Student Success

Highlights from the 2025 State of the University

lblouin — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:41:50 +0000

Highlights from the 2025 State of the University lblouin Mon, 02/03/2025 - 12:41

Chancellor Domenico Grasso hosted his annual State of the University address last Thursday before a standing-room-only audience of more than 250. Grasso shared the university’s progress toward key milestones, as well as some concerns and challenges, before handing the mic over to the offices of the Provost, Institutional Advancement and Facilities Operations, as well as several ��-Dearborn students, to discuss new initiatives and their impact, along with some future plans. Key takeaways from the event are below.

More students are crossing the finish line to graduation.

Several key metrics in the GOBLUEprint for Success — the university’s strategic plan — are well on track. The four-year graduation rate has climbed from 22% in 2018 to 38% in 2024. “That's a 16% increase. That is truly incredible,” Grasso noted. “Many factors have led to this success in graduation rate: our students’ determination, our professors’ skill and mentoring, our campus resources and a community that is dedicated to seeing students across the finish line.”

The transition to a need-based financial aid model means that 94% of ��-Dearborn undergraduate FTIAC students now receive enough aid that their remaining obligations are less than $2,000 a year. And half of classes on campus now include a practice-based learning component. “This approach provides distinctive and creative opportunities for our students to prepare for the next phase of their careers,” Grasso observed. “I commend the faculty who design these courses and the department chairs and deans who support them.”

Faculty continue to excel: In the past two years, faculty and staff annual citations in publications have grown from 13,500 to over 22,000, and ��-Dearborn faculty experts appeared in 119 major local and national media outlets in 2024. Research awards continue to climb as well. While the university aimed for $9.8 million in research support in FY2024, that number actually reached nearly $12 million. Awarded and recommended funding for the first six months of FY25 now exceeds $14 million.

Grasso celebrated last year’s launch of the Office of Holistic Excellence, noting that the office was supporting several storytelling initiatives as a means of building empathy and a sense of inclusion across campus, as recently discussed in Insight into Diversity magazine. He noted that the campus community will see a new set of KPIs related to belonging and inclusion. The latest GOBLUEprint for Success KPI report was emailed to campus following the event.

Overall enrollment is encouraging, but there is still work to do.

Grasso was candid about the fact that the university’s highest hurdle — one shared by nearly every college and university in the state and many across the country — is enrollment. "There are simply fewer college age students today than a decade ago, especially here in Michigan, but there are still growing opportunities,” he said. “We currently enroll 8,100 students, and have challenged ourselves to enroll 10,000 by 2032. We have experienced modest increases in undergraduate students, which is encouraging. More students should experience everything we have to offer here at ��-Dearborn.”

Grasso shared two concerns about graduate enrollment: first, it has declined, and second, the new presidential administration could severely limit the ability of prospective international students to enter the U.S. “The encouraging news is that the Institute of International Education believes enough members of Congress appreciate what international students contribute to our communities and economy,” Grasso observed. “Our university, too, will continue to advocate for this important community.”

He added that he is meeting with executive officers across all three campuses daily to monitor changes in federal policies, and that the university is regularly posting information on federal orders, policies and regulations on the Key Issues section of the ��-Dearborn website. He urged faculty, staff and students to visit this page for the latest information pertaining specifically to the Dearborn campus.

Grasso also addressed enrollment concerns in the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters and the resulting need to collaboratively reimagine the college’s future. “Together, let’s focus on creative and lasting solutions,” he said. “I would love nothing more than for the University of Michigan-Dearborn to create novel approaches for increasing the attractiveness of the arts and humanities that could serve as models for higher education.”

Fundraising is essential to maintaining the mission.

Grasso then passed the mic to Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement Casandra Ulbrich, who shared details about the university’s recently launched five-year “Look to Michigan” fundraising campaign. After announcing the campaign goal of $60 million, she shared short videos from three donors who choose to support ��-Dearborn in diverse ways: Mark Ritz and L. Lee Gorman have made a multi-year gift of $500,000 to install solar panels on the roof of the England Engineering Lab Building; Sadaf Lodhi and Riz Hussain have directed stock to the Student Opportunity and Engagement Fund; and Altair’s corporate contribution created the Altair #OnlyForward Scholarship Fund in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Ulbrich then spoke with two #OnlyForward scholarship recipients, CECS juniors Rehab Jadalla and Jide Owo, about the impact of the award. “Receiving the scholarship, to me, it means that, instead of spending time taking on additional jobs and taking on work to try to make ends meet for each semester, I have the space to take on the opportunities that I'm passionate about and are related to my ultimate career goals,” Jadalla, who is studying software engineering, said.

CECS juniors Rehab Jadalla (right) and Jide Owo (middle) spoke to the crowd about the impact of the #OnlyForward scholarship, sponsored by Altair Engineering.

“I also grew up in Dearborn, so I'm really, really proud to be attending this university," she added. "Just the culture of how encouraging and supportive the faculty and staff here are and the other students, and also the opportunities that I've had over the past three years, I don't think I would find at any other university."

Student success initiatives are having a big impact.

Associate Provosts Maureen Linker and Joan Remski discussed several initiatives led by Experience+ and the Office of Academic Success, all of which are seeing impressive results. These include the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, the Wolverine Mentor Collective, a new peer-to-peer tutoring program that enables students to get help with their studies 24/7 and the STEM Scholars program, which supports STEM majors from low-income backgrounds throughout their time at ��-Dearborn and boasts a 98% retention rate. Two STEM Scholars, Myriam Hazime and Zahra Alemarah, joined Remski on stage to reflect on their experiences. “I was always provided with a very strong support group that I felt like other students outside of STEM scholars didn't have,” Hazime, a CECS sophomore majoring in software engineering, told the audience.

Alemarah, a CASL junior majoring in biochemistry, echoed her sentiments: “Something that's really important, especially at ��-Dearborn as a commuter campus, is building a relationship your first year, your freshman year. Through STEM Scholars, I had so many different friends, and it was very crucial to keep me going to study when it feels impossible, to ask for help when I need it.”

Great spaces encourage students to stay.

Executive Director for Facilities Carol Glick closed out the event with a quick check-in on the Comprehensive Campus Plan, an overview of the design process, and a look at five priority projects, all in different phases: the Computer and Information Science Building (investigation phase), Mardigian Library (conceptual design), Social Sciences Building renovations for the College of Business (schematic design), Administrative Building renovations to support the move of the College of Education, Health and Human Services (design development) and the Renick University Center first floor, which is currently wrapping up construction. Glick shared a few “before and after” renderings and photos, revealing a significantly transformed space complete with a fireplace where students won’t just pass through, but will want to hang out for hours. After the event, many attendees took advantage of tours led by the facilities team and the University Unions and Events office to see the changes in real life.

Executive Director for Facilities Carol Glick gave an update on the Comprehensive Campus Plan.

Concluding the event, which took place on a nearly 40-degree day, Grasso invited attendees to stick around for the Winter Carnival. “We actually have winter this year,” he’d noted earlier in his address. “Sort of.”

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Story by Kristin Palm. Photos by Annie Barker. Watch the recording of the event here.

Administration & Governance

Institutional Advancement

Off

Mon, 02/03/2025 - 17:40

Chancellor Grasso’s annual address covered enrollment good news and challenges, major research wins, promising student success initiatives and more.

Chancellor Domenico Grasso speaks to a crowd of more than 250 at the 2025 State of the University event.

