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Christopher Paul, Retriever Staff Writer, Volume 39, Issue 17, published February 15, 2005
Coca-Cola Company has pledged $10 million in tsunami aid and in India, the company has distributed water, blankets, clothing and food, but Coke also provides aid in other ways closer to home here on the UMBC campus in the form of scholarships and internships.
As tuition rates continue to rise here at UMBC, students have to search for more creative ways to finance their educations. For chess team members and athletes, solutions for some may be found by turning to the Coca-cola Company. At UMBC, the Coca-Cola scholarship and internship program began back in 1997.
In an interview with Sheldon Caplis, UMBC’s Vice President for Institutional Advancement, “Overall, Coke donates $100,000 per year to the university. $80,000 is provided for scholarships, the rest is used for sponsoring student events and functions such as homecoming weekend and coolers for the athletic teams,” Caplis said.
Applicants for the Coca-Cola Chess Scholarships are recommended on an ongoing basis by either Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Director of the UMBC Chess Program, and faculty advisor of the UMBC Chess Club since 1991, or Igor Epshteyn, the UMBC Chess Team coach. On average, eight scholarships are awarded each year with selections being made each spring.
As for athletes here at UMBC, there is the Coca-Cola Athletic Internship program. Athletes are chosen according to their academic achievement and are recommended by Dr. Charles R. Brown, UMBC’s Director of Athletics.
Coca-Cola also contributes to the university community is other ways. “Coke also donates refreshments to help campus clubs with their various events At times Coca-Cola may contribute as many as 15 cases of refreshments” Caplis said.
For those who do not meet these criteria all is not lost. Specific internships are sometimes offered in engineering, finance, human resources, information technology, marketing, operations and the sales business units at the company’s sites located in areas such as Baltimore, Columbia, Jessup and Linthicum, MD.
Further information regarding Coke’s internships may be found on their web site, www.coca-cola.com. Click on Coca-Cola Company on the main page, click on “Careers” at the top of the page. Select “North America” from the drop down menu and proceed to “Search Jobs.” Click on the “Resume Submission Policy,” button and a new window will open. Click on the “I Accept” button and a new page will appear where one can search for internships within Maryland.
This article is an example of a journalism disaster on many levels. I was given the assignment by The Retriever news editor in a meeting on February 11, 2005 at 2 p.m. All I was given as a phone number and the man’s name, Kaplis, to speak to about Coca-cola sports scholarships. I did some research on the web in UMBC’s web site and found Sheldon Caplis. I wasn’t sure if they were the same person because the phone number was not the same, nor the spelling and I didn’t have the contact person’s first name to begin with. I had a Saturday February 14 afternoon deadline to meet. I called the office and had to plead with his secretary for an earlier interview. The office wanted me to come in on Monday, February 16, 2005. I explained I needed an earlier appointment to meet a publishing deadline.
Lesson 1: Make sure you have the person’s name spelt correctly.
Lesson 2: Conduct preliminary research on someone before the interview so you have some idea of their background.
During the interview, I found out that Mr. Caplis was an administrator whose soul responsibility was to bring financial support into the university, basically a marketing man. He knew very little about the scholarships and there were two, not one; one scholarship for the Chess Team, the other for athletes. Mr. Caplis provided me with the names of people to speak to about details for the scholarships. Now it was 11:30 a.m.
I went to set up an interview with these two men only to find Dr. Alan Sherman of the Chess Team was on sabbatical for the fall 2005 semester and that Dr. Charles Brown of Athletics was out of town. All I could do was obtain information about them and the scholarships from the UMBC website. After this, it was 3 p.m. in the afternoon.
I wanted to interview some students with the knowledge I now had, but this is a commuter school. Friday afternoon is the worst possible time to try and interview students because there are so few around. The few that were available in the Commons building were unwilling to speak with me because they were preparing for an afternoon class and just wanted to go home.
Lesson 3: Get a hold of students to interview at the beginning of the week or mid-week. There are more students to choose from if some are reluctant to speak with you.
Afterwards, I did some other research on Coca-cola to find that there were direct links to soft drinks and child/teenage obesity, labor disputes and murders in Columbia, South America, disputes in India over Coca-cola manufacturing plants diminishing drinking water supplies and unethical environmental practices.
Due to time constraints, I couldn’t find data on how much Coca-cola spends on public services it gives back to the community in comparison to how much the corporation made in profit in the last quarter. The latter is easy, the former has proved to be more challenging.
Another point of interest was exactly when did Coca-cola marketing infiltrate or decide that targeting grade schools, high schools and universities was an untapped source of revenue. It would have also been enlightening to have determined how much the schools were receiving on each bottle of soft drink sold for allowing Coca-cola to place the vending machines in the school in the first place.
The main problem was that “The Retriever” at the time was suffering from the problem of a lack of staff. Staff was thin during the fall 2004 semester and a few people graduated, and a few decided they needed to spend more time with their academics leading to an even lighter staff.
The first and second issues of “The Retriever” were extremely thin with some works being re-publications from last year and most of the articles were written by the editorial staff. The third issue, which is the issue this article appeared in was a little better, but not much because if one notes, most of the articles were again written by the editorial staff.
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