A Note from the Director

A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR

I am delighted to share with you the 2020 Annual Report for the QUEST Honors Program at the University of Maryland. QUEST continues to bring together some of the brightest, hard-working, and team-oriented undergraduates from business, engineering, and science. As individuals, these students are remarkable. When put into cross-disciplinary teams, they do very cool things. When you look at the program as a community of students, alumni, staff, faculty, and corporate partners, I think you will agree that QUEST is unlike any other program at the University of Maryland or beyond.

In the pages that follow, we describe some of the amazing developments over the past year. While we don’t have space to detail every student and program success story, I think you will find that the examples we highlight in this Annual Report help tell a story of fearlessness and resilience. When the University of Maryland moved to an online teaching environment in March 2020, QUEST was in the middle of executing on one of our most successful semesters ever. We had 8 projects going in our capstone class, 10 entrepreneurs in Africa partnering on projects, 11 corporate partners engaged with our data science class, and 9 on-campus clients ready to launch their experiential learning projects. Those 38 concurrent experiential learning projects are a record for QUEST, and our students, staff, faculty, and corporate partners were able to successfully complete these engagements even though COVID-19 required us to move to an online environment. I am so proud of every member of our community who helped make this happen.

As you read this Annual Report, please consider how you would like to participate in QUEST. We continue to innovate in our curriculum and programs. We are always exploring new ways of learning and collaborating. Sometimes these innovations occur because of external events as they have for us in 2020. More often, these innovations occur because we as a program try to lead by example for our students. This means we are always looking to improve and bring in new perspectives.

Thank you for taking the time to read this Annual Report and for helping make QUEST a program unlike any other.

Sincerely,

Joseph P. Bailey