A blog reflection by Joe Levin-Manning, Graduate Coordinator for LGBTQ Programs

Student Life is now accepting applications for two great leadership opportunities listed below. The deadline is Tuesday, November 6th at midnight. You don't want to miss out on this opportunity!

Alternative Spring Break

A week long service-learning trip that challenges students to combat civic issues underlying larger societal concerns. ASB will leave participants with a sense of comrade, compassion, and empathy for the people of the world.

This year’s trips: Homelessness, Public Health, “Seeing Baltimore,” and Gesundheit.  

STRiVE Leadership Retreat

STRiVE participants hone leadership skills, develop campus and social change projects, build community and have a lot fun. STRiVE's many activities will keep you engaged, and you'll emerge feeling confident, inspired and connected. Participants' ratings of the retreat have been off the charts. 100% of former participants say they'd recommend STRiVE to a friend.

See the attached flyer for more details and apply through the provided link!

Program: The Data Incubator is an intensive 8 week fellowship that prepares masters students, PhDs, and postdocs in STEM and social science fields seeking industry careers as data scientists. The program is free for Fellows and supported by sponsorships from hundreds of employers across multiple industries. In response to the overwhelming interest in our earlier sessions, we will be holding another fellowship.

Who Should Apply: Anyone who has already obtained a masters or PhD degree or who is within one year of graduating with a masters or PhD is welcome to apply. Applications from international students are welcome. Everyone else is encouraged to sign-up for a future session.

Locations: There will be both an in-person (in NYC, DC, SF) and online section of the fellowship using the common application below.

Dates: All sections will be from 2017-01-03 to 2017-02-24

Application Link: https://www.thedataincubator.com/fellowship.html#apply?ref=wcm91dHphaG5AdW1iYy5lZHU=

Data Science in 30 minutes: Learn how to build a data-science project in our upcoming free Data Science in 30-minutes webcast. Signup soon as space is limited.

Learn More: You can learn about our fellows at The New York Times, LinkedIn, Amazon, Capital One, or Palantir. To read about our latest fellow alumni, check out our blog. To learn more about The Data Incubator, check us out on Venture Beat, The Next Web, or Harvard Business Review.

When I was little, I used to draw maps of my neighborhood. Once I was done with my neighborhood, I’d move onto creating maps for make believe neighborhoods including everything I thought a community should have – homes, trees, a playground and hospital, a library.

When the Critical Social Justice planning team picked the theme of Home this year, just a few short weeks later, the City Paper published its “Maps” issue. The front cover immediately caught my attention and took me back to my childhood of my own map making days.

As our intro blog post to this year’s theme states: “In honor of UMBC’s 50th Anniversary, this year’s CSJ theme of Home recognizes UMBC as a home to many of us.  As we celebrate and contemplate UMBC as a home for learning, activism, and social change, we embrace the opportunity to invest ourselves in creating meaningful change here on campus in addition to taking our newly gained insights and knowledge with us back home, wherever that may be.” With this in mind, as we read through the City Paper maps issue, we wondered what it would be like to create our own maps of UMBC.

Since the fall semester began, the Women’s Center Advisory Board and student staff have all made their own campus maps. This week all of the Women’s Center discussion groups will also be creating their campus maps. When creating our maps, we asked each person to consider specific prompts such as: What is your favorite place on campus? Where can you can find others in your community or get your needs met? What is something you want to change? 

It’s been fascinating to see the ways in which home has shown up in each of our maps and the ways in which challenges and complexities of home present themselves as well. Each person’s map tells a different story about who they are and what their experience is like at UMBC. It had allowed for us to have conversations of belonging and mattering, discussions of accessibility, environmental justice, and activism, as well as reflections on ways to bridge our home at UMBC with our other homes to include Baltimore.

What would your campus map look like?

Stop by Main Street this Wednesday, October 19th from 11:30-1:30pm to create your UMBC map and pick up a Critical Social Justice: Home events calendar.

Campus maps will be displayed at the “Who Gets a Home on College” CSJ event on Thursday, October 27th which will take place on Main Street from 11:30-1:30pm.