I’m attending a meeting at the University of Maryland. Some of its top bureaucrats reminded us that Maryland was ranked 18th in the world in social sciences and 15th in engineering. That’s pretty good for a school that gives bright Maryland kids a free ride through their honors program (they even pay for textbooks).
A bigger difference between U. Maryland and schools in Massachusetts is the connection to government. The campus is punctuated by U.S. military personnel in uniform. The meeting here is attended by ministers of telecom from diverse countries in Africa as well as officials from the U.S. Department of State and US AID. A U. Maryland graduate will learn about opportunities in government that would never occur to an undergraduate at a school outside of the Washington, D.C. area.
Warts: The Quality Inn, College Park (5 kbps Internet access); the post-9/11 security provisions that have rendered the College Park airport essentially useless.
More detail on the airport, please. I was planning on flying in there this summer. Do I just need to plan a little more, or do I need to leave the turban at home?
For the “DC-3” airports checkout the AOPA info.
http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/air_traffic/frz.html
Maybe if you start your planning now you could be done by summer!
UMD is also in one of the most crime-ridden counties in the country. See today’s Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/19/AR2007031901135.html
My son, a high school senior, was over there for an open house last week. It’s a somewhat bleak campus which sits adjacent to a stretch of strip malls and an IKEA on Route 1. The topic of safety was addressed — and the feeling is that college students aren’t perceived to be ideal targets for criminals — they often carry little cash, and sometimes little more than a cellphone and their textbooks. So far, the rampant violence in PG County hasn’t affected UMD all that much, but the presence of university police and cameras (flyer talks about this) may be a big deterrent as well.
PG County has its ups and downs, but you can metro their reasonably from just about anywhere in the DC area. Plus, PG is pretty big in the takes-a-while-to-traverse sense. It’s a long way from Oxon Hill to Bowie.
I grew up in Md. and got the state honors ride, and never even thought to go to College Park. For my podunk upbringing, it was the evil big city. I opted to go to suburban Baltimore, hated it, flunked out, rambled around and ended up going to school in Tucson. I love how it ended up, but I wonder sometime what would have happened if I had gone somewhere a little more intense and inspiring.