Akil Mondie, Ph.D. Candidate at University of Maryland College Park

Akil Mondie, Ph.D. Candidate at University of Maryland College Park

During my time as an undergraduate at UDC, I could never know just how much the experiences and opportunities presented to me would eventually mean as I carried on in my career. UDC being a smaller HBCU allows for a much more intimate academic relationship with faculty, a benefit that cannot be overstated. The opportunity to contact professors on a more personal level, as well as the privilege of receiving quality mentoring time, are some of the highlights of the STEM program at the university. The UDC STEM program offers a much more complete undergraduate experience that prepares students for lifelong career success. The training received from doing undergraduate research with Drs. Song and Li through the STEM program provided me with invaluable research experience. Having a deeper understanding of advanced scientific methodologies to hands-on application of scientific concepts in lab settings has been incredibly important to my meeting my current career goals. Being able to get this out of UDC is something I am very thankful for. As a current Ph.D. graduate student working in Dr. Efrain Rodriguez’s functional inorganic solid state research group since Spring 2022, he hopes to be able to apply everything that I learned at UDC to crystallography studies with applications to understanding superconducting materials as well as robust chemical capture functions.