MICUA

MICUA Matters

Spring 2010

McDaniel College and the Carroll County community share a proud heritage and together are forging a bright future. For 142 years the people of Carroll County and beyond have looked to and found at McDaniel an exceptional education, employment, culture and recreation, dedicated volunteers, and services to the community.

The College serves as a resource—a major contributor to the prosperity, growth, and quality of life among citizens of central Maryland and the greater Baltimore-D.C. region. Nearly 280 Carroll County students—16 percent of our undergraduate population—each receive grants of $2,000 a year toward their tuition through our Carroll County Student Grant Program, supported in part through gifts from area businesses and the Sellinger Program.

We are the sixth largest employer in the county, providing 450 full- and part-time jobs that don’t require a commute outside the county. Our professors, administrators, and staff volunteer and serve on many boards, from the hospital to the public library system to the economic development corporation.

Through our partnership with Maryland businesses and government agencies, our students have valuable on-the-job learning opportunities and internships. In turn, our interns make a difference wherever they are. Recently two Environmental Policy and Science majors volunteered to audit the county’s greenhouse-gas emissions, and a Social Work student has interned at the county’s Bureau of Aging.

McDaniel professors have incorporated service learning into their courses, sending teams of professors and students into the community to work as a class with area nonprofit organizations on everything from staffing cold-weather homeless shelters to calculating and filing income tax returns for low-income residents to designing and producing promotional and fundraising brochures. During the fall semester alone, these teams served nearly 3,000 hours in our greater community.

Our students—so typical of their Millennial generation—give generously of their time and energy to our local communities. In fact, McDaniel Greek organizations and affinity groups, clubs, and individuals logged more than 6,000 hours of community service during the fall semester. They have taught English to Spanish-speaking residents, befriended children and teens at the Boys and Girls Club, made casseroles for soup kitchens, plunged into the icy Chesapeake for Special Olympics, walked for breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, raised puppies to become service dogs, wrote letters for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, and built concrete houses for the poor in Guatemala. These are just a very few of our students’ many efforts to be good citizens not only of our town, county, and State, but of our planet as well.

The College enhances the quality of life of the community through a rich diversity of cultural, recreational, and learning opportunities. The Great Decisions speakers spark conversations and sometimes debate about U.S. foreign policy among the 100 or so Carroll Countians who participate in this eight-week program. Our lectures, concerts, art exhibits, and some theatre shows are free and open to the public.

I am proud of our students and their heartfelt generosity, and we are proud to be an integral part of the Carroll County and Maryland community.