Unconventional Campuses Are 'The Future of Our County'

Shady Grove Site Offers Flexibility For Hard-Working Degree-Seekers

Amid hugs and boisterous greetings, the pioneering students at the unconventional campus known as the Universities at Shady Grove assembled at Education Building II last week to celebrate their college graduation.

Now and then someone shouted "over here" to students heading toward the other campus structure, Education Building I, and corralled them into line for pin-on red carnations, supplied by the school for the occasion.

"There are only two buildings, you know," accounting senior Ying Huang, 30, said to a guest as she and about 100 undergraduates surfed a buffet of tuna croissant sandwiches and tortellini salad. "That's what makes it nice."

Small classes and the chance to form friendships meant a lot to Huang, who left her native China to marry and settle in Gaithersburg and missed the feeling of fitting in. She found it at USG, where the typical class size is about 30 students and people working toward the same degrees take almost all their classes together. "Here, there's a community," said Huang, whose degree will come from the University of Maryland at College Park. "We feel very strongly a rapport."

Shady Grove, a Rockville neighborhood dominated for years by its hospital, Shady Grove Adventist, has blossomed into an academic and research center with satellite campuses of the University of Maryland and the Johns Hopkins University. Nestled in Montgomery's biotechnology corridor, the campuses attract more than 7,200 students, most of them part time, and offers more than 67 degrees and dozens of certificate programs.

The universities' Montgomery centers are the physical expression of goals outlined 20 years ago, when county and state leaders invited the University System of Maryland and Hopkins to build branches in Shady Grove. The county provided 300 acres for the schools and companies, and dubbed the project "Shady Grove Life Sciences Center," an effort to develop a partnership between the growing biotechnology industry and higher education.

Drawing on the strengths of the area's multicultural community and biotechnology corridor, the two universities opened in the late 1980s with one building apiece and went on to create two unique -- and very different -- campuses.

Offering degrees from seven of its institutions, the University of Maryland system developed the Universities at Shady Grove, beginning with part-time graduate courses in some of the colleges' most popular programs. A few years ago, officials began offering day courses for upper-level undergraduate students, attracting nearly 700 this year.

Hopkins, meanwhile, offers graduate degrees in four schools focusing on business, engineering, public health, education, and arts and sciences. A little more than 5,000 part-time students currently are enrolled.

And interest in the schools continues to grow. One evening last week, dozens of Hopkins faculty and staff members worked well past the advertised 7 p.m. closing time at an open house. Professors peered from their tables to see lines of prospective students of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, with wide-ranging interests to match, perusing graduate course listings in engineering, biotechnology, public health, computer science, education and other fields.

"We call this place a meeting of the minds," said Elaine Amir, director of the Shady Grove campus. "We have people coming here who have PhDs, who have law degrees, who are coming back to take courses in specialized programs."

Most students are full-time working professionals from area schools, government agencies and the biotech industry who want to stay on top of industry advances, she said.