The other morning at breakfast, I told my son I could draw an infinite line on two sides of a single piece of paper. He, of course, scoffed. So, I found a scrap sheet, made a half twist of the paper, added a crucial piece of tape, and proceeded to blow his mind with his very first Möbius strip.

Now, am I equipped to explain why a Möbius strip works the way it works? I am not. But, did I open the door to a “whoa!” moment—and the possibility of him finding it out for himself? Absolutely.

Every day at UMBC, you’ll find plenty of “whoa” moments—occasions of curiosity and delight that challenge minds and broaden perspective—across the disciplines. And best of all, these moments can happen to anyone, anywhere, because we’re all about opening doors here.

One great example is quantum, a timely topic—and “the future of Maryland,” as our governor puts it. We have amazing alums harnessing this information to build secure communications and ultra-precise sensing, but they—like all of us—started out as curious students. They just needed to show up and have their minds blown!

An eye-opening moment at Artscape brought our cover-story subject Nema Robinson to UMBC in a roundabout way—now, she is poised to be the full-circle door-opener to a new generation of music students. And what could be more whoa-inducing than being able to build whatever you might dream up in a campus makerspace or to collectively flex your imagination with friends through long-term gaming communities?

I recently celebrated a pretty major milestone at UMBC—my 20-year work anniversary. And in that time, I have experienced a bunch of personal “whoa” moments, many of which I have had the honor of sharing right here. So many Retrievers have opened my eyes—and now, as my work at UMBC evolves, it’s my turn to open a door of my own.

I am happy to share that starting with this fall’s issue, managing editor Randianne Leyshon ’09 will be taking on the mantle of editor of UMBC Magazine. She is smart, kind, and curious, and I am so happy for her—and for all of you, who will benefit from her excellent editorial leadership going forward.

Thank you for sharing so much of yourselves with me over the years, dear Retrievers. I look forward to seeing you around campus!

Date: June 12, 2025

Time: 3:45 PM 

The Division of Information Technology is aware of a widespread outage with a major cloud service provider that is currently impacting access to a number of online services used by the campus community.

This is a global issue affecting many organizations and is not the result of an outage or issue with the university's internal IT systems.

Impacted services may include, but are not limited to:

• Google (including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and other G Suite applications)
• Box
• VitalSource
• Poll Everywhere

Users may experience slow loading times, errors, or be unable to access these services altogether. We understand the critical nature of these tools for teaching, learning, and administrative work and apologize for the disruption this external issue is causing.

Our team is closely monitoring the situation with the cloud provider. 

We appreciate your patience as the external provider works to resolve this major incident.