‘Students from around the world thrive here’

stuxbury — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:40:51 +0000

‘Students from around the world thrive here’ stuxbury Mon, 01/27/2025 - 08:40

College of Business graduate student Mohamed Almajed's long-time dream was to study in the United States. He heard stories from his father, Bader, about how the experience changed his life.

“My father studied computer science in the U.S.in the 1980s and told me how it helped him make life-long connections and become a more independent person. He was very successful,” Almajed says. “Hearing him talk about life in the United States, I’ve wanted to study here since I was a child.”

For the past 10 years, the 28-year-old finance professional from Bahrain — Almajed works in Bahrain’s Ministry of Finance and National Economy, where he’s issued loans on the international and domestic side — looked for opportunities. Last year, he found one. Almajed applied and was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to study at ��-Dearborn in the College of Business’ Master in Finance program. He moved to Dearborn and started his classes in the fall.

“Out of the 100 applicants in my country, I was selected. I feel so lucky to have this opportunity to study at ��-Dearborn. My courses have been challenging, but they are led by professors who treat you well and give you the information needed to be successful. I expected my classes to be challenging, but what I didn’t prepare for is how cold it would be. How do people do it?,” asks Almajed, noting that Bahrain's coldest month of the year, January, averages 65 degrees. “You wake up to all this ice and snow on your car. It is beautiful, but it has taken some getting used to.”

Almajed is one of the Fulbright Scholars studying at ��-Dearborn this semester. Office of International Education Assistant Director Emlly Wang says, in the past, the university typically had one or two international Fulbright students at a time — but this academic year there are four. In addition to Bahrain, current Fulbright Scholars are from Cambodia, Kenya and Panama. They all started in the fall and will be on campus until they complete their degree programs. Reporter will be sharing these students’ stories in the next three Tuesday editions.

Fulbright applicants hoping to study in the U.S. list their top university choices, with the Fulbright organization matching them based on academic fit.

“We are becoming more noticed as a destination for Fulbright Scholars to study,” Wang says. “I attribute this to ��-Dearborn’s diverse community, our growing graduate programs and the faculty research happening here. It makes the university attractive for students to list us as a top choice.”

With budget being a major consideration for Fulbright university applicants, she adds that the affordability of the region, along with ��-Dearborn’s tuition costs and scholarship packages, make it attainable. According to a January 2025 Apartments.com comparison, the cost of rent in Dearborn is 21% lower than the national average.

“Students from around the world thrive here,” Wang says. “We at ��-Dearborn believe in providing opportunities for all students. As a community, we ensure that we can make a difference in people's lives here and around the world.” She says faculty and staff from across the university look for ways to make Fulbright students feel at home in a new country. For example, members of the ��-Dearborn community typically help students find furniture and transportation, along with helping them navigate grocery stores and find events to attend like the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

Almajed says he’s felt this hospitality, especially in the classroom. Even with the rigor of his graduate-level finance courses, he says his professors — especially COB faculty Vivek Singh, Mercedes Miranda and Zhixin (Jason) Liu — are very supportive and welcoming.

“In addition to my professors being experts in the fields, they are also very patient and understanding. They also have lived and studied in other countries before coming to the U.S. They understand what it is like to move somewhere new that’s away from your family to build a life,” he says. “Their kindness helped make the transition easier.”

With the first semester in the books, Almajed says he did well in his classes and passed the Bloomberg Market Concepts Certification through his course with Singh. Almajed looks forward to branching out beyond studies for the winter semester and plans to find a finance internship for the summer and take a trip to Chicago in the spring.

Almajed says his experience has been personally fulfilling and he expects it to help him professionally too. He believes understanding finance from a U.S. perspective and learning how other countries handle debt will help him as the Bahrain Ministry of Finance’s head of domestic issuance, as his home country is currently looking at ways to curb inflation.

“I plan to build relationships and gain knowledge that I will take back with me to Bahrain. I want to help build connections between these two homes of mine, just like my father did. I wish I could live this moment with him. My father passed in 2013 when I was 16 years old,” Almajed says. “But he's always with me because he continues to guide me. I know he’s seeing all the things I am accomplishing. I hope he’s proud.”

Not only is this experience beneficial to Fulbright students like Almajed — it also brings another layer of international experience at the university. For example, Wang says, a ��-Dearborn undergraduate student recently spoke with Almajed about what it’s like to live in Bahrain. The student has family history in Bahrain and wants to teach there, but has not traveled internationally.

“For our ��-Dearborn students who haven’t had the opportunity to travel yet, these students open windows into what life is like somewhere else. The Fulbright program fosters mutual understanding between nations and advances knowledge across communities. The world would have fewer conflicts with more understanding among nations and people if we had more exchanges like this,” Wang says. “The Fulbright program gives us an opportunity to live and learn with people from different cultures so we can all become a part of a wider global network.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

COB Graduate Programs

Off

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 13:40

��-Dearborn hosts Fulbright Scholars from Bahrain, Cambodia, Kenya and Panama this academic year. Meet Mohamed Almajed, a finance professional from Bahrain who’s studying in the College of Business.

Fulbright student Mohamed Almajed, pictured in Fairlane Center South's Bloomberg Finance Lab, is a COB student in the Master of Finance program. Photo by Annie Barker

Career Services is trying new ways to connect with students

lblouin — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:55:58 +0000

Career Services is trying new ways to connect with students lblouin Mon, 01/06/2025 - 08:55

Laurel Draudt says it wasn’t that long ago that college career services offices were known for resume review services and not a whole lot else. At some institutions, this “model from the 1990s” is still the norm. But when Draudt started as ��-Dearborn’s Career Services director in 2022, she was excited to experiment with a broader vision for their five-person office. Borrowing from her background in higher education professional development, Draudt saw an opportunity to recast Career Services as something students used throughout their academic careers — not just in the final few months before graduation when the pressure of a job search suddenly becomes real. “We’re really trying to get students to think about what they can be doing now to be more competitive later,” Draudt says. “We want to be having conversations with first- and second-year students about the benefits of an on-campus job or doing research or studying abroad, because if we can reach them early enough, they actually have time to make changes and do these things.”

So far, that new approach is manifesting itself in a few different ways. Draudt says the office recently added two new career coaches to bolster the office’s core service of by-appointment and walk-in career counseling sessions. And what career coaches are focusing on in those sessions with students is expanding a lot. They still give their fair share of feedback on resumes and cover letters when that’s what students need help with. But coaches are just as likely to be talking with students about programs and careers that might match their interests, how to find a not-for-credit internship (and how to sound professional when you send your inquiries), figuring out how to talk effectively about past job experiences even if they’re unrelated to a career field, or how to develop a tailored job search strategy so they’re not simply applying to hundreds of jobs and hoping for the best.

