FROM HAGERSTOWN TO

DEREK COSS ’18, BIOLOGY

HOMETOWN: Hagerstown, Maryland

Finding the Right Fit

For Derek, transferring to UMBC was a no-brainer. He’d attended Hagerstown Community College, where he’d studied in the STEM program. One of his mentors there, Dr. Kristen Lennon, recommended UMBC for the strength of its programs and the research opportunities it offered.

“When I came to UMBC, I felt attached to it from my first visit,” says Derek. “It was the campus, the people I talked to, and the program itself. And the focus on research was also important to me—[these were] faculty I wanted to do research with.”

Getting Connected on Campus

“The Transfer Student Network was a great resource,” says Derek. “Some of my first friends I met at Transfer Student Day.” Those friendships have lasted through the years, he adds. “I’m still in touch with them now,” he explains. “It surprised me because I always thought of those things as silly.”

Derek also made important connections within the Honors College, which helped ease his transition to UMBC. “[The Honors College] had transfer mentors,” Derek recalls, “I later became a transfer student leader working to help new transfer students.”

In the lab and in the field

Derek also joined Dr. Kevin Omland in his lab, where he was able to study Eastern Bluebird song. Derek is quick to note that the opportunity he had to work alongside his mentors in the lab helped him secure research publications and even put him on the path to graduate school.

Derek went on to pursue his master’s, with his research focused on behavior and sound in frogs. “I study multimodal signaling, which means [frogs] have visual and acoustic ways of communicating,” explains Derek.

That work has taken him from Maryland to Panama and back again, and it’s just the beginning.