Mary Carroll-Mason, mcmason@umd.edu, 301.405.7792
Committed to having global reach and societal impact, the University of Maryland Graduate School creates opportunities to enhance our students’ global education through such mechanisms as our participation in the graduate initiatives of Universitas 21 (U21).
The leading global network of research universities for the 21st century, U21 provides students, faculty, and staff at its member institutions with access to a wide range of events, special programs, and collaborative groups. The University of Maryland became a member of U21 in May 2013.
Among many opportunities for graduate students, U21 offers the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition and the annual Graduate Research Conference. Both initiatives provide students the opportunity to present their research before an international audience.
“The greatest opportunity for both graduate students and the Graduate School offered by membership in U21 is the opportunity to get to know and work with students and colleagues from many different countries and cultures,” says Valerie Woolston, Executive Director of International Initiatives at the Graduate School. “In this interconnected world, getting to know how others work and do research is an invaluable asset.”
In the 3MT competition, participants are judged on their ability to communicate the significance of their doctoral research to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes. U21 member institutions hold internal competitions to determine nominee for the international competition. Since joining U21 in 2013, University of Maryland representatives have done exceptionally well. In 2014, Amy Marquardt, from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, won both the Judge’s Choice and People’s Choice Awards, and, in 2015, Carly Muletz Wolz from the Biological Sciences graduate program won the People’s Choice Award.
University of Maryland graduate students have also been active in the Universitas 21 Graduate Research Conference. At this annual event, students from the member institutions present research related to the conference’s theme. At the 2015 conference, “The Digital Future,” held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, one of the University of Maryland’s three participants, Katie Kaczmarek, was selected by conference attendees to receive the Best Oral Presentation Award.
The Graduate School supports students who wish to take advantage of these opportunities by offering workshops on communications and writing, holding campus-level 3MT competitions, and providing additional editing and coaching assistance to the university’s nominees.