The Jagdeep Singh Family Makerspace, supported by a $1 million gift from the 1986 graduate and his wife, Roshni Singh, is known as the Sandbox. Its six workshops have equipment like laser cutters, large-format and 3D printers, and an electronics fabrication shop. Bill Pugh, professor emeritus of computer science, and his wife, Lisa Orange, donated $1 million to the building, including to staff and operate the makerspace.

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BY THE THE NUMBERS NUMBERS 215,600

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OFFICES

RESEARCH LABS

COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOMS

SEMINAR ROOMS

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY J A S O N A . K E I S L I N G

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True Colors

Terps’ Startup Creates Tights for Ice Skaters, Dancers of All Skin Tones n figure skating or gymnastics, athletes strive to put together the perfect outfit to complement a hopedfor perfect routine. That can be harder for athletes of color, as the attire hasn’t always matched their skin tones.

Jasmine Snead ’18, MBA ’21, who started skating at age 5, knows this firsthand. She dyed her tights in a bathtub before competitions.

“In performance sports, you aren’t just judged on how you perform, but how

I

you look doing it,” she says. “So you can imagine the drop in confidence and sense of otherness created for women of color when they do not have the options. We want to be part of the solution.”

Now she and fellow ice skater Imani Rickerby ’17 and dancer Sydney Parker ’18 are doing that as founders of Aurora Tights, a Hyattsville, Md., startup that offers tights in a rainbow of skin tones.

The trio received a $15,000 boost in March by winning the Pitch Dingman Competition, UMD’s annual “Shark

UMD Hosts University Presidents From Around Globe FOR THREE DAYS in May, the center of the

university universe was in College Park.

UMD hosted the Universitas 21 annual

development goals.

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman led a brainstorming discussion with university presidents on how to achieve greater impact through global

and senior administrators of 27 prominent

partnership. Guests saw demonstrations of

The theme was “Globalization, Isolationism and the Response in Higher Education,” with

T E R P. U M D . E D U

the aim of increasing collaborations to support progress on the United Nations’ sustainable

general meeting, convening the presidents universities around the globe.

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Tank”-style event hosted by the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

The company works with a manufacturer to dye the products and sells them for $16–$22 at auroratights. com. They plan to spend the prize money to increase their inventory, and hope to eventually expand the line to other sports like gymnastics “to send the message that you do belong in performance sports,” Snead says.—AD

UMD’s research in augmented and virtual

reality and from the Do Good Institute, with the aim of inspiring similar innovative work abroad.

I M AG ES CO U RT ESY O F AU RO RA T I G H TS ; I L L U S T R AT I O N BY R Y U M I S U N G

By the Book

Old Meets New at Printing Press/ Makerspace in Tawes Hall ages of an old book with strategically placed cutouts so that the remaining words create a new narrative.

Books printed on handmade paper. Texts illustrated with leds that light up like a constellation in the night sky.

These are some of the types of books Professors Matthew Kirschenbaum and Kari Kraus are enabling students to create through BookLab, a printing press-meets-makerspace in Tawes Hall. Opened by the English department in Fall 2018, BookLab gives students the tools to experiment with a wide range of bookmaking techniques.

“We’re interested in pressing our understanding of what a book is by looking at its mutable form historically and thinking about what else it might be,” Kraus says.

In one corner of BookLab stands an oldschool screw press, ready for a bookmaker to choose from dozens of traditional metal fonts to create something custom-embossed. Sensors, circuitry, heat- and water-sensitive inks, and other high-tech accoutrements are also available, as are scores of existing experimental books for reference and inspiration.

Students who take the one-semester BookLab course learn about the history of the book while producing their own avant-garde texts.

MFA students may take the course to create prose- or poetry-filled booklets (known as chapbooks), while computer science or engineering students with an interest in design may gravitate toward something with a tech-driven flair.

It’s a departure from the classic idea of what English courses are, says Kirschenbaum. “It’s not just talking and writing about books.

It’s about expanding our range of critical and creative work, where thinking and interpretation come from doing the actual things” that

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P H OTOS BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E

making a book requires.

For Courtney Coppage, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature, the BookLab course represented “a whole new vocabulary, a whole new skill.” Coppage created a book with the idea that it would be handed from person to person, leaving blank space in the front and back for readers to jot down thoughts for future readers and hand-binding the pages using a style in which the pages are sewn together.

Kraus and Kirschenbaum hope BookLab can reflect the evolving but still critical cultural place books hold, even as ebooks and Kindles become ever more ubiquitous. “The book is one of our most iconic cultural objects, and we’re just fascinated by its long and varied and storied history and the worlds it opens up,” says Kraus.— sl

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CAMPUS LIFE

American Idle Honors College Students Experiment With Laziness; Results Aren’t Pretty iological sciences major Anika Samee ’22 figured she was a little different from the average Honors College student—more easygoing, more willing to occasionally settle for good enough rather than demand perfection.

So she assumed an assignment in a University Honors seminar last semester focusing on American attitudes toward laziness would be a snap: Just spend eight hours relaxing with no homework, no laundry, no hardcore workouts, and then write about it.

“I started out watching a movie for about two hours,” she says. “Then I couldn’t help it.

I started cleaning and ended up spending the rest of the day sorting out my entire life.”

Their generation may be sometimes slapped with the label “snowflakes” and stereotyped as more interested in play than toil, says Katie Stanutz Ph.D. ’15, assistant director of University Honors and teacher of the “American Idle” seminar, but her students in reality have powerful work ethics.

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“The idea of being intentionally lazy kind of freaks them out,” she says. “I’m having to talk them into doing the laziness project.”

Hmm … does trying to avoid the assignment mean they really ARE lazy?

Good question, says Stanutz, whose primary aim is not to teach sloth, but to analyze its depiction in literature and culture since the nation’s founding, from picking apart Benjamin Franklin’s maxims about the moral value of hard work to analyzing the peerlessly laid-back Dude of “The Big Lebowski.”

“Oftentimes what we find is that laziness is defined as almost anything that’s not seen as profitable labor—something that runs counter to capitalist interest,” she says.

There are countercurrents as well: Some fictional characters, like Rip Van Winkle— who sleeps through his working years and

wakes up to a relaxed retirement—get rewarded for laziness.

Thanks to the class, Desiree Morrison ’21, an operations management and business analytics major, had a Rip Van Winkle experience of her own, but it didn’t turn out quite so well.

“I was pretty excited about completing the assignment—like, ‘alright, I’m going to be chill and have a lazy day,’” she says.

Going above and beyond what the assignment required, she fell asleep and snoozed right through a deadline in another course.

Consequently, Morrison received her first A-minus in a college class, kissing a 4.0 GPA goodbye.— CC

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY PA P E E T H I R AWAT

Speed Up for Good Student, Alum Innovations Tackle Societal Issues at Do Good Accelerator A NEW ENTREPRENEURIAL SPACE on campus is

focused on helping startups do well, and do good.

Student and alumni business ventures and nonprofits are taking shape at the Do Good Accelerator, the latest piece of Greater College Park, the $2 billion private-public investment to

assistance they need to make their concepts

in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership and

reinvigorate the Baltimore Avenue corridor.

reality, says Kisha Logan, Do Good Accelerator

director of the Do Good Institute.

Located in the new Diamondback Garage, the accelerator is supporting initiatives that aim

manager.

The new collaborative workspace will further

“Do Good has been fortunate to create a number of award-winning companies, nonprofits,

to solve societal issues ranging from food insecu-

ramp up the mission of the nation’s first Do

projects and innovations,” he says. “Now, with

rity to the welfare of cancer patients’ children.

Good campus while expanding students’

the opening of this space, we’re poised to

opportunities to innovate while they learn,

accelerate both the numbers and impact they’re

says Robert Grimm Jr., Levenson Family Chair

going to have.”—CC

At the new facility, students with a vision can get the coaching, mentoring and financial

Gravity’s Garden

“Before Weber, I don’t think anyone had ever spent more than 10 minutes trying to understand

Detector Display Honors Pioneering Physicist

how to detect gravitational waves in the lab,” says

A LONGTIME PHYSICS PROFESSOR who laid the

department, attracting students excited by his

groundwork for the discovery of gravitational

research, said Lorraine DeSalvo, physics facilities

waves now has a permanent memorial on campus:

director. After he died, out of respect for his bril-

a garden with 3,000-pound aluminum bars he used

liance and single-mindedness, she was determined

to search for these fluctuations in space-time.

to save part of his legacy. In 2005, former College

gravitational theorist Charles Misner, an emeritus professor of physics and Weber collaborator.

Weber also helped build up the UMD physics

Joseph Weber failed in his personal quest, but

of Computing, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences

without his pioneering work, the Laser Interferom-

dean Steve Halperin suggested creating a display

eter Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project

featuring a “Weber bar,” and DeSalvo countered

wouldn’t have gotten off the ground, project leaders say. It detected gravitational waves

with an idea for something a little more welcoming.

The Weber Memorial Garden was finally

from colliding black holes in 2015—resulting

dedicated in March outside the Physical Sciences

in a Nobel Prize in physics a century after

Complex. “This man was so persistent, and he

Albert Einstein first predicted them.

really left a mark on science,” she says.—CC

D I A M O N D BAC K GA RAG E A N D W E B E R GA R D E N P H OTOS BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E ; W E B E R H E A DS H OT CO U RT ESY O F U N I V E R S I T Y A RC H I V ES

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The Graduate School: From Past to Present

100 Years of Mastering (and Doctoring) the Universe The Graduate School Celebrates Its Centennial, From Ag to VR t’s march 14, 1919, and the Maryland State Board of Agriculture and the Board of Regents are looking at a barnburner of a meeting. On the agenda: quarterly statements, federal land purchases and the import and inspection of horses, mules and asses (the four-legged kind).

While we no longer see donkeys roaming the campus, the combined board took another action that’s still kicking and shaping the education of tens of thousands of Terps: approving the organization and creation of what is now umd’s Graduate School.

A century later, more than 10,000 students are pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees with the assistance of the Graduate School, which supports a community of graduate students on campus and raises the prominence of graduate education at Maryland.

From the humorous to the humbling, read on to discover the history of the Graduate School.— coc

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1919

13

Number of students who enroll in the Graduate School’s founding class.

1920

1920

$15 Tuition, per semester. The registration fee ran another $15, and it cost $10 to receive a diploma.

1925

Chunjen Constant Chen, the first international graduate student, receives a master of science degree in agriculture.

1931

350,000 Pounds of butter that dairy husbandry student N.N. Nicholas helped manufacture for the U.S. Navy.

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Daisy Inez Purdy is the first woman to earn a Ph.D., with the dissertation “A Study of the Bacteriological Changes Produced During the Aging of Cured Hams.”