Draudt says they’ve also been investing a lot of energy into expanding their lineup of in-person and virtual workshops. Looking to go beyond the staples, like sessions on effective job interviewing, they’ve added workshops on other equally practical topics, like understanding benefits packages (which involved a collaboration with ��-Dearborn’s Human Resources office), confident communication, and how to manage stress and anxiety during a job search. The latter two workshop ideas came from the office’s newest member — Career Coach Zainab Radi, a former career peer in the office who recently graduated from ��-Dearborn and took a staff position in the office in October 2023. Radi says being so fresh out of college and having just been through her own job search have turned out to be big assets when coming up with workshop ideas that students might actually find useful. For the confident communication session, she hit up one of her former instructors, COB Lecturer Christine Fischer, who covered everything from strategies for emailing to pitching your ideas to a supervisor to making presentations. The workshop on stress and anxiety grew directly out of conversations she was having with students. “I noticed that with the current job market, and even everything going on politically, students were experiencing a lot of uncertainty and there was a lot of stress and negative energy around that,” Radi says. “Some students who were struggling in their job searches were even having panic attacks. Not being trained in mental health or counseling, I wanted to find a way to provide meaningful support.” So she reached out to her contacts at Counseling and Psychological Services, who put together a workshop on how to manage anxiety during a job search. Radi says it was really eye opening for the attendees, many of whom had never experienced anxiety until this stage of their lives. “I remember they were really surprised by the idea of taking a walk or just getting outside and enjoying nature,” Radi says. “But that can really help you destress. You have to do other things than be on your computer all day applying for jobs, hitting refresh to check and see if you got an email back from an employer. That can just make things worse.”

Career Coach Zainab Radi, a '23 alum and the newest member of the Career Services team, has been responsible for several new workshop ideas.

Both Draudt and Radi say they’re excited to try out more new ideas in 2025, including some new workshops. Radi says a session on financial literacy and how to manage your income boost post-graduation is one topic she’s been thinking about. And Draudt says they’re going to be making more of an effort to collaborate with people and offices that are already regularly interfacing with students. “There’s so much competition for student attention these days, we think it’s a good idea to reach students where they are, because the reality is many of them still might not be thinking they need career services until it’s time for their job search.” Draudt says linking up with faculty, many of whom are already providing a lot of informal career advice, and tailoring more programs and events to specific communities, like international students, are two big priorities for the new year.

Of course, one of the biggest changes for 2025 is that Career Services will be getting a new home. Right now, the office is tucked over in Fairlane Center, but around Spring Break, the staff will be packing up and moving to their new digs on the first floor of the Renick University Center. Draudt is hopeful the convenient location at the heart of campus will help students see that Career Services is something they can be taking advantage of at any point in their college journeys.

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Want to keep an eye on upcoming Career Services workshops? Check out the office’s VictorsLink page. Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Careers or Internships

Experiential Learning

Off

Mon, 01/06/2025 - 13:45

New workshops on topics like managing anxiety during a job search, understanding benefits packages and confident speaking are part of an effort to impact students long before their senior-year job searches.

The Career Services team, from left: Career Coach and Professional Development Manager Devin Johannis, Assistant Director Mai Qazzaz, Career Coach Zainab Radi, Director Laurel Draudt and Senior Professional Development Program Jennifer Macleod.

Class of Fall 2024: College of Business graduate Lamyah Burhani

stuxbury — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:29:14 +0000

Class of Fall 2024: College of Business graduate Lamyah Burhani stuxbury Wed, 12/18/2024 - 05:29

Lamyah Burhani remembers coming to ��-Dearborn as a high school student and mentally making notes of the campus environment, the welcoming feeling she experienced and knowing she wanted to say yes to as many opportunities as possible.

Three and a half years later — yes, she graduated in less than four — Burhani has completed four internships, traveled out of state for an Alpha Kappa Psi conference as the ��-Dearborn chapter president, studied in Italy through the university’s Study Abroad program and more. She says these experiences helped grow her confidence.

“I chose ��-Dearborn because, as cheesy as this sounds, it felt home-y. It could also give me the education I wanted and was the best financial decision. What I didn’t realize is how much the past few years would bring me out of my shell and help me learn how to be secure in myself and my abilities and to speak up,” says Burhani, a Canton resident double majoring in marketing and supply chain management. “Being at ��-Dearborn has helped me become a leader.”

She joined Alpha Kappa Psi her first year, after attending the university’s Winter Involvement Fair. When she became president at the end of that year, Burhani transitioned the business fraternity back to in-person activities following the pandemic. She reorganized the student organization’s space in Fairlane Center North and looked for ways to create community. She planned fun and career-focused events on campus while promoting business development opportunities, which included the AKPsi Elevate Conference in Chicago.

Burhani says not only did her time in the fraternity and exploring resources help her meet new friends, these activities also connected her to ��-Dearborn leaders who had expertise in career development. Of particular note, Burhani mentions ��-Dearborn’s career fairs and resume workshops, as well as the COB course Business Administration 300, taught by Business Administration Lecturer Rita Agius, which introduces students to career-securing strategies. Agius is also the senior internship program manager in COB’s Business Career Center.

“I was so impressed that there was a course that focused on all things career development. We talked about resumes, job searches, marketing ourselves, writing professionally and anything you can think of that will make you a stronger candidate. It definitely enhanced my professional growth,” Burhani says. “The career training and network you can get at ��-Dearborn is really incredible.”

Burhani, who plans to focus on the supply chain management side of her degree and is currently weighing her available opportunities, says the Business Career Center helped her find three of her four internships. She completed two supply chain management internships, at Detroit Manufacturing Systems and Tenneco, as well as a marketing internship at The Mushroom Angel Company, located in Detroit’s Eastern Market. “I started going to ��-Dearborn career fairs as a freshman. At the time, I went just to go. I didn’t know if it would help me or not. It did. I want to encourage students, even during their first year, to go. And then keep going,” she says. “You build relationships year after year. You learn about the companies, meet the representatives and make connections. Then you can decide what you want to work toward.”

Burhani says she did not originally intend to major in supply chain management, but Operations Management Lecturer Laura Birou noticed her talent and encouraged her to consider it as a career path. Not only does the supply chain field have a double-digit projection for growth — the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment of supply chain management professionals will grow by 30% from 2020 to 2030 — Burhani also finds it highly intriguing.

“I came to college planning to have a career in marketing. I love marketing and will apply the skills I gained in my marketing classes to my career, but I learned that I have a talent for numbers, organizing and attention to detail that I didn’t realize,” Burhani says. “Knowing that I had a part in getting something in the right quantity where it needs to be on time is something I find fulfilling.” In addition to the automotive field, Burhani is interested in working in healthcare, where many of the supplies are potentially life-saving.

Reflecting on the past three-plus years, Burhani says her time in college also gave her an opportunity to travel to Italy through the International Summer Program in Management at the University of Padua. During the five-week program, she took business classes at the University of Padua with Italian students, while also traveling the country. She saw the Colosseum in Rome, rode in a gondola in Venice and saw Michelangelo’s David in Florence. “I’ve never lived away from home before. I got to do that, meet friends from Italy that I still talk with, and do things I only thought I’d be able to see in books or social media,” she says. “I also saw how the world is much bigger than just me or what’s happening right now. I knew that, but to see it through so many layers of history was humbling.”

Nearing the end of her ��-Dearborn undergraduate experience, Burhani says the welcoming, home-y feeling never left. Sitting in her favorite chair in Fairlane's student organization space recently while taking it all in, Burhani says she’s ready for what’s next.

“��-Dearborn is such a special place. The people here want you to go out into the world and succeed, but they also encourage you to leave a legacy here,” she reflects. “Thanks to the people I’ve met and the things I was able to accomplish while at ��-Dearborn, I know I’ll be able to do both.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Commencement

Student Success

College of Business

COB Student Organizations

Off

Wed, 12/18/2024 - 10:27

Graduating in under four years, the supply chain management and marketing double major says ��-Dearborn helped her gain job experience, an international perspective, leadership skills and memories that will last a lifetime.

