UMBC is a independent offshoot of University of Maryland in College Park. It's autonomous, but still part of the University System of Maryland. It's located near the intersection of I-95 (Exit 47B, towards Maryland Route 166) and the Baltimore Beltway (I-695, Exit 12C to Wilkens Avenue West).
It's your typical technology themed and research-centric University for the Mid-Atlantic area. To the typical student, it can seem that most of the teachers aren't professors, but just part-time instructors or graduate assistants. All the professors are busy doing research, or there just aren't enough of them on staff to teach even the upper-level classes.
The school has been courting a large number of New Jersey and New York high school and transfer students, as well as foriegn transfers. The course enrollment system every semester is credit based, but many of these transfers get to keep a large majority of their credits intact. To people like me who have been working towards their degrees for a few years, having a large influx of unexpected competition for seats in upper level tech courses was highly annoying, so a lot of my group just left to go to work instead.
UMBC has very little on-campus social life, although the drug culture is pretty well establshed in the dorm areas, with a lot of Baltimore scene ravers swapping designer drugs like Ecstasy. On some nights you can stand out on the porches and have your choice of what type of weed you want to purchase that night.
On the other side, the academic atmosphere borders on Corporate Indoctrination. With such tried-and-true methods as "Corporate Days" (now recently renamed to Corporate Visibility days) and the massive construction throughout campus of various retail facilities and corporate offices, sometimes it seems that most UMBC undergraduates have accepted their roles as simple numbers within the greater system.