I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

1941

Parren J. Mitchell

1950

First Ph.D. recipient Charles Sando (1920) preserves bugs, ears of corn and butterflies in resin at a U.S. Department of Commerce exhibit on plastics.

1950

$8 Cost of graduate student tuition per credit hour. Lab fees ranged from $1 to $10.

is the first full-time, on-campus African-American grad student, finishing a master’s degree in sociology with honors in 1952. He became the first African American elected to Congress from Maryland in 1971.

1966

An Orchestral Aloha Youth Musicians Travel to Hawaii to Fill Education Gap HAWAII MAY BE A PARADISE of natural

wonders, but when it comes to opportuni-

320%

ties for post-secondary music education, the islands can be more of a desert. For

Enrollment increase from 1956, to 8,000 students, at the height of the Vietnam War draft.

students thousands of miles—and an expensive plane ride—away from the mainland, the idea of continuing to study music after high school can seem fruitless.

So when John Devlin M.M. ’11, D.M.A. ’15 became music director of the Hawaii Youth Symphony and artistic director of the annual Pacific Music Institute festival, he leveraged

1977

1980

48.2 “The Effect of White Noise on Short- and Long-Term Recall in Hyperactive Boys”

—dissertation title.

Percent of students are age 30 or over; in 1975, only 38.9 percent of grad students were over 30.

his East Coast connections—namely, his ties to UMD’s School of Music—to create additional opportunities for music students in Hawaii to study with high-level teachers from the local community and the lower 48.

In July, six students plus staff from the National Orchestral Institute (NOI), a monthlong training program at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for highly talented young musicians, will travel to teach and

1971 History graduate assistant Jim Auerbach, with the help of Marilynn Terry, Charles Errico and Ross Kimmel, introduces audiovisual aids into the classroom.

1986

Judith Resnick Ph.D. ’77 dies aboard the space shuttle Challenger. She received her degree in electrical engineering and was the second American woman to orbit the Earth.

1991 In the early days

of the internet, a master’s student completes her thesis, “Systems Engineering and Interactive Software Tool for Creating Interactive Graphical User Interfaces.”

mentor high school students as part of the two-week Pacific Music Institute.

The partnership represents an “opportunity to have additional perspectives brought through a collaboration with the outstanding faculty of NOI,” says Devlin.

To Richard Scerbo, director of NOI, the collaboration demonstrates “how the arts at Maryland are really far-reaching, even to places like Hawaii.”—SL

2002 D.J. Patil M.A ’99, Ph.D. ’01 and others build a scientific digital library for Iraq. In 2005, the White House names him the first U.S. chief data scientist.

2003

Doctoral dissertations are submitted digitally rather than on paper.

2018 “Active Attention for Target Detection and Recognition in Robot Vision” — dissertation title.

B U T T E R P H O T O B Y S H U T T E R S T O C K ; B U T T E R F LY I N R E S I N P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F E V E RY T H I N G I N S ECTS.CO M ; S L I D E CA RO U S E L BY S H U T T E R STO C K ; B OY P H OTO BY G E T T Y I M AG ES ; A L L OT H E R CO L L AG E I M AG ES A R E CO U RT ESY O F U N I V E R S I T Y A RC H I V ES

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Relative Dominance

Terp Follows in Family’s Footsteps to Build Lacrosse Legacy WHEN GRETCHEN LAMON-STEELE’S high school

boys’ league that her brother John had created

didn’t offer a girls’ lacrosse team, she and her

in Annapolis. All four of her brothers have

sister started their own. At Anne Arundel Commu-

coached in the area—John even for Major League

nity College, she scored 17 points in a single game.

Lacrosse’s Chesapeake Bayhawks—and she

As a Terp, she competed in the 1984 Division I

followed suit, overseeing Steele from the Mites to

NCAA women’s lacrosse national championship

the local Green Hornets youth rec league to the

game, in which UMD fell to Temple.

Maryland United high school club squad.

But for Lamon-Steele, it’s what her family has contributed to the sport across the state that’s impressive.

not soft on me.”

“It’s just been handed down my entire life,”

That tough love seems to have done the trick.

she says. “I grew up with lacrosse being the

Steele excelled at Severn School, setting multiple

main sport in the Lamon family, and then carrying it on to the Steele family.”

Daughter Caroline Steele ’19, an attacker, has played a key role on offense in her four years with the Terps (including the 2017 NCAA championship team). Two of Lamon-Steele’s brothers, John ’84 and Chris Lamon ’89, played at Maryland, and Caroline’s three older siblings were on

her mom’s 17-pointer—“She was a stud for sure,” Steele says).

And on the powerhouse Maryland lacrosse team, Steele isn’t the biggest of players at 5 feet 4 inches, but she’s stood out with crafty play and stick skills—reminiscent of Mom, one of the first to switch from a wooden to a plastic stick.

“Her first goal freshman year, she scored it behind the back,” Head Coach Cathy Reese says.

at St. Mary’s College (Md.) and Christopher on

“And not that we didn’t know before then, but it

on-Steele was one of the boys, and so was her daughter.

just kinda made me smirk and smile on the sideline because this kid is so creative, so competitive and not afraid to kind of think outside the box and

“You can imagine growing up … just thrown in goal, having shots thrown at me every day,” Steele says. “That has built my toughness up, and it’s kinda made me the player that I am.”

Mom helped out with that, too.

Just as she started her own club team in Anne Arundel County as a high schooler, she formed the Mighty Mites program for 5- to 8-year-old girls in Severna Park, Md., drawing insight from a similar

T E R P. U M D . E D U

records, including an 11-goal game (not quite

teams as well—Scotty at Belmont-Abbey, Brendan a club squad at Towson. Growing up, Lam-

14

“It was tough at times,” Steele says, “but she knows the game so well, obviously, and she was

try new things.”

As Steele’s senior season comes to a close, it’s only fitting that with the team’s usual home field, the Field Hockey and Lacrosse Complex, closed for turf replacement, the site of her final home games as a Terp is the same as her mother’s during that 1984 tournament—Maryland Stadium.

After that, Steele is keeping an open mind.

Maybe she’ll be a teacher, or maybe she’ll coach, continuing the family legacy.

“It’s a wonderful sport that’s treated our family really, really well,” Lamon-Steele says. “And hopefully from here on out, we’ll pay it back and help the sport grow more.”—AD

P H O T O S C O U R T E SY O F G R E T C H E N L A M O N - S T E E L E A N D M A R Y L A N D AT H L E T I C S

SPORTS BRIEFS

Attacker Caroline Steele has been a consistent starter for UMD the past four seasons, including scoring six goals in the 2017 national championship game.

Terp Selected to U.S. Collegiate National Volleyball Team Redshirt sophomore volleyball player Katie Myers in March became the first Terp selected to the U.S. Collegiate National Team.

“Being able to represent the United States on a national stage means the world to me,” the middle blocker said.

A UMD team captain in 2018, Myers (shown below) led Maryland with 53 aces and 122 blocks while ranking third on the team with 210 kills.

Her 53 aces ranked first in the Big Ten and 14th in the country and were the most by a Terp since 2003.

Athletes were selected to the 12-member collegiate national team through the U.S. Women’s National Team open tryouts held at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The squad was scheduled to tour May 19–30 in Japan and play against Nippon Sport Science University, one of the nation’s best collegiate volleyball teams, as well as Japan’s Women’s 20 and World University Games teams.

Basketball Teams Knocked Out in Second Round of NCAA Tourneys Both the men’s and women’s basketball seasons ended in the round of 32 of the NCAA tournaments this year.

The sixth-seeded men’s squad (23–11), which was celebrating its 100th varsity season, defeated No. 11 seed Belmont in the first round before facing third-seeded LSU. The Tigers banked a go-ahead

“You can imagine growing up … just thrown in goal, having shots thrown at me every day.

That has built my toughness up, and it’s kinda made me the player that I am.”

—CAROLINE STEELE

layup with 1.6 seconds remaining to send the Terps home in a 69–67 heartbreaker.

“I was proud of them, and they represented our school all year in the right way,” Head Coach Mark Turgeon said.

The No. 3-seed women’s team (29–5) dominated 14th-seeded Radford to open the Big Dance. But the Terps, who won the Big Ten regular-season title, dropped a back-and-forth affair, 85–80, to No. 6 seed UCLA in the next round.

“I can’t say enough about the game, the amazing crowd, the environment that we had,” Head Coach Brenda Frese said.

SPRING 2019

15

ON THE MALL

CAMPUS LIFE

Sociology Professor Dana R. Fisher (center) talks to a protester while collecting survey data at the 2019 D.C. Women’s March.

Voices in the Street

Sociologist Tracks “American Resistance” for New Book t a coffee shop a few blocks from the White House, Dana R. Fisher, a sociology professor who has studied left-wing protest movements for nearly two decades, tallies up reasons why this January morning’s 2019 d.c.

Women’s March could be a bust.

An organizer’s friendliness with anti-Semitic preacher Louis Farrakhan alienated some would-be marchers; a freezing rain threatens to glaze the city in a few hours; and perhaps most fundamentally, there’s no single issue on the agenda—nothing like the inauguration that spurred the massive

A

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turnout at the first Women’s March in 2017, or the mass shooting horror that animated the March for Our Lives last spring.

Figuring on an exponentially smaller crowd, the planners a day earlier moved the gathering from the National Mall to Freedom Plaza. Fisher has conducted research among protest crowds numbering 1 million—what is she expecting today?

“Maybe 25- or 30,000? Maybe?”

If there’s a note of resignation, well, tanking attendance and infighting wouldn’t exactly bolster the thesis of her latest book, “American Resistance,” coming out late this summer.

Aimed at a popular audience, it argues that widespread opposition to the Trump administration has spurred diverse groups to merge into a people’s movement unified not by leaders, but grassroots connections.

But it’s time to work, not ponder. She pulls a stack of pink tablet computers from her bag and hands them out to undergraduates, graduate students and staff from the sociology department—all women—who’ve volunteered to help survey.

Survey data is the basis of her study of the Trump resistance. She’s hit every major protest in d.c. since the president took office, and switched to Android tablets after the first Women’s March in 2017 to speed data entry, which once could take weeks.

“I have the full data set, compiled, clean and ready to analyze within two hours of leaving the field,” she says. That kind of speed has

P H O T O B Y E M I LY R A S I N S K I

“My goal is not about one organization over the other, Democrats versus Republicans. It is about people in the streets—that their voices as citizens matter.”

—DANA R. FISHER

facilitated next-day analyses in The Washington Post, cnn and msnbc’s “Morning Joe,” among other outlets.

Political scientist Michael Heaney of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, who coauthored a paper with Fisher and is writing a book of his own about protests surrounding recent presidential politics, said her up-to-the minute findings are crucial to understanding

grassroots opposition groups.