Portrait of COB graduate Lamyah Burhani. Photo by Jansen Sangala

Class of Fall 2024: CECS graduate Dania Ammar

lblouin — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:46:13 +0000

Class of Fall 2024: CECS graduate Dania Ammar lblouin Mon, 12/16/2024 - 11:46

When Dania Ammar moved with her family from Beirut to southeast Michigan in 2017, her plan was to build on her civil engineering background and start the master’s in construction management program at ��-Ann Arbor. But some family circumstances led to her deferring her enrollment. As it happened, during the unexpected semester off, she reconnected with a friend from Lebanon who was studying mechanical engineering on the Dearborn campus. He had a lot of good things to say about the college, particularly how the research enterprise was growing quickly, giving graduate students a lot of opportunities. It was enough to pique Ammar’s interest. She got on the ��-Dearborn website, checked out the programs and research labs, particularly those in Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, and set up a meeting with then-College of Engineering and Computer Science Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and current CECS Dean Ghassan Kridli. “Dean Kridli was very generous in giving me some time to talk with him about the programs and all the research that was going on at ��-Dearborn at that time. I decided this was definitely one of the best options,” Ammar says.

The following semester, Ammar decided to go for it — enrolling in the IMSE master’s program at ��-Dearborn in 2018. IMSE is a broad discipline, and Ammar recalls feeling very open to exploring all the possibilities. That first semester, she took a variety of classes and found an early champion in Associate Professor Jian Hu, who specializes in using data analytics and machine learning in risk management applications. “I had a very good math background and knew some programming, but I had no background in that field,” Ammar says. “Professor Hu provided me with all kinds of support, told me which books I should start reading, and gave me time to get accustomed to programming models that we were using. I learned so much and it was a phenomenal experience.” A little later in her master’s program, she crossed paths with Professor Shan Bao, a specialist in human factors who was helping develop a new master’s program in Human-Centered Design and Engineering, a field that roots engineering solutions in deep understandings of human needs. Ammar says a lot of people think of human factors as a psychology-based discipline — and it does draw on psychology and user feedback quite a bit. But with Bao’s work, Ammar saw how the discipline’s deepest potential lay in combining those insights with complex data analytics and even artificial intelligence. “You can’t really develop any product, whether it is something simple or something very complicated, like an automated vehicle, without going into the human factors aspects of it,” she says. “But I saw this isn’t just about psychology. It’s about figuring out ways to quantify the psychology — to measure human preferences and behaviors so you can build models that help you gain insights into those measures.”

Ammar loved working with Bao and chose to continue her journey at Dearborn with a PhD. For her dissertation research, she took on an ambitious multiphase project in transportation safety that explored one of the more fascinating emerging challenges related to autonomous vehicles: How will pedestrians learn to trust and safely interact with vehicles when humans aren’t doing the driving? Ammar says both pedestrians and drivers typically rely on an exchange of visual signals, like eye contact and waving, to negotiate who has the right of way, and absent a human driver, cars will presumably need some way of declaring their intentions. She began her work with a deep dive into road crash data, identifying the factors that lead to the most dangerous situations between pedestrians and human-driven vehicles in order to derive potentially problematic pedestrian-AV scenarios. She then embarked on building a cueing system designed to satisfy pedestrians' needs while interacting with AVs in these evaluation scenarios. That phase of her research led to several interesting conclusions. For example, Ammar discovered that pedestrians tend to favor technologies that closely mimic their interactions with human drivers, e.g. AVs that communicate a symbolic message, like the familiar flashing silhouette used at crosswalks, either directly on the vehicle or via crosswalk infrastructure (or both). She also investigated many fine-grain details, like whether a pedestrian’s age, gender, and driving and pedestrian behavior (conservative versus nonconservative) influenced their preferences for AV cueing. The final stage of her research involved creating a VR simulation, where she observed participants reacting in tricky situations, like an autonomous vehicle quickly approaching a red light before eventually stopping. By measuring how long pedestrians took to leave the curb and using physiological measures like pupil diameter, she could see which safety cues inspired trust or distrust. She’s hoping the results, which have led to several publications, will help other researchers, automakers and civil engineers as they design cueing systems for the era of autonomous vehicles.

Since officially finishing her PhD program, Ammar has switched gears a little bit, and in some ways, it’s a moment when her diverse studies are all coming together. Since August, she’s been working as a data science project engineer with Hottinger Brüel & Kjær, where she focuses on data analytics and machine learning-based solutions for a wide variety of industries. “These skills can be leveraged in any application, including civil engineering-related fields, which have changed a lot even in the short time since I was an undergraduate student,” Ammar says. “Let’s say you had a project and you needed insights about soil mechanics or wanted to predict settlements in the soil over time. In the past, we would have done that with a bunch of physics-based and numerical equations. But now, with more sensors being installed and collected data becoming available, researchers are developing machine learning-based models to answer those questions. That’s where the field is going now, and in the future, most engineering solutions will be built with data collection in mind so these models can keep getting better.”

Ammar now just has one finishing touch to put on her ��-Dearborn career: Walking across the commencement stage in December. She expects it’s going to be a pretty emotional moment. “��-Dearborn has been my home for the last seven years,” she says. “It’s only been a few months since I left, but to see everyone again is going to be very special. I’ve had the opportunity to work with so many different people, and I always felt, sincerely, that every day I spent with them was a chance to learn something new.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Commencement

Student Success

Technology

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Mon, 12/16/2024 - 16:44

The recent PhD graduate almost pursued a career in construction management until ��-Dearborn helped her unlock a future in data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Since finishing her PhD, Dania Ammar has been working as a data science project engineer. She'll be putting the punctuation mark on her seven-year ��-Dearborn career on Saturday, when she walks across the commencement stage. Photo by Annie Barker

Class of Fall 2024: CEHHS graduate Jesse Whitman

lblouin — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 15:48:18 +0000

Class of Fall 2024: CEHHS graduate Jesse Whitman lblouin Mon, 12/09/2024 - 10:48

Education master’s student and Fall ’24 graduate Jesse Whitman has always been drawn to people and places that don’t match his own background. In fact, when he graduated from his small-town, southwest Michigan high school in 2007, he didn’t apply to a single in-state university — just to guarantee that he’d land somewhere unfamiliar. As it turned out, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio wasn’t exactly exotic, but it was hard to turn down a Division I track scholarship. Whitman’s major at Miami, however, did stretch his horizons. He majored in history, with a concentration in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He even learned Arabic. “I just have always had this desire to learn about other cultures, and that seemed about as different from my own background as you could get,” he says.

Whitman loved his time at Miami, but he jokes now that his choice of major may have complicated his employment prospects — especially given he graduated in 2011, when the U.S. economy was still recovering from the Great Recession. So fresh out of college, and struggling to find work in his field, he decided to completely switch gears. He says he joined the Navy in small part because his grandfather had served in the Navy, and in large part because he had a lot of student loan debt and the Navy has a generous loan repayment program. When he enlisted, he scored high on the ASVAB exam, a sort of SAT for the military, which put him on track to train to become a “nuke” — technical staff who maintain the electrical systems on the Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers. The intense training lasted 18 months, after which Whitman was assigned to the Harry S. Truman, an aircraft carrier based in Norfolk, Virginia, where he worked on operations and maintenance of the nuclear propulsion plant’s high-voltage electrical system.

