When the legendary English mountaineer George Mallory was once asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everett, he famously replied, “Because it’s there.”

Merrimack’s own Dave McGillivray ’76 will host the second annual DMSE Sports Classic this weekend, bringing together runners of all levels and ages for two days of competition and festivities on campus.

Daniel Herda subscribes to the adage that if you want to understand another person’s experiences, walk a mile in his shoes. So, last month, the assistant professor of sociology led a 10-day study-abroad trip to Germany as part of his course Crossing Borders: The Sociology of Immigration.

Shannon Doucette ’20 is expecting a finger-snapping, joyful time when she makes the leap from the Rogers Center to Symphony Hall this month as the newest — and possibly youngest — member of the Boston Pops Gospel Choir.

For four recent Merrimack graduates, volunteering for weeklong community-service projects was among their most rewarding experiences as students. But it wasn’t enough to satisfy their yearning to help others.

Members of the Merrimack community who want to safely view the partial solar eclipse on Monday, Aug. 21, can visit the courtyard outside Crowe Hall, where a telescope and individual viewing glasses will be available.

Merrimack’s Master of Education program has been ranked among the best in the country for online or hybrid programs designed to lead to initial teacher certification.

Michigan’s loss, it turns out, is Lawrence, Massachusetts’ gain. Since 2009, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Rickey Caldwell Jr. has run a summer robotics camp for academically gifted middle- and high-school students in his adopted home state of Michigan, where he attended college.

Though women make up about half of the U.S. workforce, fewer than one-quarter hold positions in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics professions. This not only deprives the country’s fastest-growing sector of some of its brightest and most creative minds, it stifles innovation and growth by failing to capitalize on women’s unique perspective of the market economy.

With a toast and a shower of confetti, Merrimack College formally named its first academic building in a quarter century, for the college’s most generous donors, board chairman Michael ’92, H’17, and Kerridan Crowe, P’17. This gift marks the largest individual contribution made in support of the college to date.

Question: What do you get when you mix equal parts criminology and chemistry? Answer: Merrimack’s new interdisciplinary minor in forensic science.

The statistics are as startling as they are cautionary: First-generation college-bound students from low-income families are four times more likely than their peers to drop out of school in their first academic year. Within six years, nearly nine in 10 students of this demographic leave school without a degree.

It’s a job that’s been a lifetime in the making. Earlier this month, Merrimack librarian Elizabeth Sarkodie-Mensah returned to her native Ghana to prepare for her new role as that West African nation’s permanent representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO.

Year in and year out, America’s transportation infrastructure falls prey to Mother Nature: earthquakes in California, hurricanes in New England, flooding in the South, tornadoes in the Midwest.

Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Cynthia Carlson is marking time at a fence post near the honors program residence hall in North Campus.