“Dana Fisher’s research has played a critical role in providing scholars, the media and ordinary citizens real-time knowledge,” he said. “It has enabled us to learn about the demographics, politics and direction of these emergent movements and organizations.”

As she and her students walk from the café to the plaza, a woman asks her to sign a petition for Equal Rights Amendment ratification.

“I’ll be happy to sign it later,” she says, striding away. “Not right now, though—we’ve got to gather data.”

Fisher dispatches her crew to the far ends of the square, with instructions to move through the still-sparse crowd and ask every fifth person to complete the survey. (The practice, aimed at randomization, gets better than 90 percent participation.)

One of the survey takers, Kathryn Berthot ’86, a furloughed fcc employee, said the

controversies didn’t faze her.

“Not everyone agrees on everything here,” she says. “We don’t have to in order to work together on a bigger thing we all agree on.”

As marching time draws nearer, more people surge into the square from up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and side streets.

In the end, there’s hardly room to move as the crowd reaches an estimated 100,000— bigger than the 2018 Women’s March and hardly the predicted bust.

Fisher’s data peg the crowd as far more moderate politically than at many marches— filled with people who for the first time went out in the streets with others alarmed about the country’s direction. Democracy in action, Fisher says.

“My goal is not about one organization over the other, Democrats versus Republicans,” she said afterward. “It is about people in the streets—that their voices as citizens matter.”—cc

SPRING 2019

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ON THE MALL

E CX AP MLPOURSAT LIO FE NS

Making Scents of Data Researchers Explore Use of Smells to Help Convey Visual Information

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

rom freshly baked bread to a natural gas leak to your grandmother’s perfume, perhaps no sense has the ability to make mouths water, signal danger or unearth memories like smell does.

Now, researchers in the College of Information Studies are trying to harness that elemental power to see if it can do more than just evoke an “ahhh” or “don’t-go-inthere” reaction, and help convey data.

In an early proof-of-concept experiment, iSchool Ph.D. student and economist Andrea Batch (below) used a virtual reality headset to sort through a visual dataset of bitcoin transactions, represented by 3D colored spheres hovering in virtual space. A headset attachment using technology similar to plug-in room fresheners aimed various smells at her nose—a different one for each class of transaction.

“The purpose is not to increase the realism of a virtual reality environment and make you feel like you’re in an actual space— although the technology could be used to do that—but to see what kind of information it’s possible to convey with

F

smell to enhance data visualization,” says Niklas Elmqvist, an associate professor of information studies with an appointment in umd’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (umiacs).

The VR headset-mounted version was limited to six scents, but a new tabletop version (the researchers named it ViScent) can waft a full 24 in different intensity levels toward users—from those classified as pleasantly “leafy” to the “heavy-rotten” palette that includes cadavers and feces, but also beer and eggs. Master’s student Biswaksen Patnaik is building the device to test the limits of what’s they’re calling “information olfactation” with human participants.

Smell can never replace visuals for processing data, the researchers say, but it might be able to aid in “flow” for analysts interacting with vast amounts of information. For example, in a mass of business data, “good” results might smell minty, and bad ones faintly skunky. Their findings and technology could even apply to safety applications—for instance a car flooding the cabin with the aroma of coffee if its systems sense a tired driver.

The trio of researchers were surprised at the relative dearth of published findings about people’s ability to distinguish smells, intensity levels and other parameters, and map them to visible information. They’ll be filling in that ground-level knowledge— and enduring occasional wisecracks.

“We know this is kind of amusing research,” Elmqvist says. “Smell is intrusive, in your face. People immediately start thinking about all the bad smells that could fill your living room, or worse, your office.”— CC

P H O T O BY B I S WA K S E N PAT N A I K

Turning the Heat Up— or Down New Fabric Created at Maryland Automatically Adjusts to Environment TOTING AROUND EXTRA layers in

It can be tuned to “gate”

case you catch chill or wondering

infrared radiation (i.e., heat), the

how much you can practically—or

researchers say, either blocking

legally—shed if you overheat may

or allowing heat transmission

soon be things of the past.

based on temperature and

UMD researchers led by

humidity. The material, still in

YuHuang Wang, associate profes-

development and not quite ready

sor of chemistry and biochemis-

for workout wear, was reported in

try, and Ouyang Min, professor

February in Science.

of physics, have developed the

“The human body is a perfect

first fabric that adjusts to the

radiator. It gives off heat quickly,”

environment, warming you up

Ouyang says. “For all of history,

when you need it and cooling you

the only way to regulate the

down when you don’t.

radiator has been to take clothes

The fabric is made of yarn

off or put clothes on. But this

coated with carbon nanotubes,

fabric is a true bidirectional

a lightweight conductive metal.

regulator.”—CC

UMD-NASA Project to Map World’s Forests in 3D

which launched with a SpaceX

impact of fires and hurricanes to

commercial resupply mission in

predicting the weather.

A UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

from analyzing snowmelt and the

December, will use a laser method

“To be able to have any kind

called lidar (which stands for light

of rational policy about how one

detection and ranging) to take

protects forests, you have to know

three-dimensional measurements

what you are starting with,” says

project aboard the International

of the earth’s surface and compre-

Ralph Dubayah, a professor in the

Space Station will soon start

hensively map its forests.

giving scientists new insights into

A collaboration between UMD

Department of Geographical Sciences and the principal investigator

how much carbon is stored in

and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight

the planet’s trees and how much

Center in Greenbelt, Md., GEDI is

carbon dioxide they can absorb, key

scheduled for a two-year mission.

to understanding a warming planet.

It will provide scientists with data

initial results to be available in the

that has applications in everything

fall.—LF

The Global Ecosystem Dynamics

P H O T O B Y FAY E L E V I N E

Investigation (GEDI) instrument,

of GEDI. With GEDI fully tested and operational in space, Dubayah expects

SPRING 2019

19

ON THE MALL

E X P L O R AT I O N S

Unfair Strike Zone?

Research Shows How Pollutants Lead to Bad Calls

J

ames archsmith considers himself only a moderate baseball fan. But the assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics’ recent research slides headfirst into a topic that riles up many of the game’s aficionados: botched calls by the ump.

Archsmith wasn’t interested in proving that your team should’ve won such-and-such game. Instead, he was trying to figure out how air quality affects labor productivity during high-skilled tasks, and he settled on a unique subject: Major League Baseball umpires. Their cerebral yet high-pressure work and geographic variation, as well as the availability of pitch-tracking data, made them ideal for determining which pollutants impact performance.

By comparing the pitch-tracking information with Environmental Protection Agency stats from around stadiums, Archsmith and colleagues Anthony Hayes of the University of Ottawa and Soodeh Saberian of the University of Manitoba found that their hunch was correct: Higher levels of certain pollutants led to worse calls.

“We’re not physicians. We’re not epidemiologists,” Archsmith says. “But that’s possibly a pathway that is interfering with cognition

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

with the umpires.”

Using data from PITCHf/x, a system in ballparks that uses multiple cameras to track each pitch’s trajectory, Archsmith evaluated umpires’ mistakes within an inch or two. After comparing that with stadiums’ air quality—the Los Angeles parks were “absolutely the worst,” he says, with other high-traffic areas like his Detroit Tigers’ Comerica Park also showing large effects—he saw that carbon monoxide and fine particulates had a

significant negative impact, while ozone and nitrogen oxides didn’t. The umps’ constant travel helped pinpoint that.

“We pluck an umpire out of one city and then observe that umpire in a different city several days later,” Archsmith says. “So we’re actually able to identify the effects of these pollutants separately, which other studies that look at just one place aren’t really able to do.”

Archsmith, who teaches students how to similarly analyze large data sets, might have

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY J A S O N A . K E I S L I N G

Mirrors on the Moon

50 Years After Apollo 11 Landing, UMD Experiment Continues to Provide Physics Answers

on Earth. The bounce-back from those pulses enables precise measurements of distance that in the past five decades have led to discoveries ranging from the moon’s liquid core to confirming that Earth’s continents are still (slowly) moving.

In fact, the arrays are responsible for “really the only verification” of some aspects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, says Currie, now a professor emeritus at UMD. “Science has come out of it remarkably,”

ALONG WITH NEIL ARMSTRONG and Buzz

Aldrin, University of Maryland scientists left

other baseball-related research on deck. But he notes that the lesson here isn’t just that we should lay off the officials when calls don’t go our team’s way.

“This is actually something that’s the center of a big policy debate in the United States right now. How should we be setting environmental quality standards?” Archsmith says.

“This is saying maybe we should be a little bit more cautious about what these standards should be.”—ad

P H OTO CO U RT ESY O F N ASA

he says.

And there’s plenty more to learn. Currie

a lasting mark on the moon when Apollo 11

has been working with the National Labo-

landed there 50 years ago in July, one that

ratories of Frascati, Italy, and commercial

is still imprinting on the world of physics.

space company Moon Express to get a

That’s because a piece of equipment the

new generation of arrays onto the moon.

astronauts left behind—a small panel of 100

With measurements exponentially more

mirrors designed by UMD physicists Doug

accurate, he hopes the new instruments

Currie, the late Carroll Alley and a national

shed light on mysteries like dark energy

team—remains in use for experiments.

and dark matter.

The lunar laser ranging array, which

“The gain we will have with the next gen-

works in tandem with two others placed by

eration is significant,” Currie says. “It allows

the Apollo 14 and 15 missions in 1971, is a

us to chase in the direction of some of the

target for lasers beamed from telescopes

fundamental questions of physics.”—LF

SPRING 2019

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E X P L O R AT I O N S

FA C U LT Y Q & A ERIC SHIN

Percussionist With a Full Plate Faculty Member, NSO Musician Opens Restaurant in College Park ERIC SHIN INDULGES HIS PASSION for

more diverse dining options. Terp asked him how

preserve the cultural ties and that authenticity

percussion as a faculty member in the School

he keeps a steady beat, even if his grandmother

and bring it forward in a modern way.

of Music and principal percussionist in the

doesn’t always approve of his flourishes.—CT

National Symphony Orchestra. But growing up in a food-loving Korean-American family led him to take on a new kind of gig.

In 2016, Shin founded SeoulSpice, a restaurant

How have your Korean-American roots influenced your vision for SeoulSpice?

What have you learned as a restaurant owner along the way?

When we first opened, we had no idea what to

The one thing that stayed true throughout my

expect. When we made our sauces, we made,

that serves what he calls Korean comfort

whole childhood is the food. That’s the one part

like, five blenders full of each sauce, thinking

food with a fast-casual twist. He opened the third

of my culture that I’m most comfortable with. I

that’ll get us through lunch. About 30 minutes

location in College Park’s Terrapin Row in Novem-

look around and see Chinese food becoming a

before we opened, there was a line around the

ber after hearing comments from students and

thing, Japanese food, but I don’t see Korean food

block. We ran out of food by 2 p.m. So figuring

other community members about a need for

out there as much as I would like. We’re trying to

out how to scale food was something that took a really big learning curve. As someone who loves to cook, I’m so used to doing dinner parties, but now we’re prepping and serving over a ton of chicken every week.

