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Three local high school students attending the University of Maryland’s men’s basketball matchup vs. Penn State thought they’d been selected to play a “find Testudo” game at midcourt.What they found instead is their future for the next four years: Kingsley Nwogu, Laura Civillico and Joseph Southall were each handed letters welcoming them to UMD’s Class of 2030. Laura and Joseph were also the first to discover they had been invited to College Park Scholars.

Students from Data Justice were among many College Park Scholars programs participating in the 2025 edition of Good Neighbor Day throughout the city of College Park and surrounding areas.

College Park Scholars celebrated the best and the brightest of its most recent Citation class at its annual Citation and Awards ceremony recently. The 2025 Citation class, already packed with leaders in their academic fields of study and on campus, emerged undaunted by the challenges as one of the last high school classes during the pandemic, as productive community members in Scholars and at the University of Maryland.

From knitting to music making, hobbies serve as entry points to explore AI, algorithms, programming, and more. Nearly a dozen one-credit, half a semester Maker Movement Approach to Computing (MMAC) classes at the University of Maryland use students’ personal interests as a low-stakes on-ramp to learn about technology.In the knitting class, you can find Felix Baum ’29, a computer science and linguistics double major in College Park Scholars’ Data Justice program.

With the announcement of the 2025 First Year Book as The Constitution of the United States, College Park Scholars set a course to make one of the nation's founding documents spring to life. What better way than a day trip to the place where the document was signed!Many of our Scholars had not visited the City of Brotherly Love before or were very young on their first trips to Philadelphia. Now armed with some understanding of the founding of the United States, they were eager to dig in.  "I have never been to Philadelphia before and I want to learn more about a city that is so important in American history," said JaeMin Thurman, a Life Sciences Scholar. "I also want to continue to build relationships with other Scholars students."

A collaboration between OCS and the Business, Society and Entrepreneurship (BSE) College Park Scholars Program and sponsored by the Enterprise Mobility Foundation, the Career Boutique was created by BSE students, who gathered clothing donations and purchased new items as part of their capstone project in the spring. BSE students and teaching assistants, like computer science and finance major McKendry, will also be staffing throughout the school year.Clinical Professor and BSE Director Oliver Schlake donated the Hugo Boss suit that got him through a doctoral dissertation, wedding and Smith interview, and encourages community members to contribute too.