Smith Welcomes 75 New QUEST Students at Annual Retreat

The Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) retreat gave 75 incoming sophomores their first taste of life in the QUEST program. The two-day offsite experience is held at Camp Horizons in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and is a bit like a corporate retreat and a bit like a college class mixed up with a healthy dose of summer camp.

The retreat is intended to help them feel like a community, says Amy Riesner, director of the QUEST program. Students are coming in to this very demanding program. The retreat helps them get to know each other and start learning to work together.

QUEST is an innovative three-year honors program in collaboration with the A. James Clark School of Engineering; the program also admits students from the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Students in QUEST focus on process improvement and operations improvement. Through a five-course sequence, they study the integration of quality in the workplace while applying the knowledge and skill-set they have gained from their major in the field of engineering, business, or computer science.

Business majors, engineering majors, and computer science majors will be working together in multi-disciplinary teams for the first time during the retreat. Team-building activities, including a high-flying ropes course, get students cooperating, strategizing and succeeding as a team. This is important, because the multi-disciplinary teams that are formed during the retreat will be together through the whole first semester, working on a critical project in their product redesign course.

For more information about QUEST, visit: http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/quest.