Announcing the winners of this year’s UH Week Trivia Challenge!
It’s House Eltanin Day! Wear something green or your House Eltanin t-shirt to show your UH pride.
Support the Campus Pantry by donating a non-perishable item at the UH Commons. Meet the Speaker of House Eltanin this afternoon (12:00-1:00pm, UH Commons) and win a chance to receive a UH blanket, UH crewneck, or other giveaway. Don’t forget to bring a donation for the Campus Pantry!
This afternoon, join us for the annual UH Course Fair (4:00-5:30pm, UH Commons)! This event invites faculty instructors of all UH courses to visit the Commons and discuss their courses and research with UH students. Want to know about Gen Ed requirements? Got a question about course readings or assignments? Want to know how a course will be graded? Consult the source at the UH Course Fair! Insomnia Cookies and free giveaways for all who attend. Join us!
And don’t forget to review the newest clusters and tracks announced earlier this week. The four new clusters will be available beginning in Fall 2024 through Spring 2026. Check out the details below!
It’s House Shaula Day! Wear something maroon or your House Shaula t-shirt to show your UH pride.
Support the Campus Pantry by donating a non-perishable item at the UH Commons. Meet the Speaker of House Shaula this afternoon (1:30-2:30pm, UH Commons) and win a chance to receive a UH blanket, UH crewneck, or other giveaway. Don’t forget to bring a donation for the Campus Pantry!
Don’t forget to review the newest clusters and tracks announced earlier this week. The four new clusters will be available beginning in Fall 2024 through Spring 2026. Check out the details below!
It’s House Denebola Day! Wear something purple or your House Altair t-shirt to show your UH pride.
Support the Campus Pantry by donating a non-perishable item at the UH Commons. Meet the Speaker of House Altair this afternoon (12:30-1:30pm, UH Commons) and win a chance to receive a UH blanket, UH crewneck, or other giveaway. Don’t forget to bring a donation for the Campus Pantry!
And don’t forget to review the newest clusters and tracks announced yesterday. The four new clusters will be available beginning in Fall 2024 through Spring 2026. See below for more information!
It’s House Denebola Day! Wear something blue or your House Denebola t-shirt to show your UH pride.
Support the Campus Pantry by donating a non-perishable to the UH Commons. Meet the Speaker of House Denebola this afternoon (1:00-2:00pm, UH Commons) and win a chance to receive a UH blanket, UH crewneck, or other giveaway. Don’t forget to bring a donation for the Campus Pantry!
Today UH is pleased to announce the newest clusters and tracks. The four new clusters will be available beginning in Fall 2024 through Spring 2026. See below for more information!
Finally, celebrate Valentine’s Day with Student Life Council! We invite you to make your own valentines for those special people in your life (4:00-6:00pm, UH Commons).
We conclude this year’s UH Week by celebrating all things UH! Wear something orange or any UH t-shirt today to show your UH pride.
Today is the last day to support the Campus Pantry. Non-perishable donations continue to be accepted in the Commons. Remember: the House that donates the most wins extra House Cup points!
If you haven’t picked up your UH Week custom merch, today is the day! UH blankets will be distributed in the Commons from 9:50am-12:00pm (or when supplies run out). Supplies are limited. Get yours today!
This afternoon, join us for Future Fair! Representatives from offices across campus will be in the Commons today just for you (3:00- 4:30pm, UH Commons). Joining us will be the Do Good Institute, National Scholarships Office, Education Abroad, Pre-Law Advising, Reed-Yorke Health Professions Advising Office, the Counseling Center, the Oral Communications Center, the Writing Center, Engineering Career Services, and the Career Center. Get your resume reviewed. Get a professional headshot. Join us at Future Fair! .
Finally, don’t forget to review the newest clusters and tracks announced earlier this week. The four new clusters will be available beginning in Fall 2024 through Spring 2026. Check out the details below!
How will we survive and thrive in an AI-dominated world? This cluster turns to science fiction’s intuitions for advance warning about the implications of AI, explores the way politics will manage deep fakes and algorithmic bias, and invites students to question whether intelligence needs to be biological to support human life.
How do our actions reverberate in an unpredictable world? The insight at the heart of the so-called “butterfly effect” is that decisions made in one place can produce unintended consequences felt far away. This cluster invites students to explore how small actions can have large impacts in our ever more inter-connected world.
If what we know grounds our perception of the natural world, how do we think our way to the world we hope to live in? This cluster interrogates how science both expands and limits what we can imagine, and how imagining has long fed the scientific pursuits that show us the futures we want.
Populations, organizations, and the environment are all under surveillance. Surveillance, in turn, shapes identities, social categories, and environmental policy. This cluster take up the potential costs of surveillance in terms of the individual, social inequalities, and ethical dilemmas within systems of surveillance themselves.
Hosted by Exeter College, Maryland Honors in Oxford is a six-week summer study abroad program bearing UMD and UH credit. The aim of this opportunity is to challenge and inspire UH students through engagement with Oxford’s world-class reputation for academic excellence. Students will participate in Oxford’s distinctive model of undergraduate education with a talented and diverse cohort of students from around the world.
Another new theory & practice track beginning in 2024 will be announced very soon. Stay tuned!