Whitman says his time in the Navy shaped him in several important ways. The high-stakes environment of operating a nuclear-powered electrical system taught him a lot about the importance of owning your work. And it enabled him to see the world: during his time in the Navy, he went to Dubai, Croatia, Crete and Bahrain. Most importantly, he says, it taught him a lot about people — and specifically, about who Americans really are, deep down, when the issues that divide us aren’t front and center. “I mean, when you’re doing your shift and you’re trying to stay awake at 2 a.m. and you're not looking at your equipment, what are you doing? You’re learning about the person sitting next to you, what they believe in, what they enjoyed about the recent port call,” he says. “The Navy takes a really big sample of America. It’s maybe a better representation of what America really is — or could be. It’s the melting pot. It’s people who have really different backgrounds and beliefs, but there is this expectation that we’re all going to work together regardless of our beliefs because we all have this greater mission we’re contributing to. After being in the Navy, I’m confident I could work with anyone.”

Whitman says the reason he left the Navy was pretty simple: His daughter was born, and his demanding work schedule, which required him to be out to sea for weeks at a time, meant he was missing too many of her “firsts.” He decided not to renew his contract and to head back to school, making what seemed like a logical choice. He enrolled in ��-Dearborn’s electrical engineering program, where he says the stunning new Engineering Lab Building was a big draw. But three semesters in, he simply wasn’t feeling it. “I was doing well academically, but it wasn’t ‘sparking joy’ — to quote Marie Kondo,” he says, smiling. “So I tried to think back to the last time I felt a lot of job satisfaction, and it was teaching.”

In the Navy, it turned out, Whitman got to do quite a bit of teaching, most often about technical subjects having to do with the ship’s electrical systems. Other times, it was more informal, like the mentorship that came with looking out for younger members of his team. “Some of them were 18 years old, and the Navy can throw a lot of money at you, so it’s important to take care of your finances,” he says. “They had questions about how to buy a car or buy a house, and I was a little older, so I could help them with that stuff. It felt good to be able to impact their lives in a really practical way.” Whitman decided to cut his losses in his engineering program and switch to a Master’s of Education. The vibe shift for him was immediate. He says it felt incredible to suddenly be around a group of super positive people who were all committed to serving a greater good — not totally unlike the environment he’d found in the Navy, but it was a better fit for who he’d become.

Whitman says it feels pretty amazing to be bringing this chapter of his life to a close — which, of course, is really just the beginning of a new chapter. In particular, he feels fortunate to have had the time and space to “find my footing as a 35-year-old man,” something he says was only an option because of his wife’s support. And his student teaching experience this past semester has only reinforced the feeling that he’s made a good choice. In particular, he’s enjoyed all the experimentation it's forced him to do. On his very first day, for example, when he bored the first two periods of sixth-grade geography students with a prepared lecture on the fundamentals of maps, he wasted no time pivoting. During the lunch hour, he quizzed his supervising teacher, who gave him some sage advice about the attention spans of 11-year-olds that he’s still using. Developmentally, Whitman says, kids that age are still learning how to digest large “blocks” of information. So this semester, he learned to mix in things like YouTube videos and activities that ask the kids to weigh in with their takes on things. “Luckily, I’m at the age where it’s easy for me to accept that I don’t know everything,” Whitman says. “I’m new to this, so working with teachers that have been at this for 20 years — of course, they’re going to be better at it than me. Why wouldn’t I try out their advice? Even they’re still trying out new things. You see that teaching really is going to be a lifelong learning experience.”

In fact, Whitman’s student teaching experience at his Oak Park middle school has been so enjoyable, he’s now thinking his preferred first job might be something like teaching 7th grade — even though he originally envisioned himself as a high school social studies teacher. “With all things, I try to just embrace the opportunity you find yourself with,” he says. “I kind of think of it like being in a maze. How do you know you’re going the wrong direction? You hit the wall and turn around. That’s happened to me a few times in life. But now I’m finding that I might want to do middle school because I gave it a chance. The path in front of me still feels open.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Commencement

Student Success

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Education

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Mon, 12/09/2024 - 15:44

After serving in the Navy for eight years, Jesse Whitman is answering a different call and pursuing a career in teaching.

For the final leg of his master's in education, December grad Jesse Whitman has been teaching middle school geography at a school in Oak Park. Photo by Annie Barker

Lecturer Rashid Faisal wants you to remember — and see yourself in — Cornelius Henderson

lblouin — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 14:19:21 +0000

Lecturer Rashid Faisal wants you to remember — and see yourself in — Cornelius Henderson lblouin Mon, 11/18/2024 - 09:19

Two years ago, the University of Michigan announced the launch of the Inclusive History Project, an initiative aimed at studying and documenting the history of the university that’s attentive to diversity, equity and inclusion. But ��-Dearborn Education Lecturer and ’20 EdD alum Rashid Faisal has been chasing down the life story of a 1911 African American U-M engineering grad for a lot longer than that. When Faisal first learned of Cornelius Henderson in 2006 during a conversation with one of his wife’s colleagues, Faisal was surprised he’d never heard of Henderson before, given that African American history is a subject he studies pretty intensely. According to the one-pager he was handed, Henderson was an engineer who was pivotal in two of the most groundbreaking early civil engineering projects in Detroit, the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. The other detail that immediately caught Faisal’s attention: Henderson attended one of Faisal’s alma maters — the University of Michigan — at a time when it had very few non-white students. “We knew very little about the Black students at the university who attended well before what we would consider the affirmative action era of the 1960s,” Faisal explains. “I mean, we’re talking about 1906 when Henderson started as a student. What was his life like? What was his experience like? It just opened up this window for me to try to learn more about the early African American students at the university.”

When Faisal began that research, he learned of people like George Jewett, who, in the 1890s, became the first African American varsity football player at U-M. And there was Eddie Tolan, a world-record-setting Olympic sprinter who ran track at the university in the 1930s. But Faisal was continually drawn in by the details of Henderson’s story. The rough existing sketch of Henderson’s life that existed at the time was that he was the only African American student in the engineering college and was a standout student despite being isolated by his white classmates. When Henderson graduated and began looking for work, he was denied by every engineering firm in Detroit — except one, which offered him a janitorial position. Fortunately, a chance encounter with one of his U-M classmates led to a better opportunity: The young man urged Henderson to apply for work at his employer, the Canadian Bridge Company in Windsor. Henderson took the advice and ended up building a career there that spanned 47 years, climbing the company ladder from entry-level draftsman to structural design engineer by the time of the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor Tunnel projects.

Education Lecturer Rashid Faisal has been chasing down the story of Cornelius Henderson for nearly two decades. Photo by Annie Barker

That general story alone made Henderson an interesting figure, but Faisal was hungry for more of the textural details of his life. And as he did more research, he often encountered things that complicated the traditional narrative. First and foremost, the young Henderson, the University of Michigan student, was often assumed to be a person who endured isolation as the college’s lone Black student. Faisal says one of his professors even described being particularly impressed by Henderson’s achievements in mathematics and science because he, unlike his white classmates, did his work “without help.” But Faisal says other details of Henderson’s life give us reason to question this assumption. Henderson, Faisal says, would have been part of what W.E.B. Dubois often called the “Talented Tenth” — a term for an influential class of early 20th-century African American leaders who were highly educated and dedicated to bettering circumstances for Black Americans. Henderson’s father was a college president and considered one of the most highly educated men of his era. His mother was a teacher. His older brother also attended U-M, went to medical school at the Detroit College of Medicine and became a prominent Detroit doctor. And though he was likely the only Black student in the college of engineering, he shared a rich social life with other Black students who were members of the Epsilon Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the oldest Black fraternity at U-M. His fraternity brothers included people like Richard Hill, a U-M law student who later mentored Thurgood Marshall. “Henderson came from a certain kind of Black American cultural capital: the Black church, the Black fraternity system and historically Black colleges and universities,” Faisal says. “So, from an outsider's point of view, it may have appeared he was doing this all on his own. But just because the culture of support was rendered invisible doesn’t mean the culture didn’t exist. In many ways, he was part of the elite of American society at that time.”

