This past summer, professors from all disciplines at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County encouraged their students conducting research on campus to submit to UMBC’s go-to print journal for undergraduate research, the UMBC Review. 

The UMBC Review, currently working on its 21st edition, is “a peer-reviewed publication, completely directed by UMBC undergraduate students,” according to the UMBC website.

“[It] gives students the opportunity to publish their research,” said Dr. April Householder, Director of Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships. “Every aspect from learning how to do research and finding those opportunities at the beginning of the process, through presenting, through funding, and the culmination of all of that is that they’re ready to publish something in a journal like this.” 

Householder believes that writing for the Review can be helpful in several ways. It gives students a resume boost, and even if their work does not make it into the Review, they can get feedback on their writing. “That is something that they might not normally get in a classroom setting,” she said. 

Householder described the rigorous process of writing for the Review in different steps, starting with “the student [editors] reviewing and giving writing feedback if they think it would be a good fit for the journal.”

“The next step is the [editors] are responsible for finding off-campus reviewers,” she said. “The student editor may find a professor at another university and get the off-campus reviewer to review [the paper]. In that way, the reviewer has no connection to UMBC so they’ll look at it based on the merits of the writing, and that’s why we call the process rigorous.”

The new science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) editor for the Review, senior biology major Kristina Atanasoff, is excited for the new edition. Other sections include arts and culture and humanities. “We work with all kinds of students with different majors. I’ve read chemistry papers, mechanical engineering papers and statistics and economics papers,” Atanasoff said. “There are all kinds of subjects.”

Atanasoff thinks that the UMBC Review is important because there are very few other universities that have similar publications.“There are some [papers] that I think are really cool and exciting. The excitement is kind of amplified by the fact that it’s undergrads like me at UMBC doing this,” she said. 

 “I think the Review and being published is a really cool and unique thing about UMBC,” she said.  “I really like the emphasis our university places on undergrad research and encouraging that.”