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Every spring when incoming college freshmen are invited to join College Park Scholars, we receive questions from prospective students and parents, asking for clarification on various aspects of our program. Here, we’ve gathered the four most frequently asked questions (FAQs) to aid you in your college decision-making process. What is the value of a living–learning community? The benefit of a living–learning community is that you connect with other students on both a social and an academic level. In College Park Scholars, students live in the same residence hall and floor as other people in their programs, enabling built-in study and social groups and helping to foster community.

Everyone’s college decision process is different. Here are some examples of Scholars students who chose the University of Maryland (UMD) for distinctly different reasons. Mari Lemmie Hometown: Baltimore, Md. Year: Senior Major: Public policy Scholars program: Justice and Legal Thought

College Park Scholars means two years of learning across disciplines, considering complicated problems and making connections between the classroom and the rest of the world. As a capstone to that experience, we require sophomore Scholars to identify and complete a practicum project. In 2017, a sophomore in our Environment, Technology and Economy program developed a sustainability intervention as part of an internship. A Science, Technology and Society student researched basic income and workforce automation. A group of Public Leadership sophomores organized to start a local chapter of a national camp for children of cancer patients.

This blog post is the first in the "Choosing Scholars" series, which examines various aspects of College Park Scholars. When Erin McCormick was invited to College Park Scholars last year, she knew that she wanted to pick a program that would expand her world view and teach her something different. “I wanted to expose myself to subjects I wasn’t confident in in high school,” McCormick says. After reviewing the curricula for the 12 Scholars programs, she was drawn to the Science, Discovery and the Universe (SDU) program because she hadn’t yet had the opportunity to learn about astronomy.

Things I did not know in early January:

They say laughter is contagious. And yawns. And, of course, the flu. Most people figure they catch the flu by touching contaminated surfaces or being exposed to droplets from a sick person’s coughs or sneezes. But it turns out the flu may be even more contagious through the air than we had thought. University of Maryland Professor Don Milton and several other researchers just released new findings that the flu may actually be spread just by breathing. For students of College Park Scholars, the discovery underscores the unique opportunity they have to be involved in groundbreaking public health research.