The University of Maryland, College Park, celebrated its eighth annual Maryland Day on Saturday, April 29, attracting 75,000 visitors to campus. The Smith School welcomed visitors on McKeldin Mall, with the day's most popular giveaway - a Smith School/Testudo beach ball. In Van Munching Hall, visitors were able to tour the state-of-the-art building and attend an undergraduate program information session.

Two current Robert H. Smith School of Business students and a recent alumnus were among the top winners of the sixth annual University of Maryland $50K Business Plan Competition that wrapped up Friday, April 7, 2006.

For the past 20 years, the Smith School has been honoring and rewarding outstanding faculty members, instructors and PhD students for their teaching excellence. The Smith School community submitted 124 nominations for 58 teachers for the 2005-06 Krowe/Legg Mason Teaching Awards and 10 emerged as winners. (see list below)

Robert Isaman '85, vice president, integration at UTC Fire & Security (UTCFS), a division of United Technologies Corporation, addressed a lively audience of Smith School graduates, family members, friends, and Smith faculty and administrators at the Smith School's winter commencement ceremony on Thursday, December 22. Nearly 350 candidates were eligible to attend the graduation ceremony, which was held at the Comcast Center: eight doctoral, 25 executive MBA, 100 MBA/MS, and 210 undergraduate business degrees were awarded.

The University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business is seeking nominations for the schools 2006 Smith Leadership and Excellence Awards. The annual awards, which pay tribute to business leaders and organizations that have made a significant and positive impact in the mid-Atlantic region, will be presented in four categories: Business Excellence, Leaders for the Digital Economy, Leadership Excellence, and Public Excellence.

For the past two years eSmith has been evolving into a comprehensive gateway that allows students, faculty, and staff to navigate through a network of public and private information, services, and business functions of the Smith School and the University of Maryland. The internal portal provides a secure infrastructure to present Web-based applications and information to the Smith community, focusing on tools for collaboration, research, and personal productivity.

For Dan Robillard, community has always been important. After working in the U.S. Navy for eight years, Robillard was looking for a community to call his own as he transitioned back to private life. And while pursuing an online MBA at the Smith School of Business, that’s exactly what he found. “There was this community of veterans that really helped each other out,” Robillard says. “It was an environment that I wanted to be a part of.”

As a systems engineer, math major, nuclear reactor operator and mother of two small children, there isn’t much that Kenyetta Barnes fears. Except, she laughs, quantitative subjects, like accounting and finance, despite her strong math background. “Accounting and math are completely different,” she says. “I always had this fear of those types of classes.”