What are the fundamental rights and responsibilities of choosing to live in community with other humans? How do human communities collaborate to solve shared problems, and what are the consequences when they fail to do so? Looking to examples across time and around the globe, this cluster considers how communities have adapted to natural, industrial, and economic changes. The courses in this cluster identify examples of community resilience in the face of wars, plagues, and other unrest, as well as occasions when communities have ignored challenges, avoided responsibility, and scapegoated others. Together they seek to understand how to maximize civil bonds and minimize destructive habits of individualism.
What is health in an unhealthy world? What is the role of restorative justice in individual and collective well-being? Social inequalities including race, class and gender fundamentally shape physical and mental health outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the existing health disparities in the United States and globally. This cluster takes up these systemic challenges to health and well-being, from social inequality and access, to social justice and the racism that persists in our medical institutions. Drawing on expertise from sociology, counseling psychology, family law, and performance studies, the courses in this cluster help students grapple with global debates around reproduction, mental health, coping with sexual violence, medical ethics, and the specific health needs of college students.
As we chart innovative pathways to the future, does the past matter? And what are our present obligations to it? The idea of “heritage” is a bundle of contrasts and contradictions. It is as much about the present and future as it is about the past. What we think of as our collective heritage is invested with intensely personal and emotional connection, while also being highly managed by authorities and governments, and disciplined within legal and economic regimes. This cluster interrogates the ways in which we fashion, forsake, and mobilize our histories. Courses explore the way material, natural, and cultural heritage celebrates past traditions, reckons with historical injustices and atrocities, and helps us chart our future.
How do entities of all kinds—from people and processes to artifacts and ideas—achieve their full potential? How is this development affected by their environments? And what are the enduring effects of early exposure on development? From patterns of emergence that are common across species and transitions in behavior that happen over millennia, to the ways that identity is remade through migration and the lifelong effects of early poverty, the behaviors of complex organisms are shaped by social needs and community concerns. This cluster examines the mechanisms and conditions of natural growth patterns to explore the many ways these metamorphoses are enabled—and imperiled—by the forces around them.
Tempests, wildfires, melting glaciers, and rising oceans speak to the increasing vulnerability of our planet and its systems due to climate change. The United Nations calls this predicament a race we must win. But what kind of race is climate change and what form should our political and moral responses take? Is it more similar to smallpox and the coronavirus or to a looming catastrophic asteroid strike? How do we weigh our actions against our impact on nonhuman animals and biodiversity? We can be sure that changes in Congress will impact how we orient to these issues as a nation in the coming years. But what role can advocacy play in the form Federal policy takes? In this track, students will acquire the knowledge they need to evaluate crisis response and the advocacy skills they need to be part of the solution.
Cities are living monuments. They express the past, localize the present, and herald the future. Yet, more often than not, we move through them without paying attention to their material reality or how that materiality and our identities interconnect. This track invites students to take in the capital in their backyard, Washington, D.C., as a designer and as a critic. Who decides what a city looks like? How does architecture shape the lives lived in it? How do the needs and dreams that people bring to it alter a city’s personality as well as its façade? In these courses, you will walk about, listen to, draw, and even reimagine the structures that support everyday civic life in the District. Seeking out unbuilt areas and learning what it means to benefit or suffer from cityscape design, you will consider the hopes and dreams of D.C. past and present. Join this track to explore the built environments we inhabit, and how they inhabit us.
University Honors partners with the Federal Fellows, Global Fellows, and Maryland Fellows programs to offer a range of sequential theory and practice track opportunities. These tracks pair a fall-semester theory course, taught by expert practitioners and leaders in their field, with a spring-semester internship in the DC-area. Students benefit from professional development workshops and one-on-one advising throughout the year. Through the Fellows program, University Honors students have engaged in internships in the White House, Federal agencies, congressional offices, the Maryland General Assembly, non-governmental organizations, non-profits, foreign embassies, think tanks, and more.
Global financial crises, increasing social divides worldwide, and deepening mistrust between business and government require a holistic multi-stakeholder approach that builds bridges among various research fields. This track explores the intersection of financial markets, politics, and the recent confluence of new technological, environmental, and geopolitical developments that has fundamentally altered the global operating environment. Its companion courses will help students grapple with fundamental questions of globalization. What are the social, political, cultural and economic impacts of globalization? Where are the fault lines in the financial world that could precipitate another crisis, and possible realignments, in the global monetary order?
A central role of government is to protect its citizens from threats at home and abroad, but an enduring challenge is how to do so given the legal and moral constraints, as well as the practical limitations on the government’s powers. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has sought to protect the nation from terrorism with extremely mixed results; in some cases, arguably stretching the bounds of its power. This track invites students to imagine themselves as decision-makers in government, seeking to protect the nation while grappling with the consequences of their choices. How have methods of protecting the nation succeeded and failed? Has the U.S. government overstepped its legal and moral limits in doing so? To what lengths are we willing to go to secure democracy—and who decides?
Institutions by their very nature are built to sustain their processes over time. Many of the ways we do things in government and higher education, for example, have evolved slowly over centuries. Recognizing untapped potential in a stable organizational structure requires insight. Identifying solutions requires ingenuity. In this track, students focus on the University of Maryland’s own institutional processes, identify challenges, and propose innovative solutions for improvement. After a semester of developing their theoretical understanding and honing their practical skills, students devote a semester to working in partnership with University leadership to effect real change on our campus.