Graduate Students

Thousands of Jewish college students -- including more than 200 from Maryland -- will head to Israel as 2000 dawns next month, for free.Their trips will be paid for by Birthright Israel, a philanthropic initiative geared to reconnecting an increasingly assimilated young Jewish population with its religious homeland. The program's ultimate goal -- to provide an "Israel experience" to every young Jew.The first wave of Birthright trips, offered to college and graduate students, has attracted a flurry of interest.

COLLEGE PARK -- Several thousand students, faculty and administrators at the University of Maryland, College Park rallied yesterday in protest of the racist, threatening letter sent to African-American student leaders, an incident that prompted members of the university community to question the level of tolerance on the campus.With his hand shaking, school President C. D. "Dan" Mote Jr. urged the crowd that spilled over the grassy Nyumburu Amphitheater behind the Stamp Student Union to "work together to stamp out this cancer on our community."

Peter Hughes and Barry Rice are clearly computer geeks, the types who talk about RAMs and ROMs and CPUs as if speaking a native language.Rice, an assistant professor of accounting at Loyola College, celebrates the arrival of technology in the classroom. "The lecturer in front of the class, the talking head, just won't cut it with the MTV generation," he says.But Hughes, a sophomore at St. John's College in An napolis, takes a different view: "It is so easy to get involved in all that, while the real problems of the world are being ignored, the problems of the soul."

Six Morgan State University graduate students displayed their ideas yesterday for enhancing the Waverly business district on Greenmount Avenue, site of a new "Main Street" effort.While their designs will not definitely be implemented, it was a chance to rethink the "self-image" and identity of the area centered at 33rd Street and Greenmount Avenue, said Frank Jannuzi, president of the Charles Village Community Benefits District. "I found so much that was attractive and provocative."Main Street is a national program that promotes more vibrant downtown areas.

SHANGHAI -- One of the more popular classes this semester at Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University isn't even in the course catalog.Students call it "the movie lecture," but a better title might be: "Sneak Previews with Sister Kathleen."Every Tuesday afternoon, as many as 100 eager Chinese students converge to hear Sister Kathleen Feeley, the 70-year-old former president of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, chat informally about movies that many of them have never seen.Never mind that Feeley wrote her dissertation on Flannery O'Connor and -- until recently -- saw only a couple of films a year.

Digging in the dirt and searching the woods for turtles sounds like child's play, not research. But six students at Towson University have a different view after taking part in a field study that could help them prepare for graduate school.The project -- a study of eastern box turtles headed by Donald Forester, a biology professor -- gives the students a chance to earn independent study credits while assisting researchers from the university and the Baltimore Zoo."It's great for undergraduates to be able to put field experience on their resume," said Forester.

Peter Lorenzi remembers when a blackboard and dusty nub of chalk where the only tools a teacher needed. Those days are quickly fading.When the dean of Loyola College's graduate school of business steps into his classroom these days, he can brush a small touch-screen panel with his finger and dim the lights, jolt the videocassette recorder to life, call up a Web page on a giant projection screen or cut to a television show.When Lorenzi lectures, he no longer has to turn around to read from the blackboard.

If you're short of financing your college education by as much as $10,000, someone is looking to help you.That would be Helen London, executive director of a private Baltimore agency that has announced it is expanding its last-resort, interest-free loan program.Since 1924, the Central Scholarship Bureau has lent more than ** $4.5 million to 5,000 Maryland college and graduate students. Now, it has liberalized its criteria and will award an additional $100,000 this year -- for a total of $360,000.

The University of Maryland, College Park is beefing up security, and worried women are walking with escorts after dark in the wake of two assaults and a rape reported on campus in the past week.Last night, about 80 students and staff turned out for a vigil in front of the student union to vent their anger over the incidents."All the women on campus are frightened," said Kristy Wright, a Student Government Association vice president."No one's walking alone," she said. "We never should have walked alone in the first place."

