This post was written by Ayanna Davis, B.A. ’24, M.A. in Integrated Design student.
It took nearly 20 years for Angela DeBerry to put a name to the work she was interested in and finally get the opportunity to study it.
In the early 2000s, Angela was building a career in human services when an internship pushed her to look more closely at the organizations behind the people she served. She began paying closer attention to the organizations behind the work. She saw firsthand how leadership, training and communication could impact employees and the people they were there to serve.
“I increasingly became interested in how all those pieces fit together and how they could work better,” she said.
When she shared those interests with an academic adviser, the adviser introduced her to the field of industrial and organizational psychology.
Finally, in 2022, Angela found herself studying it at The University of Baltimore.
Education has always played an important role in her life.
Born in western Germany to military parents and raised primarily in rural West Virginia, Angela experienced poverty and housing instability throughout her childhood. At times, her family lived without electricity, running water and indoor plumbing.
Still, Angela excelled in school. She participated in gifted and talented education programs through the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and received recognition for her academic achievements.
“Even when life outside school was difficult, academics were a place I could shine,” Angela said.
Angela’s experiences growing up not only shaped how she viewed education, but also how she learned to view others and the circumstances they may be facing.
“When I meet someone who's struggling with housing, employment or access to services, I want to understand what they're managing before making assumptions about their motivation or their potential,” she said.
That desire to understand and help others started early.
By high school, Angela was assisting students with disabilities. Shortly after graduating, she began working in group homes.
What started as an interest in helping others turned into a career of nearly three decades in human services, where she supported people with intellectual, developmental, medical and behavioral health needs.
While building her career and raising a family, Angela continued her own education.
She earned two associate degrees, one in human services with a concentration in substance abuse and the other in liberal studies with a visual arts focus, from Hagerstown Community College. She later earned a bachelor's degree in liberal studies, with a minor in leadership studies from Frostburg State University in 2007.
Education provided a pathway to the stability and opportunities she wanted for herself and her family.
“Given my childhood, I cared a lot about my child having at least a stable home to live in," she said.
When Angela arrived at UBalt, she enrolled in its M.S. in Applied Psychology program with a concentration in industrial and organizational psychology.
At UBalt, she has built skills in research methods, statistics, survey design, program evaluation and organizational assessment. She has found countless opportunities to connect what she is learning in the classroom to questions she has carried in her career.
One highlight was participating in a graduate student consulting challenge. She worked with students from universities in and across the Washington, D.C., area to address a real-world organizational problem. The team had just four days to work together, develop a solution, and present recommendations to professionals in the I/O field. Angela’s team placed second.
UBalt has also given Angela a community where she feels her experiences and way of thinking are valued.
“I finally feel like I’m at a place where I’m accepted,” she said. “I’m accepted for thinking differently.”
In 2024, Angela received the Beth Mitzell Grit Award from The University of Baltimore as part of the annual Eubie Awards celebration. The award goes to an UBalt student who has demonstrated hard work, resilience, and passion in pursuit of their education. The award recognizes students whose achievements reflect character, grit, and perseverance through adversity, qualities that made the honor that felt especially meaningful to Angela.
“If I ever received any award in my life, it's going to be the one that says that I have grit,” Angela said. “I’m happy with that, to know that I was recognized for my grit.”
Now, Angela is putting what she has learned at UBalt into practice.
Through her practices with Glowforward Foundation as an intern she is developing participant and mentor check-in surveys and contributing to program evaluation. She hopes these tools can help the organization better understand people’s experiences, identify where support is needed and evaluate how its programs are working.
Angela is also a trained National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI) Maryland advocate and co-chair of NAMI Western Maryland, where she is helping establish an affiliate serving communities in Maryland.
As she gets closer to completing her master’s degree, Angela hopes her education will create even more opportunities for her to make a difference in the lives of others.
“I have a big spot in my heart for people who are disadvantaged,” she said. “Hopefully, it means that there will be more opportunities that open up in my life, more opportunities for me to be able to help people.”