How do you balance your time as a professor, musician and restaurateur?

In the beginning, it was really difficult. It wasn’t uncommon to stay until 3 or 4 a.m., go home to take a quick nap, come back at 6 a.m. and then have to be at the Kennedy Center by 9 a.m. My wife was extremely helpful—there were days a grill cook would call out and my wife would come in and cook while I was in the back doing dishes.

Now, my schedules at UMD and at the orchestra really go hand in hand. At the restaurant, I’ve been really fortunate to have a great staff to rely on so anything I have to deal with is not time-sensitive.

The cilantro-lime sauce served at SeoulSpice is uniquely non-Korean. What’s the story behind that?

When I was living in Houston, a buddy of mine got me addicted to it and I started putting it on Asian food. My grandma always tells me I have to take it off the menu, but that one’s definitely going to stay.

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

P H OTO BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E

THE BIG QUESTION

What’s the hardest lesson you’ve learned?

STEPHEN BRIGHTON

BRYAN BUTLER

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DIRECTOR OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES AND HONORS DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

PRINCIPAL AGENT, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND EXTENSION

—

The hardest lesson I am learning is to be myself. This may seem like a simplistic, if not cliché, answer, but it is perhaps the most difficult thing to attempt. In each individual, there are many “selves” but at the core, there forms the true “self.” Staying true to that self is fraught with struggle and conflict, but one has to be comfortable in his or her own skin and be able to succeed and fail with equal measures humility and confidence. It is not so much a task to complete but rather a mantra to practice in everyday life.

—

Little victories are all you need. We all want to achieve great things and be recognized for them. But reaching constantly for the fruit on the highest branch can cause you to fall out of the tree.

JOEL CHAN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF INFORMATION STUDIES

—

As an introvert and nerd at heart, “networking” used to be a dirty word for me. I believed I should and could focus on my own work without worrying about what others think or how to communicate my ideas. In fact, feedback and iteration are the lifeblood of

creativity, and networking is an incredibly rich source of those ingredients. (For tips on this, I recommend the classic “Networking on the Network” by Phil Agre, which frames networking as community-building.)

AXEL KRIEGER ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

—

Good ideas will persevere. While rejections from journals and funding sources, criticism from paper reviewers, and failures in initial research can be paralyzing and create the need to chase other projects, sticking to good ideas and relentlessly pursuing them often leads to the biggest successes.

LISA A. TANEYHILL ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ANIMAL AND AVIAN SCIENCES

—

It’s okay to ask for help. In my experience, working women (especially those with kids) don’t often ask for help. We think that we should be able to do it all—to be that superwoman who successfully juggles every curveball that life throws, completely on our own—because asking for help can be perceived as a sign of weakness. In reality, the woman who has it all achieves this because she has built a village, comprised of her spouse, partner, family, friends and/ or others, who help her in numerous ways to be her best self. Asking for help is smart and strategic, not weak.

Share your answer and see more faculty responses at terp.umd.edu/BigQ5 Suggest a future question at terpfeedback.umd.edu

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M AT T H E W L A U M A N N

SPRING 2019

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P H OTO BY STO C KSY

GROWING CONCERNS

Full legalization of marijuana is often considered inevitable. But as the industry takes off, Terp entrepreneurs and academics alike are still wrestling with the implications.

B Y

L I A M

F A R R E L L

SPRING 2019

25

THE GLOOM FROM A RAINY February

night on the Oakland side of the San Francisco Bay dissipates inside the doors of Harborside.

Hipsters, hippies and soccer moms wander past display cases on shiny wood floors, and browse the selection of body lotions, cookies and other products with names like Maui Pacific Island, King Louis and Swami Select Hindu. Perky counter and floor workers chat with customers to a soundtrack of Otis Redding singing “The Happy Song.”

With different products, this establishment co-founded by Steve DeAngelo ’86 would be a more typical brick in the 2019 cultural wall, akin to the trendy cafes, gadget and liquor stores found in up-and-coming or arrived areas.

But Harborside isn’t offering espressos, earbuds or a bourbon barrel stout—it’s selling cannabis.

The store’s transition in January 2018 from a medical marijuana dispensary to general adult sales was the latest accomplishment for DeAngelo, who’s been called the “Father of the Cannabis Industry” by former San Francisco mayor Willie L. Brown. A longtime advocate who spent decades in bruising political fights over the drug’s legalization, DeAngelo is now frequently on lists of the most powerful people in the legal weed business. And he’s feeling “profoundly vindicated.”

“For most of my life,” he says, “I was

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

vilified and chased and harassed.”

Operations like Harborside make it tempting to believe the United States has already crossed the reefer Rubicon. Thirty-three states, including Maryland, and the District of Columbia have sanctioned marijuana in some form, ranging from decriminalizing the possession of small amounts to adult recreational use. After decades of the cannabis spotlight slowly moving from tales of abuse to medical possibilities and criminal justice reform, a Gallup poll last fall found that 66 percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, up from 12 percent when the polling company first asked a half-century earlier.

But for as much as the landscape has changed since President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, University of Maryland graduates working in the fledgling yet flourishing cannabis industry face an uncertain future, with a federal government that still bans marijuana as a drug with the highest potential for damage and without any medical benefits. From ambiguous legal guidance to banking barriers, cannabis is an area rife with risk along with potential reward as it transitions from countercultural signifier to big business.

THE PUBLIC SERVICE announcement

planned for the Super Bowl telecast begins with a Colorado mother describing how her son used to suffer from dozens of seizures a day. A Buffalo man comes next, and says he spent 15 years on opioids for back pain. Lastly, a veteran from Oakland puts on a prosthetic leg while saying he couldn’t live with either the pain or conventional treatment plan for his injuries.

“Cannabis is giving me my life back,” the Buffalo man says, before viewers are shown the words, “The Time is Now,” and asked to contact their U.S. senators and representatives.

Acreage Holdings, an investment firm that is the largest operator in U.S. cannabis, was ready to spend millions of dollars to bring this message to arguably the most mainstream event in American society, but CBS decided it didn’t meet broadcast standards.

It’s a decision that could fast appear antiquated, as cannabis becomes more associated with suits in a boardSteve DeAngelo room than tie-dyed T-shirts in ’86 is a longa basement. Acreage counts time advocate for marijuana former U.S. House Speaker legalization and was John Boehner as a board once called the “Father of the Cannabis Industry.” member, and celeb-

P H O T O B Y P E T E R Y A N G /A U G U S T I M A G E S

“As goes California, so goes the United States.

As goes the United States, so goes the world.” rities including lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, actress/talk show host Whoopi Goldberg and NFL hero Joe Montana have become partners and investors with other cannabis concerns.

Howard Schacter ’87, vice president of communications for Acreage Holdings, spent a career in public relations before working for the National Association for Cannabis Businesses in 2017 and moving over to Acreage a year later, attracted to the challenge of stewarding an emerging business as well as cannabis’ medical potential.

“The objective here was to use one of the largest stages available to put forward this important message. However, CBS rejected our PSA because it ‘doesn’t accept marijuana ads,’” Schacter says, noting the story went viral shortly afterward. “In retrospect, the 3 billion impressions we generated through media coverage of the rejection dwarfed the 100 million impressions we would have generated through the telecast of the Super Bowl, without having to write that check.”

Eyeballs aside, he knows full legalization remains less than guaranteed until the federal government relents. That could happen soon, depending on the twists and turns of presidential politics. While President Donald Trump’s administration has opposed changes and at one point even threatened a crackdown, multiple contenders for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, including U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, support legalization.

“The momentum is heading in the right direction,” Schacter says.

FLASHY BILLBOARDS and trade show

websites like americascashcrop.com weren’t what academics used to envision for a United States with legalized cannabis, says Peter Reuter, a professor at UMD’s School of Public Policy and

—STEVE DEANGELO ’86

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, who has spent his career studying drug and illegal markets. With “simple naiveté,” he says, researchers including himself believed marijuana legalization would likely entail a bland state monopoly with nondescript stores and no attention-grabbing advertising, essentially “supply without promotion.”

Instead, he says, “We’ve taken this drug, which is not harmless, and allowed it to be aggressively promoted.”

Now he believes the cannabis industry is on its way to embracing the same sins as the tobacco and alcohol industries, and should answer for studies showing legalization’s ill effects, such as intensifying consumption among its most frequent users.

“Are we better off?” Reuter asks. “The true costs of this are not particularly salient and hard to quantify.”

The National Academies of Sciences tried to do that in 2017, releasing a report on the known health effects of cannabis.

It found strong evidence that cannabis is an effective treatment for issues such as chronic pain and chemotherapy-induced nausea, yet also noted increased risks for psychoses, motor vehicle crashes, and learning, memory and attention impairment.

But the top recommendation was a call for public, private and philanthropic research groups to commit to getting more information. Federal regulations remain a significant stumbling block, the report found, as researchers can’t get the right quantity, quality or types of cannabis to properly conduct their investigations.

The extent to which cannabis research is still a flashpoint was highlighted earlier this year with the release of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s book “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Mari-

juana, Mental Illness and Violence.” Some researchers objected to how their work was used to portray the drug as a definitive cause of mental health disorders, rather than having a more ambiguous correlative or sociopolitical effect (i.e., if someone is expected to act a certain way under a drug’s influence, they will).

Cannabis presents some unique challenges for researchers and consumers, says Amelia Arria, UMD professor of behavioral and community health and director of the Center on Young Adult Health and Development. Because the drug itself has been getting stronger over time and past research was conducted on less potent marijuana, she says it’s likely we are underestimating adverse consequences.

While more research is needed, Arria says, what scientists know so far about cannabis’ connections to everything from cognitive and mental health problems to the impairment of academic achievement among young adults and adolescents should prompt a harder look at the consequences of legalization.

“When we see these signals, we get concerned,” she says. “It’s disappointing the policy is way ahead of the science.”

People in the cannabis industry often say they welcome that conversation.

“With legalization comes responsible regulation. This product should be governed,” Schacter says. “That to us is the right path, versus an illicit market where it’s a free-for-all.”

LOCATED IN A NONDESCRIPT Suitland, Md., office building next to a collection of car dealerships and a Red Lobster, AltPharm is a medical marijuana dispensary founded by a family of UMD graduates.

The plain white door to the business, open since April 2018, gives way to a

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Harborside, one of the most prominent cannabis businesses in the world, was co-founded by Steve DeAngelo ’86.

warm interior reminiscent of a high-end coffee shop, belied only by a security door separating the couch-filled lobby from where actual products can be purchased.

