High Hopes

Meghan “Meg” Colabella ’10, history, is about to do what few other athletes have done. She’ll be graduating within three years, all while playing on the basketball team, earning a 3.88 GPA (and writing a time-intensive capstone) and participating in a number of service projects.

Originally from Montclair, New Jersey, Colabella played basketball at an early age and up through high school. Recruited by UMBC, she chose the school not only because of the team but for UMBC’s strong academic stance on education. Although most of her time is taken up by basketball, she tries her hardest to engage in a number of activities.

“They key is not cutting anything but just prioritizing better,” she said. “I try hard not to procrastinate and really manage the important stuff.”

Prioritizing her studies in history helped Colabella earn recognition on America East’s five-member Scholar-Athlete team last season. This year, she’s working on a capstone paper with a cross-cultural look at the relationship between early France Jesuits and Native Americans. She hopes to continue these studies in graduate school at UMBC, where she will focus on China and the Middle East, all the while competing as a graduate student athlete in 2010-11.

“Meg has a great passion for both the game of basketball and her studies,” said Jessica Bernheim, assistant director of athletic communications. “She is always the first player on the court shooting around before each game, and when I see her around campus or even on road trips, she always has some sort of textbook or notebook with her. I know she has been working very hard to be able to graduate this May after just three years, and to be able to do that while also playing a sport with such a demanding schedule is extremely impressive.”

In addition to basketball and school work, Colabella is the basketball team’s representative to the Student-Athlete Advisory Council, and she’s in a number of honor societies, including the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Sigma Alpha Lambda and Phi Kappa Phi. She’s also on the president’s scholarship list. Service is equally important to her, and she’s done a number of projects including helping out at My Sister’s Place Women’s Center, Race for the Cure, school visits, clinics and “safe trick or treat” and the Children’s Home.

Baltimore seemed like the perfect place for Colabella in terms of her sport, academics and service learning.

“It’s not a terribly big place, but it’s not too small either so there are plenty of opportunities,” Colabella. “I’ve had nothing but good experiences with the people I’ve met, and I’ve made some of my best friends through UMBC.”

Colabella has high hopes for the women’s basketball team.

“Things are looking pretty good for next year. Most players from this year’s team will be back, with four new people on the roster. It’s going to be a good season.”

(3/12/10)

There has been growing concern that a professor at UMBC is doing more harm than good to academic integrity because of their fervent methods of enforcement. This professor requires all of their students to use the website Turnitin.com while schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have all denounced the practice. There have also been court cases which have ruled that the website violates intellectual property laws, but the professor will fail any student that decides not to turn their material in through the website.

Furthermore, current rumors suggest that students have been falsely accused of cheating and were failed without hesitation. From my personal experience and from the conversations I’ve had with students who have this professor, I do not doubt the possibility. How does everyone else feel about this?