Most elementary schools offer instructions about how to check out library books. At Wellwood International School, it's explained in seven languages."We have so many families that don't speak English very well, and we wanted all of them to know how to borrow books," says Wellwood librarian Rebekah Kaufman.With students from 38 countries, such practices are commonplace at Wellwood.A third of its 500 children are foreign born. They speak at least a dozen languages. Almost one in five qualifies for extra help in learning to speak English.

Loyola will celebrate its official change from a "college" to a "university" Friday, a move designed to click with prospective students who want more than a cozy liberal arts experience. The "college" designation no longer fits Loyola, given its programs in engineering, business, computer science and speech language pathology, said President Brian F. Linnane. Though Loyola officials aren't seeking to change their institution's character, they're hoping the "university" tag will give high-schoolers a better idea of what it has to offer.

Confused about tuition costs or the terms of private education loans? Wish you knew the price of textbooks before signing up for a class? Well, you no longer will be in the dark. The Higher Education Act, recently renewed by Congress, is all about transparency. The updated act requires new disclosures on the cost of textbooks and tuition as well as the terms of private loans. These disclosures take aim at some of the problems afflicting higher education: Skyrocketing tuition. Soaring textbook prices.

Graduate-student leaders and labor activists squared off against university administrators yesterday over a bill before the General Assembly to grant teaching assistants and contractual faculty the right to form unions. The debate in a House of Delegates committee centered - as it has in other states - on the question of whether giving graduate-student employees the same collective bargaining rights as other state workers would undermine the educational relationship between professors and students.

High school seniors who want to go to a selective college next fall should already be making arrangements to take the tests they will need before they apply ahead of the deadlines for such schools, which are usually in January or February. One of the consequences of taking these tests is that if you do well, you may be deluged with literature from colleges and universities all across the country. Some students may feel flattered that Harvard, Yale or MIT seems to be dying to have them apply.

Applications are being accepted for the 2007 Baltimore City Mayoral Fellowship Program. The program, which will run from June 11 to Aug. 3, is open to students in their junior or senior year of college, and to graduate students and recent college graduates. Fellows, who are paid stipends, will be assigned to projects focusing on such areas as urban planning, public policy and municipal services. They will make presentations to the mayor and her Cabinet at the end of the program. The application deadline is March 1. Information or application: www.ci.

Michael likes to give hugs and can be something of a night owl. Jenny bowls and is always up for an outing. Becky delights in music and enjoys shrimp and diet Coke. They are clients whom McDaniel College graduate students Melanie Soper and Ila Bryant care for as part of a two-year program. The students earn a master's in human services management in special education, while gaining practical experience through a simultaneous live-in internship with three developmentally disabled clients.

The University of Baltimore will offer every freshman who enrolls in the fall of 2007 a one-year scholarship covering all out-of-pocket tuition and fee expenses - a bold move designed to attract students to its first freshman class in three decades. University officials hope that the one-time grant program will help publicize the downtown college's conversion from a school serving only junior and senior undergraduates - as well as graduate students - to one offering a full four-year undergraduate education.

Professors do take teaching seriously The cynical comments by the professors quoted in Alan Rosenthal's column "The dirty secret about professors" (Opinion * Commentary, Sept. 5) did a disservice to a profession many regard as a true calling. I suspect, however, that the "big-name" universities that employ them are partially to blame for their churlishness, because they have fostered a belief that being asked to teach first- and second-year undergraduates would be a humiliating demotion, rather than an opportunity to interact with an engaging and challenging student population.

The University of Maryland, College Park celebrated the 150th anniversary of its founding this month, with a mixture of satisfaction at significant improvement in its academic reputation and frustration at failing to move closer to its goal of joining the top 10 state universities in the country. College Park placed 18th among 162 public universities in U.S. News and World Report rankings published last summer. When the magazine created the ranking system eight years ago, the school ranked 30th.

FOR GRADUATE students, money habitually is in short supply. And by now, the pool of scholarships and grants to help ease that need for next school year largely is drained. According to FindTuition.com, a fee-based scholarship search engine, only about 20 percent of scholarships for graduate students carry deadlines through December. Still, several options exist, even this close to the start of the fall semester: First, if you're working and attending school simultaneously, see if your company offers tuition reimbursement or tuition assistance.