The goal, says James Riordon ’14, the company’s president, is to provide an environment like a small-town pharmacy, where embarrassed or uncertain patients can be counseled through the process of buying medical marijuana——be it in smokable or other forms, in varying levels of strength.

“We like to keep it nice and small, very hands-on,” he says. “It’s an ongoing effort to educate and reach out to people. We’re completely the opposite of what they believe is going on.”

AltPharm was the result of a dinner conversation around the time Maryland legalized medical marijuana in 2013.

Riordon’s grandmother was sick with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, and he saw firsthand “how awful some of the prescription medication can be.” A family business was born: Riordon is engaged to Marguerite Santos ’12, vice president of operations, and his parents, James Riordon ’87 and Vicky Ellen Mayoral ’86, are the directors of communications and human resources, respectively.

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But cannabis businesses face different obstacles than your standard startup because the federal government still considers selling its central product a felony. So while investors and entrepreneurs can herald cannabis as the next big money-making opportunity, they also have virtually no access to the financial services available to traditional businesses, from small business loans to credit and debit card transactions. National banks are avoiding the cash-based industry, and the smaller, regional ones stepping into the gap are betting on the goodwill of the federal government.

Though a 2013 Department of Justice memorandum said the government would pursue marijuana cases only in situations like selling to minors and financing cartels, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded it. In a confusing twist, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is still relying on that memo.

Consequently, AltPharm had to rely on private investors for seed funding, Riordon says, and a big part of his job is making sure he is up to date on “the finest details” of all state and local regulations.

“I’m always having to learn and stay

on my toes,” he says. “It’s nowhere near your average business.”

Because customers can use only cash, AltPharm houses an ATM, but Riordon says they do have a bank. (He declined to name it because of a mutual privacy agreement, but at least one Maryland institution—Severn Savings Bank—has noted in SEC filings that it accepts deposits from and makes loans to medical marijuana companies.) It’s a reflection of how even marijuana’s local legality does not always equate to openness.

“It’s still something that is, ‘Let’s not be too loud about this,’” he says.

That may not be the case much longer.

A June 2018 Washington Post-UMD poll found 52 percent of Maryland residents support legalizing the sale and taxation of marijuana for personal use, with 41 percent opposed, and the General Assembly created a workgroup to study marijuana legislation and come out with recommendations for the 2020 session. While quibbling over how to regulate legalized cannabis, legislative leaders have generally conceded it will happen at some point.

“This is a trillion-dollar industry. It needs to be managed right,” state Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. ’64 said during a January forum on Maryland politics. “We need to look at other people’s mistakes before we move forward.”

For Santos, it’s rewarding to be at the forefront of that.

“We certainly don’t operate in fear,” she says. “Literally seeing a cultural shift is so exciting.”

ABOUT 13 MILES DUE WEST of

Harborside and its peace-sign logo (“Be Well, Be Free” reads one parking lot sign) is the Haight-Ashbury district, a San Francisco neighborhood synonymous with 1960s rebellion and the hippie movement.

P H OTO BY J I M W I L S O N / T H E N E W YO R K T I M ES/ R E D UX

Reminders linger of its past: an anarchist bookstore and tattoo shops; street musicians with long dreadlocks; a youth services storefront and portable trailers offering bathroom and shower access for the indigent.

There’s also a Ben & Jerry’s at the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets.

DeAngelo, a former Yippie who participated in annual “smoke-ins” in front of the White House and still wears his hair in two long braids, is sensitive to the collision of commerce and the counterculture, and how the years ahead will likely increase friction between longtime cannabis activists who’ve spent years on the outside looking in, and a newly interested investor and business class.

“From a personal point of view, I am cleaved down the middle,” he says.

“There is a profound culture clash and sense of distrust.”

For all his rebellious bona fides, DeAngelo is not shy about pursuing new business opportunities, noting in his 2015 memoir/polemic “The Cannabis Manifesto” that many political solutions advocated by leftist colleagues “never sat well with my entrepreneurial spirit.”

Besides leading a cannabis investment and

research firm called the Arc View Group, DeAngelo is in the process of getting Harborside on a Canadian stock exchange.

Not surprisingly, DeAngelo has taken some hits on this perceived hypocrisy.

The short-lived Netflix series “Disjointed” had a thinly veiled antagonist named Angelo DeStevens who spent a few episodes greedily trying to capitalize on the ingenuity of the show’s mom-andpop dispensary. (While amused at the character’s initial appearance, complete with the braids, DeAngelo later tweeted that he was disappointed at his treatment in light of “so many more worthy villains in the world.”)

“We have to remember why we started this,” he says. “We can’t now block the spread of this plant just to preserve our little fiefdom.”

DeAngelo’s ambition, as laid out in his book, is to shift the conversation from one that includes only “total abstinence or crushing dependence,” and into broader conversations about wellness instead of intoxication, regulation instead of prohibition, and social justice instead of punishment.

“For me, there’s no such thing as recreational cannabis,” he says. “This is so

TERPS IN CANNABIS

From advocacy and investment to research, UMD graduates are involved in every aspect of the marijuana industry. Here are a few: CARISSA CARTALEMI

DARRYL HILL ’65, who

KRISTI KELLY ’99 is

MBA ’15 owns the

broke the color barrier as the first black football player in the Atlantic Coast Conference, is the CEO of Sunburst Pharm, a dispensary in Cambridge, Md., and has been an advocate for minority business representation in the industry.

executive director of Colorado’s Marijuana Industry Group and a founding board member of the world’s first marijuana financial institution, Fourth Corner Credit Union.

Baltimore medical cannabis dispensary location of the national Starbuds company.

STEVE DEANGELO ’86

is a longtime advocate of legalization who runs Harborside dispensary in Oakland, Calif., as well as the investor and research firm the ArcView Group.

P H OTO BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E

CARY MILLSTEIN ’83

is a partner in Verano, a Chicago-based cannabis company recently

acquired for $850 million in the largest U.S. marijuana business deal to date. The company has created and purchased dispensaries around the country, including one in Howard County, Md., founded by Millstein and bioengineering pioneer

much bigger than recreation.”

Skepticism clearly remains. While Michigan voters legalized cannabis last November, North Dakotans rejected it. Missouri and Utah legalized medical marijuana as well, but in March, a legalization bill failed for the 15th year in a row in Hawaii.

A different future, however, is already marching on in California. Just before that busy February night at Harborside, San Francisco prosecutors announced that they would expunge more than 9,000 marijuana-related convictions dating back to 1975.

“As goes California, so goes the United States,” DeAngelo predicts. “As goes the United States, so goes the world.” TERP

James Riordon ’14 and his fiancée, Marguerite Santos ’12, run a Maryland medical marijuana dispensary.

RAM MUKUNDA ’79, M.S. ’81 is the head of IGC

Pharma, which has filed multiple patents for medical cannabis products.

JAMES RIORDON ’14,

fiancée MARGUERITE SANTOS ’12 and parents

ROBERT E. FISCHELL

JAMES RIORDON ’87

M.S. ’53, honorary Sc.D.

and VICKY ELLEN MAYORAL ’86 founded and

’95.

run AltPharm, a medical marijuana dispensary in Suitland, Md. HOWARD SCHACTER ’87

is head of communications for Acreage Holdings, a cannabis investment firm headquartered in New York City. Former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner is on the board.

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Aileen Cole, one of the first black members of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, wrote, “Each one of us, in the course of our professional relationships, did contribute quietly and with dignity to the idea that justice demands professional equality for I L L U S T R AT I O / P H O T O nurses.�

CREDIT allN qualified

O n e h u n d r e d y e a r s a g o , t h e f l u pa n d e m i c h a d a n u n e x p e c t e d side ef f ect: a ci v il r igh ts br e a k t hrough for bl ack n u r se s. In a n upcoming book, a umd professor w ill tell their stor ies. by s a l a l e v i n ’10

n October 1918, as influenza was tearing across the globe—killing at least 50 million before its brutal reign ended—three young American Red Cross nurses arrived at a makeshift camp near Charleston, W.Va., to take care of stricken miners. Inside a high school-turned-hospital, the scene was stomach-turning. Every one of the patients was lying lifeless on his cot, a baggage tag hanging from each right wrist. The nurses were too late. “I’ll bet you young nurses had your hearts set on going overseas, wearing romantic Red Cross uniforms, to nurse our soldiers, didn’t you?” an officer later taunted them.

The nurses—Aileen Cole, Clara Rollins and Susie Boulding—had long wanted to be Red Cross nurses, to contribute to the war effort.

But as black women, they’d been rejected by an organization and military that didn’t want

P H O T O V I A A R M Y. M I L

them. It was only as the pandemic raged, and soldiers and other patients languished in military hospitals and other encampments—and as doctors and nurses themselves succumbed to the virus—that the Red Cross and Army begrudgingly accepted them.

Cole, Rollins and Boulding were among the 18 women who served as the first black nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during and immediately following World War I, when a public health crisis unexpectedly advanced the cause of civil rights.

The unsung stories of these and other Red Cross nurses are the foundation of “Finding New Fronts: How World War I Service Shaped a Generation of U.S. Nurses,” a forthcoming book by Marian Moser Jones, associate professor of family science, as well as an April article in the American Journal of Public Health marking the centennial of the nurses’ service.

Already the author of a book on the history

of the Red Cross, Jones was a clear choice to solve a mystery that fell into the lap of some National Institutes of Health archivists.

They’d been contacted by a doctor from Potomac, Md., who had discovered what looked like a World War I nurse’s diary among his late wife’s belongings. Baffled, the archivists turned to Jones—who had done a post-doc at NIH—to figure out who the diarist was.

That quest turned into a 3,000-mile road trip, as she decided to focus her next book on World War I nurses. Going from state to state, archive to archive, driving as far west as North Dakota, Jones collected letters and diaries from nurses who served in the Great War—and realized most of them were from white women.

Jones knew then that any book about World War I nurses would have to include the banning of black nurses. “It wasn’t just incidental,” she says.

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Nine of the black nurses who integrated the U.S. Army Nurse Corps were sent to Camp Sherman in Ohio during the height of the flu pandemic.

lack women in America were hardly new to nursing when World War I broke out. As slaves, black women breastfed their owners’ babies and tended to the sick, both white and black. During the Civil War, records indicate that 181 black nurses—male and female— served at 11 hospitals in three states. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were both nurses who treated soldiers.

Early nursing schools created quota systems that limited admission for minority students. Boston’s New England Hospital for Women and Children, incorporated in 1863, restricted entry to one black woman and one Jewish woman annually.

By the early 20th century, black hospitals and nursing schools had started to appear, partly in response to the educational segregation that followed the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson. Spelman College founded the country’s first black nursing program in 1886, and Howard University followed suit by 1893, as did other schools in following decades. The 1910 census counted 3,210 black nurses, skyrocketing from 201 in 1900. Of those, 3,010 were women.