Aside from the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, Henderson contributed to a wide variety of projects, including serving as architect and engineer for Memorial Park Cemetery, the first Black cemetery in Detroit. Faisal has uncovered evidence that indicates Henderson was also involved in the construction of multiple apartment buildings and hospitals in the city. Photo courtesy of Rashid Faisal

Faisal thinks recognizing that Henderson’s achievement didn’t happen in a vacuum is important for a number of reasons. First, he says casting Henderson as exceptional, or doing what he did “without help,” feeds the so-called “magical Negro” narrative, a racist trope from the era that framed Black intellectual achievement as unusual. Moreover, in erasing the context for Henderson’s admittedly remarkable life and rendering him only as a talented person who overcame obstacles, we make his story less accessible and relatable to contemporary audiences. For example, it’s long been a priority for higher education institutions to increase representation of Black students in STEM disciplines. But Faisal says if we’re erasing or misrepresenting historical examples like Henderson, we’re failing to give today’s students the opportunity to see themselves not as trailblazers in a field where they've historically not “belonged,” but as part of a long story of achievement in which they are simply the latest chapter. “In the absence of historical memory, we ask students to understand what they’re doing as new when we have a blueprint from the past,” Faisal says.

Indeed, over his many years as an educator of both K-12 and college students, Faisal has leveraged Henderson’s story to challenge students’ views of themselves, others and history. He’s used Henderson’s life as a leaping off point for students to do oral histories of their own families, a project that’s led many students to discover unknown family legacies of college attendance, including some first-generation college students who realized they actually aren’t the first. In 2016, Faisal led a team of fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders, who did their own research on Henderson and created a traveling exhibition, which they presented throughout southeast Michigan, including to a class of ��-Dearborn graduate students, and which was on display at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History for an entire year. Most recently, with support from an Inclusive History Project grant, Faisal asked ��-Dearborn students in his multicultural education course to reckon with the “multiple identity” features of Henderson’s life, especially the sometimes conflicting forces of his race and social class. The results were fascinating. Faisal found it interesting, for example, how easily one Arab American engineering student was able to find herself in Henderson’s story, as she faced similar challenges as a woman in a predominantly male field. For one white male student, it was a revelation that a Black intellectual class even existed at that time. “I had one student who wondered if maybe the discrimination Henderson faced in looking for a job was based on his language,” Faisal recalls. “And I found this so interesting because her comments seemed to be based in certain assumptions of her understanding of the Black vernacular, when in reality, Henderson, because he came from an elite class, probably talked like the rest of the guys in those engineering firms. But I was glad she made that point. It shows that what we see today informs our understanding of the past, and that we often try to understand things that are unfamiliar to us in terms of what is familiar.” Faisal says the hope in doing an exercise like this is that students, when they’re out in the world working as educators, will approach issues of identity in a more nuanced way. “So when that student is out there teaching her unit on Black history, maybe she won’t just reach for Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass,” Faisal explains. “She’ll reach for the lesser-known figures. She’ll make the cross-cultural comparisons. And when you do that, the story becomes alive.”

Along with Howard Lindsay, Lurine Moncrease and Sharon Sexton, members of the Black Historical Sites Committee at the Detroit Historical Museum, Faisial helped create a new historical marker honoring Henderson in Detroit’s Riverside Park. Photo by Annie Barker

Henderson has now been part of Faisal’s life for nearly 20 years, and in some ways, he may be reaching the end of what he can do with the historical record. Unfortunately, many of the details of Henderson’s engineering achievements were likely lost in a fire that destroyed a significant portion of the Canadian Bridge Company’s historical records. But Faisal reckons he’s not quite done with Henderson. He’s thinking his next project might be a book series on Henderson’s life for children and young adults. And he’s hopeful that the next round of Inclusive History Project funding will enable him to create a walking tour of sites connected to the history of U-M’s early Black students, which would include a new historical marker honoring Henderson in Detroit’s Riverside Park near the Ambassador Bridge. “From my perspective, everything U-M is doing with the Inclusive History Project, it’s all positives and no negatives,” Faisal says. “I could see this as a project across all major universities with long histories — and I hope they follow our lead.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

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Education

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Mon, 11/18/2024 - 14:17

With an Inclusive History Project grant, the education lecturer is challenging his students to reckon with the nearly forgotten life story of a 1911 African American U-M grad who became an accomplished Detroit civil engineer.

Cornelius Henderson attended U-M at a time when it had very few Black students and went on to contribute to two of the most ambitious early civil engineering projects in Detroit: the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. Photo by Annie Barker

Dearborn Wolverines gain real-world experience through internships

kbourlie — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 16:35:56 +0000

Dearborn Wolverines gain real-world experience through internships kbourlie Thu, 10/17/2024 - 12:35

For students getting ready to enter the workforce, internships offer valuable opportunities to build skill sets and resumes, while also testing out knowledge learned in the classroom in the real world. Reporter recently talked to four students who dedicated part of this past summer to an internship to learn more about their experiences.

Caroline Tepper, College of Business

Business major Caroline Tepper plans to graduate this December and already has a job lined up with Ford Motor Company, thanks in large part to a purchasing and supply chain internship she completed this summer.

“I'm lucky and grateful that I've been extended an offer to actually join Ford Motor Company starting in January. It's really exciting to come back after my internship,” Tepper says. “I'll be a Supply Chain Ford College Graduate in purchasing, and that entails a three-year rotational program. You move through two or three different rotations to help new hires gain experience in the field.”

Tepper says her summer experience gave her a chance to put skills she learned to the test.

“I actually utilized pretty strong data analytical skills throughout learning how to navigate several of Ford's data risk tools that they use in order to monitor risks throughout the entire world,” says Tepper.

For other students preparing to enter the workforce with their first internship, Tepper reminds them, “You have to think of it like a foot in the door to a company potentially extending you a full time position. It’s almost like a longer interview.”

“Try your best, ask questions,” Temper advises. And remember: “We have fresh and diverse perspectives, and what we can bring to a company from our college experience, I think, it’s really valuable.”

Christina Townsend, College of Arts, Sciences and Letters

��-Dearborn senior Christina Townsend found her perfect internship match this summer working in social media and public relations for the Friends for Animals of Metro Detroit animal shelter. The journalism and screen studies major – who is also minoring in marketing – needed to complete an internship to fulfill her degree requirements. For the animal lover, being able to use her videography skills while building her marketing skills was an ideal fit.

“I'm a big cat and dog lover. For the dogs, I joined them on walks around the site and I took pictures with them. With the cats, I visit them in their cat condos and make videos with them or put them in a greeting room and make a more interactive video with some toys. But I also enjoy the people. There's a lot of good people here,” says Townsend.

One of those people was her supervisor, Manager of Development and Community Relations Maria Nardecchia, who Townsend says “took her under her wing” and went above and beyond to make sure she got the experience and knowledge she needed out of the internship. “I left the internship more confident in my ability to market and showcase my skills,” says Townsend.

