The Mason Spirit

Celebrating 50 years of Mason alumni provides the perfect opportunity for learning more about the Mason student experience—from the very beginning.

Continue Reading Keeping Mason’s Past Alive with Alumni Stories

Fans of Mason’s sports teams have seen the Patriot mascot evolve from a man dressed in colonial garb to large-headed fuzzy cartoon characters with crazy socks to a dapper, almost superhero Patriot.

Continue Reading Go Green, Go Gold: A History of Mason Mascots

Growing up in Bangladesh, Shaquib Chowdhury knows firsthand the effects of rising sea levels due to climate change. Bangladesh is a low-lying country prone to flooding, and citizens from coastal towns are constantly relocating to the capital, Dhaka, already one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Chowdhury has decided to do something about it.

Continue Reading Student Profile: Shaquib Chowdhury

Over the past 30+ years, Mason’s 10,000-seat arena has been a big part of campus life and the Northern Virginia community. Since its 1985 opening, the Patriot Center (now EagleBank Arena) has been visited by more than 12 million patrons for more than 3,600 events that have ranged from ultimate fighting to the Harlem Globetrotters.

Continue Reading From Dolly Parton to Megadeth: A Flickering Tribute to Mason’s Musical Scene

Saskia Clay-Rooks, executive director of Mason’s University Career Services, is constantly updating the programs and web resources offered to ensure they are timely and relevant to students in their career search. While plenty of resources are available online, she looks to provide students and recent graduates with other opportunities—the biggest of which are the connections her staff is able to facilitate between students and employers, alumni, or faculty.

Continue Reading Meet the Mason Nation: Saskia Clay-Rooks

This fall Mason English professor and novelist Laura Ellen Scott, MFA ’93, saw the release of the second book, Crybaby Lane (Pandamoon Publishing, 2017) in her New Royal Mysteries trilogy. The books revolve around a university and its crime writing program in the fictional Ohio town of New Royal.

Continue Reading Building a Mystery

Over Alumni Weekend, Mason alumnus Steve Parke came to campus to share his experiences working with music icon Prince and sign copies of his new book, Picturing Prince (Octopus Books, 2017), for an enthusiastic crowd of the Purple One’s fans.

Continue Reading Picturing Prince

CS 112 Introduction to Computer Science is the engineering equivalent of freshman composition. At Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering, almost all engineering students, regardless of their majors, must pass this course. It’s a challenging one, especially if it is their first encounter with writing code.

Continue Reading Flipping the CompSci Classroom

On an otherwise ordinary day near Springfield Mall in Northern Virginia, a car came to an abrupt stop on the side of the road. The driver jumped out, dragged his passenger outside, and threw her onto the curb. Then he got back in the car and sped away. Luckily, Mason alumni Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, an expert on human trafficking, was in her own car nearby, and saw the whole thing.

Continue Reading Seeing What Others Don’t

To celebrate 50 years of Mason alumni, we arranged for a member of that very first class to meet with a member of the current graduating class, take a tour of the campus, and share their experiences.

Continue Reading 1968 Meets 2018