Still, despite meeting every imaginable

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standard of professional qualification, these nurses couldn’t overcome the prevailing law of the land: racial discrimination. In 1916, the American Nurses Association stipulated that applicants have pre-existing membership in a state chapter—16 of which (plus Washington, D.C.) barred black nurses. In 1911, the Red Cross—essentially the recruiting arm of the Army and Navy Nurse Corps—had voted to exclude black nurses.

Many black Americans hoped that World War I would change the racial calculus in the country: Showing their loyalty to their country by supporting the war effort could finally convince white Americans that they were equally worthy citizens. “Racially, this war spells for us the most glorious word in the vocabulary of freedom—opportunity,” said Dr. C.V. Roman, a professor at Meharry Medical College in Nashville.

While black doctors, dentists and soldiers did join the military, women struggled to find a place in the war effort. Though the Red Cross officially lifted its ban on black nurses in 1917, black women still found themselves facing an unspoken barricade. “The Red Cross would hold recruitment fairs in major cities—they’d say, ‘We need nurses desperately,’ and then their applications would be taken by the Red

Cross and rejected, or held and go nowhere,” says Jones (pictured at top, right). Although Red Cross leaders tried to place some of these nurses at Army camps, Army nursing leaders rebuffed their efforts.

Starting in January 1918, the flu pandemic sprinted across the world, eventually sickening some 500 million—a third of the world’s population. Chicago and other cities closed theaters, movie houses and other public places in an attempt to stem the disease’s spread. In Philadelphia, some corpses waited more than a week to be buried, and a trolley car manufacturer donated 200 packing crates to be used as coffins. Life expectancy in the U.S. fell by approximately 12 years.

Amid the carnage, black nurses found a chance to become essential. With 20 to 40 percent of military personnel sickened, camps and hospitals were overrun. In 1918, Tuskegee Institute President Robert Moton said that the Red Cross’s refusal to enroll black nurses represented an “indifference on the part of colored people which ought not to be when the country needs every ounce of effort along every available line.” n September 2001, Jones was in her lower Manhattan office, working for a 20-person news outlet called GenomeWeb. When the World Trade Center was struck, “I was one of those people who ran across the Brooklyn Bridge to escape,” she says. On the other side, Red Cross workers tended to the stunned evacuees. Jones’ mind flashed to memories of the Red Cross in her life—swim lessons, first aid classes. The Red Cross seemed omnipresent—but why?

Growing up in St. Louis, Jones had been encouraged to pursue science or health care as a doctor. “The idea of nursing was disfavored among my mentors,” she says. “It was like, if you’re smart and interested in health science, go become a doctor.”

P H O T O C O U R T E SY O F W. E . B . D U B O I S PA P E R S ( M S 3 1 2 ) S P E C I A L C O L L E C T I O N S A N D UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST LIBRARIES.

During her time as a health and science reporter, Jones “started to think about all of the norms of the health care system and public health” and their origins. “A lot of that history is taught from the perspectives of doctors or health systems, and nurses are sort of incidental.” As a feminist, that rankled her.

“If you want to talk about the history of health sciences or health in the military, you have to look at nursing, not just medicine.”

Jones left journalism to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia, where she dived into the history and sociology of public health. Her focus on the history of nursing was the product of “a passion to bring back the voices of people who haven’t been heard,” she says. “In history, there’s been either forgetting or burying of histories of women and people of color and the roles they played in very important events from wars and disasters to simply building a country or city.”

When Jones was approached in 2013 with what she eventually discovered to be the diary of World War I nurse Minnie Victoria Strobel, she found herself wondering more about the lives of individual nurses.

She enlisted the help of Jean Shulman, a longtime volunteer nurse historian for the

Red Cross, in tracking down nurses’ letters and diaries.

Shulman had become adept at ferreting out long-hidden relatives and stories through queries from the public like, “We found a pin in the attic (and) we think my grandma went to France,” she says. “Through the years we’ve been able to find endless stories of World War I nurses, and I very early on became interested in some of the black nurses.”

With the help of research assistant Matilda Saines ’19, Jones scoured the scant photos and records, recognizing their role in the non-cinematic version of the civil rights story, in which “you had generations of people fighting without seeming to advance very much, but with little advances, like these 18 black women.” ileen Cole was shaken by her experience in that high school gym. “It was gruesome to see a whole unit of dead patients, each one lying on an army cot and covered with a blanket as if asleep,” she wrote in her diary.

Patients’ beds were isolated by curtains at a New Haven, Conn., hospital during the pandemic of 1918–19.

M O S E R P O R T R A I T B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I ; A M E R I C A N N A T I O N A L R E D C R O S S P H OTO G R A P H CO L L EC T I O N , LO C , LC-A 6 1 9 5 -39 9 7 [ P& P ]

But she and the other nurses weren’t deterred. On Nov. 13, 1918, Cole received a letter from Clara D. Noyes, director of field nursing for the Red Cross. She and 17 others had been assigned to the Army Nurse Corps and called to report on Dec. 1, half to Camp Sherman in Ohio and half to Camp Grant in Illinois.

The nurses lived in “separate but equal” housing, sharing a living room, dining room and kitchen. A black maid cooked and served their meals.

Despite the segregated living—and being excluded from social events for white nurses and doctors—records from the nurses and their supervisors recall a surprisingly smooth reception, largely free of overt racial animus.

“Clara A. Rollins I hope I shall never forget, because of her splendidly cooperative spirit shown throughout her service at Sherman,” wrote Mary Roberts, chief nurse of Camp Sherman. “I recall one amusing instance which occurred when a change of personnel in the ward seemed logical and imminent. A request, signed by every man in the ward, was sent to my office begging that Miss Rollins be not taken from them.”

The nurses, too, recalled warm relationships with soldiers and medical staff. “There apparently was no bias or discrimination in our nursing assignments at the base hospital,” wrote Cole. “We were liked, accepted, and respected by officers and men.”

Still, for the 18 women, the moment was at once a breakthrough and a bitter reminder of their country’s resistance to change.

“The story of the Negro woman in World War I is not spectacular,” wrote Cole. “We arrived after the Armistice was signed, which alone was anticlimactic. We had no opportunity for ‘service above and beyond the call of duty.’ But each one of us, in the course of our professional relationships, did contribute quietly and with dignity to the idea that justice demands professional equality for all qualified nurses.” TERP

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Dedicated—and slightly obsessed—Terps created their own version of “Survivor.” Twelve smartphone-shot seasons later, they’ve kept the torch burning, and passed it to “castaway” communities across the country.

BY ANNIE DANKELSON PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI AND STEPHANIE S. CORDLE

hris LeCompte ’16, the infamous pot-stirring contestant of “Survivor: Maryland’s” second season, sat before the tribal council facing elimination. Head down, he blurted out why he’d been distracted heading into the vote: His dog died.

His fellow Terp tribe members, gathered around a picnic table bookended by tiki torches near La Plata Beach, couldn’t help but be moved, and LeCompte went on to finish fourth and return for season five: “All-Stars.”

Except: LeCompte’s dog had not died. Sammy wasn’t even sick.

Welcome to the ultra-competitive world of “Survivor: Maryland,” umd’s student-run, smartphone-shot version of the cbs reality show.

Undergraduates with a flair for the dramatic, the strategic and the slightly outrageous have signed up for Maryland’s game since 2012, with around 20 Terps divided each semester into tribes to face off in physical and mental challenges, and vote each other out until a winner emerges for a whopping $100 prize. So it’s exactly the same as the TV reality-show stalwart, except that one lasts 39 days, maroons contestants in remote locations and awards the victor 10,000 times as much.

And while the “real” show is chugging along with 38 seasons since 2000, “Survivor: Maryland” has developed a cult following of its own, with thousands of views on its YouTube episodes, a robust Reddit and Twitter presence, and student versions of host Jeff Probst popping up at colleges across the country.

“Since there are no stakes—very minimal stakes, I guess—it’s all prideful, and it’s all just competitive nature,” says Drew Lerner ’20, the third and current host of “Survivor: Maryland.” “The genuine emotion on the screen is what people connect to.”

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hen Austin Trupp ’15 first arrived on Maryland’s campus, his La Plata residence hall felt like an island: the home away from home, the shared living spaces and bathroom, and the constant interaction between floormates.

“I just kept thinking,” he says, “that this would be such a good setting to do a version of ‘Survivor.’”

Maybe not every incoming Terp’s first thought, but Trupp is a superfan. He’d seen every episode—which required some catching up, as he was 6 when “Survivor” premiered— and had tested his skills in online versions of the game. He wanted to create the full experience, though, so he broached the idea of a college edition to his friends, joking about who would backstab whom. He eventually convinced them, and after a summer of planning, “Survivor: La Plata Island” began his sophomore year.

“I thought at that point I was just going to do it, like, for one semester,” Trupp says. “I wanted people to have something to remember about college that wasn’t just going out and going to parties, going to their classes.”

That initial season, Trupp filmed only occasionally so the 21 participants could have a souvenir of their experience. But as others saw bandanna-clad Terps constantly playing

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this elaborate game near La Plata, word got around, and hopeful contestants convinced Trupp to keep “Survivor” going—and to record full-length YouTube episodes.

The cell-phone-shot scenes are choppy.

The audio is inconsistent. Generic dorm furniture and freebie college shirts with the sleeves cut off are common sights. But it’s enough.

“A small online community kind of discovered it and would talk about it and write about the episodes,” Lerner says, “and that’s how it kept spreading.”

On top of managing his Honors College course load, chairing the University Student Judiciary’s executive board and being a resident assistant, Trupp ran a one-man show, filming, editing and running challenges and tribal councils. When the now-government analyst graduated with government and politics and business degrees, fellow fanatic Anders Norberg ’18 took over hosting duties.

And when Norberg donned his cap and gown, he passed the torch to Lerner.

“I think ‘Survivor’ gives a lot of passion to other people,” says Norberg, also a business major. “I’ve had nights where we’re outside in freezing temperatures and rain doing a challenge, and people are yelling and crying.”

That passion—maybe obsession—is contagious. Close to 200 students have played, and beyond Maryland, Trupp estimates that

students from 25 colleges across the country have reached out about starting their own “Survivors.” YouTube shows are already in place at Michigan, Ohio State, Emerson, Virginia and more.

“Maryland definitely set the blueprint,” says Greg Friedberg, creator of Ohio State’s “Survivor: Time and Change.” “Even if the cbs show eventually gets canceled, who cares? We’ll keep the torch burning.” acking the network budget and exotic locales of the TV series, the collegiate version requires an extra measure of creativity. Contestants race across balance beams, meticulously set up rows of dominoes, play tug-of-war with an old tire, even speed-eat dining hall chicken tenders that have gone stale.