Logan Kilby, College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical engineering senior Logan Kilby spent summer 2024 continuing to gain hands-on experience through his product engineering co-op with American Axle and Manufacturing. The mechanical engineering student has worked in driveline systems for the company over the last three years, largely focusing on component engineering. While the co-op has given Kilby the real world experience he needs to succeed as an engineer, it’s also given him an opportunity to make industry connections both within his company and with original equipment manufacturers such as GM.

As he looks toward graduating this December, he’s confident in the knowledge and skills he’s built. “I've really gone from not knowing anything to having all kinds of skills under my belt. And I feel confident that I can do the job of any full-time engineer,” says Kilby. “Most of the tools I would use as an engineer, I already have about three years’ experience with.”

This October, Kilby accepted a full time position as a mechatronic engineer with AAM.

Maya Abdallah, College of Education, Health and Human Services

Maya Abdallah

During her final semester at ��-Dearborn, Maya Abdallah completed a summer internship at United Outstanding Physicians with their data entry department. While the internship was not required for her major, Abdallah wanted to get insight into the business and insurance side of healthcare since the next step in her career path is applying for medical school. During her internship, Abdallah was able to learn more about how medical insurance works and the collaboration that happens behind the scenes between physicians and insurance providers to make sure the needs of patients are met. She says one of the best aspects of her internship was the people she worked with. “They were very welcoming and very nice, and they really wanted to make sure that I had a good experience there. They really made sure that I was learning.”

While Abdallah is now looking at applying to medical school, she’s glad to have had this experience early on in her academic career so she can put that knowledge into practice and knows what to expect later on.

“It's a very niche and specific part of the medical field that you wouldn't really see even as a physician,” says Abdallah. “I definitely will be using it in my future career.”

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Interested in learning more about completing an internship as part of your academic journey? College of Arts, Sciences and Letters students can contact the CASL Internship Office. College of Engineering and Computer Science students can contact CECS Experiential Education. College of Business Students can contact the COB Business Career Center. College of Education, Health and Human Services students can contact CEHHS Field Placement.

Story by Kathryn Bourlier. Photos by Julianne Lindsey and Julie Howells.

Careers or Internships

Experiential Learning

Student Success

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

College of Business

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

College of Engineering and Computer Science

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Mon, 10/21/2024 - 16:17

Hear from students across ��-Dearborn’s four colleges who furthered their career goals over the summer.

Caroline Tepper outside of the Ford Motor Company World Headquarters in Dearborn where she completed in internship over the summer. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Caroline Tepper outside the Ford Motor Company World Headquarters in Dearborn, where she completed an internship over the summer.

Fall ’24 shows robust enrollment performance for ��-Dearborn

stuxbury — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 19:55:33 +0000

Fall ’24 shows robust enrollment performance for ��-Dearborn stuxbury Tue, 09/24/2024 - 15:55

While many regional public universities have experienced significant financial hardships and enrollment challenges, ��-Dearborn is seeing encouraging enrollment performance.

This year’s incoming class of full-time, first-year students is up 4.7%. Among all incoming students, there is a 7% increase in students of color, Pell-eligible students are up 7% and graduate students are up 27%.

Total enrollment this fall is 8,104, with 6,187 undergraduates and 1,917 graduate students.

The academic profile of ��-Dearborn’s first-year students is third-highest among the state’s public universities, with a 3.7 average grade-point average. The university’s four-year graduation rate has increased 9% over the past three years, and the six-year graduation rate increased 2% over last year.

“These increases are the result of hard work by the enrollment management team and many others across campus,” said ��-Dearborn Chancellor Domenico Grasso. “Many strategies have been put into place — such as the One-Stop Service model, block tuition, the conversion of three-credit classes to four credits and our revised financial aid model — that have a direct impact on recruitment and retention. I am most proud of our substantial increases in graduation rates, a true testament to student success.”

��-Dearborn is attracting more traditional full-time students, who are graduating more quickly than prior cohorts.

All of this good news is the result of a lot of behind-the-scenes effort, said Melissa Stone, vice provost for enrollment management. “Our enrollment strategy is working. In addition to new initiatives we put in place over the past few years, we have worked as a campus to create an environment where we are all working together as a community to make sure our students are connected to the information and resources they need to be successful.

“Our faculty and staff are dedicated to our students. When our students succeed, so do we.”

To address a slight enrollment drop in previous years, the university developed a Strategic Enrollment Management Plan, identifying student-focused enrollment obstacles and state-level challenges and outlined solutions.

A streamlined transfer admissions process is designed to address the university’s previous transfer-student enrollment decline. It ranges from forming a dedicated team to work with transfer students to holding more on-site visits with community college partners. Efforts have resulted in a 2% transfer-student increase this year.

To counteract the state’s shrinking high school population, ��-Dearborn expanded its dual-enrollment opportunities to help potential new students become more familiar with campus. And to attract domestic graduate students, the university resumed in-person open houses after a COVID-19 disruption, waived admission fees and appointed a new dean of graduate studies, Armen Zakarian.

The university also has invested more in need-based financial aid. For the fall 2024 first-year class, 44% of students pay no tuition, thanks to financial aid packaging that includes ��-Dearborn’s Go Blue Guarantee and the state’s Michigan Achievement Scholarship.

Stone said the SEM Plan initiatives are yielding results. For example, the first-time undergraduate student numbers remain healthy. “The last two academic years have seen the largest first-year classes,” she said.

Stone said students are attracted to ��-Dearborn because of its location, affordability and supportive, welcoming atmosphere. But what gets them to enroll and stay is making sure they have what they need to be successful.

“The SEM Plan helps us align time and resources by developing a shared vision of the most impactful initiatives to support the success of current and future students to meet our enrollment goals,” she said. “We know there is always work to be done, but I’m proud of our campus efforts and where we are with enrollment this year.”

See additional student profile and trends.

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Admissions

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University-wide

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Tue, 09/24/2024 - 19:55

New full-time student enrollment is up. The four-year graduation rate increased 9% over three years.

First-year students visited campus during Wolverine Welcome Day on Aug. 29. Photo by Annie Barker

Alum Zaineb A. Hussein has found her place

lblouin — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:42:32 +0000

Alum Zaineb A. Hussein has found her place lblouin Tue, 09/24/2024 - 11:42

The week after 9/11, 17-year-old Zaineb A. Hussein and her mother, Mariam, who had immigrated to Dearborn in 1977 with her husband during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War, were shopping at an estate sale on the west side of the city. Zaineb didn’t share her mother’s love of rummage and garage sales, but when she spotted a pair of ice skates that she simply had to have, she was glad she had tagged along. Her mother led a friendly negotiation over the price, until an elderly woman interrupted and told her mother to “go back to your country.” Zaineb instantly filled with anger. “My mom is my heart. You come near my mom and I see red,” she says. Zaineb was just about to lay into the woman when her mother urged her to hold back. “I was, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But my mom said, ‘Stop — she doesn’t know better.’” Then her mother turned to the woman and declared simply, “I am an American citizen and we are proud to be here.” The host of the estate sale, apparently mortified by the encounter, offered her the ice skates for free. They decided to leave without them.

Hussein recalls the encounter as one of her early formative lessons in politics. First, it showed her that, even though her mother had been born elsewhere and would always be viewed as a “foreigner” by some people, she still had so much pride in her identity as an American. Her mother’s roots here mattered to her, and she felt them as strongly as any other American. Second, Hussein says it taught her that you can’t always “meet fire with fire.” “If you really want to see a change in people, you have to be able to demonstrate that in a way that will be received,” she explains. Hussein says that lesson was reinforced again and again over the next few years as a student at ��-Dearborn, where she majored in history and political science. On a diverse campus, her classmates were hardly a monolith when it came to faith, values and politics, and her classes gave her countless opportunities to hone her skills in communicating with people who had views different from her own. More importantly, she developed a working view of human nature, one which makes it feel not just like a political cliché when she extols the virtues of trying to understand others’ views, even ones you might detest. “I think at ��-Dearborn, I really learned that my interpretation of something could be very different from another person’s — even if we were looking at, say, the same historical events,” she says. “I think that’s when I realized just how much our life experiences make us who we are. If you and I lead very different lives, we’re going to have different perspectives, different stories, different values. So if you want to communicate with someone, you have to start there.”

That perspective is certainly part of what has helped Hussein build a dynamic career alongside some of the biggest names in Michigan politics. Post-graduation, she initially headed to Lansing, where she worked for a half decade with the Michigan Department of Human Services and as a director of constituent affairs for then-Michigan State Senator David Kzenek. After burning out on the Lansing political culture, Hussein welcomed an opportunity to return to Wayne County, where she worked as the county’s director of diversity and inclusion and deputy director for external affairs for the county executive. She never thought she’d return to Lansing. But after a conversation with a colleague led to an unexpected opportunity in the Secretary of State’s office, she took a position working as Jocelyn Benson’s deputy chief of staff, where, among other things, she spearheaded minority group outreach initiatives during the 2020 election.

Hussein declares with an understandable amount of pride that she’s rarely had to apply for a job — she’s usually been recruited — and her current position is yet another example. When her longtime friend Abdullah Hammoud, a fellow east Dearborn native and ��-Dearborn alum, expressed interest in running for mayor of Dearborn, Hussein was all in — first answering Hammoud’s call for help with the campaign, and later, when he won, taking on the role of his chief of staff. Alongside Hammoud, Hussein says she’s found a place and a team that makes her feel like she could stay awhile. She sees the work Hammoud is doing as mayor as historic. Indeed, as the first Arab American to be elected mayor in the city’s history, the charismatic young executive is regarded as a symbol of the growing political power of Arab Americans not just locally but nationally. But more than that, Hussein insists what makes Hammoud special is how focused he is on doing the actual work of healing a young, demographically diverse city whose history has been pocked by multiple periods of anti-Black and anti-Arab racism. For example, shortly after Hammoud took office, the administration decided to host the first ever Dearborn-Detroit block party along the cities’ shared border. Hussein remembers more than one instance of a Black Detroiter coming up to the mayor, remarking that it was the first time they ever felt welcome in Dearborn. “I think with this administration, you’re seeing a team that’s actively coming to terms with our history and that’s trying to rectify many past practices that have hurt people in our communities,” Hussein says. “I do think we’re at an inflection point. When I was growing up, it was Arab Americans on the east side and white residents on the west side. But now, almost anywhere you go, you’re finding a diverse group. And people increasingly see our diversity as our strength.”

This moment of transition hasn’t always been smooth. Hussein says there are still outlier voices in the city who aren’t on board with this vision. The past year, in particular, has presented its share of challenges. The war in Gaza thrust Dearborn, which is home to one of the larger Palestinian diasporas in the U.S., into the national spotlight. Some of the old tropes about Arab Americans and Dearborn quickly found new life online and in the press, including a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America's Jihad Capital,” which drew national backlash, including forceful criticism from Hammoud and ��-Dearborn Chancellor Domenico Grasso. As chief of staff, Hussein got used to handling death threats against Hammoud, sifting out which ones to bring to his attention and which to let the police address quietly in order to not cause him added stress. The team has also wrestled with how to use the spotlight to potentially exert their influence on the national conversation over the war. From the start, Hammoud has been outspoken in his criticism of the assault on Gaza and of the Biden administration, a view that’s shared by many in the city. Earlier this year, the collective frustration morphed into a much-talked-about political liability for Biden, as the then-presumptive Democratic nominee risked losing an important part of his coalition in a tightly contested must-win state. In January, Biden’s campaign manager reached out to Hammoud for a meeting. Hammoud turned them down, telling them he would be open to talking with actual policymakers, but not campaign operatives. A few weeks later, the administration followed up by sending several high-ranking officials to Dearborn.

When Hammoud and his advisors were making decisions about these events, Hussein says there was a surprising amount of unity in the room. It’s one of Hussein’s main jobs, of course, to keep the team tight, and working behind the scenes like this is definitely an underappreciated political craft. For Hussein, it’s about being able to spot great thinkers to put around the mayor, but also knowing how to rein them in when a decision must be made and there’s only a couple hours to do it. It’s about pushing talented people past their limits to get something that’s just a little bit better — and not making them hate you for it. And it’s also about being extremely politically aware of opportunities and political landmines. “I try to see things through all possibilities and outcomes, whether I agree or disagree with the approach,” she says. “If one word in a statement we’re putting out could be interpreted differently, then we have to have a plan to address that if that happens. That’s why we labor so hard over words and ideas. Everybody sees the world a little differently.”

Hussein has made her career working behind the scenes for other people, but she’s made enough of an impression that she now gets asked semi-regularly about whether she’ll run for office some day. “Never” is her quick response on the day we talk. Her explanation is that she doesn’t like talking about herself, and she thinks she can have far more impact by using her talents to elevate others, rather than just herself. It’s a nice sentiment, and rings as sincere, if a bit self-deprecating and deflecting. But I then ask if she has anyone in her life that disagrees with this self-assessment. “There are a few people,” she says, noting that one of them is an influential mentor. I then point out that her logic seems sound if she’d be running for legislative office, but her self-described talents — pushing people, helping diverse teams gel, taking pace and crises in stride, anticipating all possible consequences of a decision, listening to diverse constituents — sound like a nice toolbox for an executive. “I guess you never say never,” she says.

Hussein did run for office — once. She was elected junior class president of Fordson High School. Her slogan was “Ask not what Zaineb Hussein can do for you. Ask what you can do for Fordson.” “I know, super cliché. But I thought it was very cool,” she says, smiling. As a person who puts a lot of stock in the power of words, no doubt she’d come up with something better next time.

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Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

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Tue, 09/24/2024 - 15:41

The chief of staff for Dearborn’s first Arab American mayor talks about why she loves making change from behind the curtain and why she’s still a hard ‘no’ on running for office herself.

Student Success

Highlights from the 2025 State of the University

More students are crossing the finish line to graduation.

Overall enrollment is encouraging, but there is still work to do.

Fundraising is essential to maintaining the mission.

Student success initiatives are having a big impact.

Great spaces encourage students to stay.

‘Students from around the world thrive here’

Career Services is trying new ways to connect with students

Class of Fall 2024: College of Business graduate Lamyah Burhani

Class of Fall 2024: CECS graduate Dania Ammar

Class of Fall 2024: CEHHS graduate Jesse Whitman

Lecturer Rashid Faisal wants you to remember — and see yourself in — Cornelius Henderson

Dearborn Wolverines gain real-world experience through internships

Caroline Tepper, College of Business

Christina Townsend, College of Arts, Sciences and Letters

Logan Kilby, College of Engineering and Computer Science

Maya Abdallah, College of Education, Health and Human Services

Fall ’24 shows robust enrollment performance for ������-Dearborn

Alum Zaineb A. Hussein has found her place

Fall ’24 shows robust enrollment performance for ��-Dearborn