Once, in the latest season, they stood for over an hour with their arms in the air, their wrists tied to red Solo cups of water perched on a ledge above them, holding still so they didn’t spill.

Around 50 to 60 undergrads—from the generally hypercompetitive to the “Survivor” superfans to the new students looking to meet new people—volunteer for that hullabaloo per season. Hosts and “Survivor Maryland” veterans like LeCompte comb through applications and film in-person interviews to find compel-

ling Terps who seem most likely to outwit, outplay and outlast.

Besides the challenges, there’s constant strategizing: over phone calls and texts, at apartments and dorms, in Chipotle or the Bagel Place, in the stands during football games. Even being left out of a group trip to the bathroom can spark obsessive worry.

“You never know who’s talking to who, how much people are talking to each other,” says Taylor Sirchio ’21, a season 12 contestant.

“When I’m not in class, I’m meeting with people or thinking about it during class, losing sleep over it.”

The all-encompassing nature of the game presents a balancing act that the CBS castaways don’t have to deal with. LeCompte, for instance, was a finance and accounting major, in a business fraternity and on the executive board for Terp Thon and played intramural sports. Yet he spent hours a day on the game and once dragged his roommate outside at 1 or 2 a.m. on a Wednesday to scour the campus for a hidden “immunity idol.”

“You definitely start to kind of have these blurred lines between the game and friends and school and living,” he says.

But while he earned his lowest GPA during his season-five semester, he achieved his highest during season two, crediting “Survivor” for keeping him “laser-focused.”

Time management becomes a factor for the jack-of-all-trades hosts/cinematographers/film editors, too. They encourage contestants to whip out their phones whenever they’re talking “Survivor,” and between the challenges, tribal councils and one-onone confessionals, hundreds of hours of footage pour in.

That’s why, if you’re wondering how to view season 12, you can’t yet—and likely won’t be able to for years. Season six, “New Beginnings,” the first run by now-alumnus Norberg, was filmed in Spring 2016 and hit YouTube only in January of this year.

He still has to produce seasons 7–10 on top of his actual job on a TV production desk at ICM Partners in Los Angeles. “I know the rest of my life will be spent on this,” Norberg laughs. his past summer, in the same College Park backyard where Lerner now holds tribal council, a horde of contestants from past seasons, other colleges and even Sunday Burquest and Adam Klein from the actual “Survivor”—fans and now friends of the creators of Maryland’s version—gathered for a one-day reunion game, a thank-you, in part, to the Terp who started it all. Trupp came in sec-

ond in the mini-competition, losing only to Burquest, a 40-something Minnesotan who competed on CBS’s season 33.

He was glad he didn’t win. That would’ve been a cliché.

In a game where lying and double-crossing are fundamental, not everyone takes defeat so well. After the first person got voted out each season, Trupp questioned whether he should really be doing this. He had to take a semester off after watching a friendship between contestants painfully crumble.

But as the community grows far beyond the original La Plata Island, those moments are the exception.

“It’s very typical after the season for everyone to become really good friends, even though they spent an entire semester trying to scheme and backstab each other,” Lerner says.

“That’s one of the most unique things about the organization, and one of the main reasons I want to continue the legacy.” TERP

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Letter From the Executive Director A LOT CAN CHANGE in 30 years:

1

MEMBERS ARE THE TERPIEST TERPS You define Maryland pride.

Ratsie’s to Nandos, the Rendezvous to Cornerstone, the old Cole Field House

2.

FIND TERPS ANYWHERE Even at your office!

Network with workplace Terps at a Morning with Maryland event.

to the new Cole Field House. Just

3

ETCH YOUR LEGACY IN STONE (AND BRICK!)

on the Frann G. and Eric S. Francis Lifetime Member Wall or on a brick or paver at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center.

as College Park has transformed over the years, so has the University of Maryland Alumni Association.

Thirty years ago, we started in one room at the Rossborough Inn. Today, we operate from the state-of-the-art Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, your home here on campus.

We got our start in 1986, when the Maryland General Assembly realized the unique nature of our land-grant mission and allowed each institution to create its own Alumni Association. Thus, we began with a commitment to serving

9 VOLUNTEER FROM YOUR COUCH as a mentor or mentee through Terrapins Connect.

College Park’s graduates. Today, we maintain that commitment, serving more than 369,000 alumni in Maryland and

10 BOOST YOUR IDEAS with fellow entrepreneurs, innovators and business owners at a Terp Entrepreneur Network event.

around the world.

11 EXCLUSIVE ACCESS Alumni receive invitations to events such as game watches and lectures every year. Members always receive 50% off!

Alumni are more connected to their alma mater than ever: 26,000 Terps participated in Alumni Association programs last year. We’re providing more opportunities than ever before for alumni to connect by region, affinity or industry. Plus, we’re setting the stage for success among the next generation with a broader student reach, thanks to our award-winning Student Alumni Leadership Council.

Our 30th anniversary is a chance to acknowledge what we’ve accomplished and an opportunity to look forward. For the past two years, the Alumni Association Board of Governors, made up of our strategic leaders and ambassadors, has

16 GOOD FORTUNE AWAITS Rub Testudo’s nose right outside the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center.

17

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SPOT MARYLAND SPIRIT SUPPORT TERP SCHOLARS through your membership dues.

Whether in the airport, grocery store or park, you’ll know a proud Terp when you see one wearing Maryland gear.

served under the excellent leadership of President Kirk Bell ’88. He passes the reins to Jim Spencer ’90 on July 1.

Professional networking. Mentoring. Traveling the globe.

Meeting fellow alumni, in person and online. These are just a few of the ways that I pledge to continue linking alumni back to the institution that changed their lives for the better. Here’s to the next 30 years of uplifting and celebrating Terps.

23

BE A CHAMPION

24

25

UMD Champions are

Amy Eichhorst

Executive Director University of Maryland Alumni Association

goodwill ambassadors for Maryland who receive and share good news about UMD with their social networks.

PROFESSIONAL WEBINARS can help you prepare to switch careers, save for retirement or anything in between.

GET THE SCOOP on all things Maryland in Terp magazine and newsletters tailored to you.

P.S. New and current members can receive this commemorative pin. Visit alumni.umd.edu/30yearsfearless for info.

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

I C O N I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y VA L E R I E M O R G A N

M

4

ONE-ON-ONE ACCESS TO TESTUDO Meet our mascot at the Homecoming tailgate, Charter Day, the annual Member Appreciation Basketball event and more.

5

NETWORKS FOR ALL

MARRY WHERE YOU MET

Whether it’s academic, affinity, regional or industry-based, there’s an alumni network for everyone.

The Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center can host your wedding ceremony or reception right on campus.

Bonus: Members get discounts!

12 TEACH NEW TERPS THE ROPES at Alumni Association events like the Summer Send-off and Terp Bound.

Reasons to Love Your Alumni Association our 30th anniversary this year, and you’re invited to the party.

We’re marking the milestone at events throughout the rest of 2019 and offering discounted membership rates as low as $30 a year! Here are our top 30 reasons to be a part of it all: WE ARE CELEBRATING

26 INSTILLING LIFELONG LOYALTY The Student Alumni Leadership Council inspires a sense of community between Terps across generations.

27 KEEP GOOD COMPANY Alumni go on to do remarkable things—in the arts, industry, academia and sports.

30 LO G O D ES I G N BY JAS O N A . K E I S L I N G

6

13

The Alumni Association honors multigenerational Terp families at an annual Legacy Pinning Ceremony.

14 Inspire others by speaking at a professional networking event or by joining an alumni board.

FIND OLD FRIENDS, connect

CELEBRATING LEGACIES

Members save on purchases made at national and local retailers and on travel.

LEAD FEARLESSLY

Alumni Association’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. Win swag by participating in social media contests.

28

TERP DEALS

with the new Graduates of the Last Decade program connecting recent grads.

CONSTANT CONNECTIONS

20

21 MAKE A POLITICAL IMPACT

with thousands of other alumni and set your communication preferences through the exclusive Alumni Directory.

at the state and national levels through the Terp Advocacy Network.

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TAILGATING PARTIES Alumni gear up for a Terps victory outside the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center or at sponsored game watches around the country.

8

GO FOR THE GOLD

to leaders in your field and opportunities to build relationships with fellow Terps through degree-specific networks and events.

19

STAY SOCIAL through the

7

15

MARQUEE EVENTS including Maryland in Manhattan, the Homecoming tailgate, and the new Celebration of Terps: Featuring the Maryland Awards.

22 YOUR HOME BASE The Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center is your home on campus and a premier event space.

FEED YOUR WANDERLUST through the alumni travel program, offering one-of-a-kind experiences to see the world with fellow Terps.

Learn more: alumni.umd.edu/30yearsfearless

SPRING 2018 9

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ALUMNI

PROFILES

GAIL RUBIN ‘80

Speaking of Death

Alum Turns Mortality Into Conversation Starter ail rubin’s life work is to prepare others for the end of theirs. And if doing so calls for a visit to a Death Café, a tour of cemeteries or a grim but informative evening playing “The Newly-Dead Game,” she’s just showing how facing our final rest doesn’t have to be so funereal.

Certified by the Association for Death Education and Counseling in thanatology (the scientific study of death), Rubin ’80 writes books, gives talks and hosts events focused on getting people to “think about, talk about and hopefully do something about our 100 percent mortality rate,” she says.

Though there’s no quick fix for mortality—at least not on this metaphysical plane— Rubin encourages people to take steps to make their deaths easier on loved ones: write a will, create medical directives, plan a funeral. She uses humor and film clips— from movies and television shows like “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”—to take some of the

G

Before Death Comes a-Knocking What can you do to plan for your end-of-life care and funeral? In her own words, Gail Rubin ’80 lists five tips to get started.

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

fright out of death.

“I’m a very upbeat person,” Rubin says.

“I’m not a goth or gloomy or anything like that.”

Maybe not, but death has long been an interest of Rubin’s. Decades ago, when she and her classmates in a Maryland film production course were assigned to make a film that featured bubblegum, most students “had car chases and then ended with something about bubblegum,” she says.

Rubin instead spoofed Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal.”

In her version, a medieval knight (played by her friend Eric) tries to charm the grim reaper (Rubin’s then-boyfriend and nowex-husband, Bob) with a stick of gum.

“In the end, death gets his man,” Rubin says.

After a career in public relations and event planning, Rubin shifted professional focus following her second wedding in 2000.

To celebrate in her new home of Albuquerque, she planned “a creative Jewish-Western

WRITE YOUR ADVANCED MEDICAL DIRECTIVES Whether you do or don’t want heroic measures to keep you alive, such as ventilation or intravenous hydration and nutrition, spell it out in writing.

Name the people who will speak on your behalf when you can’t.

Update this document every three years.

PREPARE A WILL Even if you don’t have a big estate, a will prevents the state from dictating who gets your worldly goods. This is especially important for those who have been married more than once, and for same-sex couples.

Update this document at least every five years.

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY R Y U M I S U N G

CLASS NOTES

Identical twins BRANDON and BRADLEY DEYO , who attended Maryland from 2013-15, landed on Forbes magazine’s annual “30

wedding.” The bride wore a beaded, fringed jacket and cowboy boots; the groom, a Western tuxedo and bolo tie.

A Western swing band fronted by a rabbi played klezmer music during breaks.

“Just as talking about sex won’t make you pregnant, talking about funerals and end-of-life issues won’t make you dead.”

—GAIL RUBIN ’80

Inspired, Rubin decided to write a book about creative life cycle events and landed a monthly column in The Albuquerque Tribune called “Matchings, Hatchings, and Dispatchings.” Realizing the death-related columns were the most popular, Rubin completed her 2010 book, “A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die.” Since then, she’s coordinated events

like the New Mexico offshoot of the global Before I Die festival, including visits to cemeteries and funeral homes, panel discussions on end-of-life issues and even a Death Café, “which is an opportunity to talk with strangers about whatever’s on your heart or mind about mortality issues while you have a little coffee or tea with some cake and cookies,” Rubin says.

She’s also given a tedx talk on how to plan for death and created what she calls the “Newly-Dead Game,” a play on “The Newlywed Game” in which couples are asked about each other’s last wishes.

This year, Rubin was honored by the publication Albuquerque Business First as one of 20 Women of Influence, recognizing her as one of the city’s most prominent women.

Rubin has taken some of her own advice. When the time comes, she plans to have a traditional Jewish funeral with a Western twist: a display showing off her 18 pairs of cowboy boots. “Those of my women friends and relatives who have size 9 feet can take a pair to remember me fondly,” she says. — sl

Under 30” list for their success in launching and building Mars Reel, which creates videos for and about top high school athletes. They attract more than 30 million monthly viewers.

Cornerback J.C. JACKSON , who played for the Terps in 2016 and 2017, went from being an undrafted free agent last year to winning a Super Bowl ring with the New England Patriots on Feb. 3.

GAIL BERMAN ’78 was the

executive producer of the runaway hit Netflix series “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo,” about families decluttering their homes with a Japanese consultant’s assistance. Berman, a former Fox entertainment president, also helped launch “American Idol” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Former NBA players WALT WILLIAMS ’92 and TONY MASSENBURG ’90 wrote the book

“Lessons from Lenny: The Journey Beyond a Shooting Star,” about COLLECT YOUR FINANCIAL INFORMATION Your loved ones can’t access accounts and insurance policies they don’t know about. Make a master file of important information, including usernames and passwords, for online accounts.

While you’re at it, compile a contact list for friends,

relatives and financial/legal advisers.

SHOP BEFORE YOU DROP Visit local funeral homes before you need their services.

It’s a fascinating shopping trip, and you can gauge each business on their personnel, pricing and facilities. You’re not morbid to plan ahead.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY J A S O N A . K E I S L I N G

You’re being a wise consumer.

TALK TO YOUR LOVED ONES Let your family know what you might want for your disposition and life celebration.

Just as talking about sex won’t make you pregnant, talking about funerals and end-of-life issues won’t make you dead.

what they learned following the death of UMD basketball star Len Bias. It features

a foreword from University Archivist Emerita Anne Turkos.

Submit your class notes and read many more at terp.umd.edu.

SPRING 2019

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ALUMNI

PROFILES

A Character Sketch

B O B M OY E R ‘ 0 0

“TOY STORY 4” Bo Peep

“UP” Kevin

“Between ‘Toy Story 2’ and ‘3,’ most

“I think the hardest character was

of the characters were brought up

Kevin, the bird. To get those

to a modern level, technically. Bo

iridescent, shiny, fluffy feathers and

Peep we hadn’t seen since ‘Toy

then, his neck that could bend in

Story 2,’ so we had to build her from

any direction—it’s just kind of a

scratch and make her look like she’s

crazy character. To make that feel

IT TOOK 81 MINUTES— the running time of

really made out of porcelain. We

like it’s something that’s really in

1995’s original “Toy Story” movie—for

also tried to fill in where has she

the world, and believable, was really

Bob Moyer ’00 to decide his future.

been and what has she been doing,

fun and tricky.”

How an Alum Created the Look of Some of Your Favorite Pixar Stars

“I walked out and immediately told

and visually imply a lot of history.”

all my friends, ‘That’s what I’m going to do,’” he says.

Moyer made good on his prediction

“INSIDE OUT”

Joy

“She’s an emotion. And we don’t

in the most literal way. The longtime

know what emotions look like. So

computer animator for Pixar is the super-

the idea was, she’s effervescent,

vising technical director—“the film’s general

she’s sparkly, she gives off a glow.

contractor,” he says—for “Toy Story 4,” which comes out June 21.

That’s easy to say, but how do you

Through UMD’s Individual Studies Program, Moyer pieced

actually make a character that

together an education that combined computer science, visual arts

talks and feels emotion herself?

and “other odds and ends” to move him toward his goal. At Pixar

We built her like a glowing fog—she

“All the hundreds of rats you see

Animation Studios in Emeryville, Calif., since 2002, he’s served up

feels almost like a cross between a

in all the crowd scenes—I worked

the studio’s trademark jaw-dropping visuals alongside some of the

firecracker going off and a glass of

on those. I’ve always enjoyed doing

champagne.”

crowd projects: Okay, how am I going

most talented animators and storytellers in the business.

He talked to Terp about a few of his favorite characters from a list of modern-day classics he’s worked on.—CC

“RATATOUILLE” Background Rats

to make a hundred things look as believable as the one character that we’ve spent two years on?”

“CARS” Mater

“The first character I ever shaded was Mater. I spent months learning about rust and chrome. Our team went to a detailing and body shop north of San Francisco and learned how they do car paint, and detailing out to get pinstripes and the clear coat. At the end a guy handed me a giant rusted bumper, and I still have it hanging in my office.”

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

P H OTOS CO U RT ESY O F P I X A R

TO LEARN HOW GOOD OUR GRADS ARE, GOOGLE “CO-FOUNDER OF GOOGLE”

Before he earned his first

$50 BILLION Sergey Brin earned his bachelor’s in computer science and mathematics at UMD. YOUandUMD.com

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ALUMNI

M A R T Y S C H WA R T Z ‘ 7 7

PROFILES

Driving Change

Terp’s Car Donation Program Turns 20 1986 ford escort station wagon can change someone’s life. Just ask Marty Schwartz ’77.

Eighteen years ago, his nonprofit, Vehicles for Change, awarded that car to Lisa Phillips, allowing the single mother of three to get from Woodlawn, Md., to a new job at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Instead of waiting on public transportation to get to the pharmacy or laundromat or to get her kids to and from school, she had time to pursue a degree, earning a dual MBA before starting her own workforce training business.

“I drove it until the wheels came off,” Phillips says of the car. “It was this domino effect. I just started knocking things out.”

Schwartz has watched thousands drive toward better lives since he founded Vehicles for Change 20 years ago in April. The nonprofit, which repairs donated cars from the public and awards them at a deep discount to low-income families, has given more than 6,200 vehicles.

“The impact that it has on our families is off the charts,” Schwartz says.

He showed sparks of entrepreneurial spirit as a middle schooler, creating a newspaper delivery business in his Catonsville, Md., neighborhood. At UMD, he worked maintenance in the residence halls while taking a variety of classes, eventually deciding on an accounting major.

But his first job out of college as an auditor was “absolutely the worst,” Schwartz says. He then bounced around, getting involved in coaching soccer, baseball and lacrosse and as a fundraiser in the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s athletic department before eventually answering a want ad from Cars for Careers, a Howard County program seeking an executive director.

At an automotive show, an auto parts dealer from Precision

A

Certipro asked Schwartz if he’d be interested in expanding the car awarding idea, and with a $20,000 grant, a $10,000 loan and the backing of a larger company, Vehicles for Change was born.

“I always tell people, whatever you believe in for a supreme being or whatever,” Schwartz says, “this is where I’m supposed to be, and this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Besides helping eligible car recipients—many of them from job readiness programs, domestic violence shelters or rehabilitation centers—get better jobs and shrink their commutes, Vehicles for Change has grown to include Freedom Wheels, a retail used-car lot whose proceeds fund repairs to vehicles for awarding, and Full Circle Auto Repair & Training Center, which prepares former inmates for technician jobs. It’s expanded in the DMV area and to Detroit, and Schwartz hopes to continue adding locations.

“He’s got that coach mentality,” Sean Howard, who started with Full Circle last June, says of Schwartz. “He’s the one that comes in and builds that morale up.”—ad

S C H W A R T Z P H O T O BY S T E P H A N I E S . C O R D L E , A U T O I M A G E S C O U R T E SY O F M A N U FA C T U R E R S

SPRING 2019

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ALUMNI

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Diary of a Diamondback Alum’s Entries Give Glimpse of 1930s Terp Life PROM PREP BACK IN 1930 looked a lot like it does today: buying a dress,

getting ready with friends, receiving a corsage from your date. Ruth M. Finzel ’31 added meeting with a bootlegger to her list.

With the United States in the midst of Prohibition, just months after the stock market crashed, the adventurous education major wrote in her diary nearly daily, providing University Archives with a rare snapshot of student life during the Great Depression.

Amid her comments on the Maryland prom and crushes—“Oh boy— shrills + heart throbs”—and snide remarks—“John Lemonert played a clarinet; and talk about sour notes!”—the pages offered signs of simpler times: riding up College Avenue on the back of a Buick, exchanging frequent letters with family back home and seeing “all-in-colors” movies.

But not everything has changed. Nearly 90 years ago, Finzel wrote of familiar Terp topics like Homecoming, lacrosse games and sorority functions, and popping over to D.C. on the weekends.—AD

P H OTO BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

WINDOW INTO THE WORLD

From the sidewalk on Baltimore Avenue, photographer John T. Consoli gets a reflected view of Terps at Bagels ‘n’ Grinds working on their sticker-covered laptops.

SPRING 2019

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PAID

TERP MAGAZINE DIVISION OF UNIVERSITY RELATIONS COLLEGE PARK, MD 20742–8724

PERMIT NO. 10 COLLEGE PARK, MD

Change service requested

Pour yourself into acid-washed jeans. jeans Wear a T-shirt three sizes too big.

Get a perm. Or, better, a mullet.

Go retro ’80s and celebrate the 30th anniversary of the University of Maryland Alumni Association. Get throwback pricing on annual memberships for only $30, or join as a lifetime member and take 30% off the standard rate.

An offer this good only comes along every 30 years!

ALUMNI.UMD.EDU/30YEARSMEMBER

Join or renew by May 31 and receive an exclusive 30th anniversary pin!