• Walden Circle, contact Joel Baker, jbaker13@umbc.edu
• Lakeland Young Explorers, send completed application to  Zach Pekor, zpekor@umbc.edu

Volunteer openings are still available for these programs (Walden Circle, M-Thurs) and Lakeland Young Explorers (M-Thurs). 

AMERICAN STUDIES majors: You wouldn't believe how much potential there is for success as an Undergraduate Researcher!

It's also a great platform to connect with your peers, gain life long skills, and get one step closer to achieving your goals. You can focus on any specific area of interest to you; the choice is yours! 

If you've had trouble developing relationships with faculty in your department, get involved in research and gain a mentor!

If you are interested in going to graduate school, undergraduate research is an EXCELLENT thing to have on your Resume'. It's an opportunity to display passion, creativity, depth, and dedication!

If you want to spice up your experience here at UMBC, take on a research project and apply for travel funding, publications, presentations, internships, and much more.

Follow the link provided to learn more, and to see what other students in your field have done.

Last but not least, COME OUT to the:

How to Get Started in Research Workshop

Monday, September 22

12:00p.m. - 1:00p.m.

LH3

Find out if this is a good fit for you! 

Hi everyone, it’s me, Yoo-Jin!  This week I’d like to reflect on my TED Talk, Ray Rice, and abusers/ perpetrators of relationship violence. First of all, I couldn’t have done this talk without the help of our coordinator, Megan, who brought her incredible insight and wit to help structure my talk. As I was preparing for my TEDx Talk, which was about reframing the way we think and talk about relationship violence (and as a result acted or didn’t act when faced with it), I found that with the media outcry of Ray Rice’s video of him punching his then fiancee, Janay Palmer, my talk became relevant in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. As I went through my talk this past Saturday, I talked to the audience about three steps we can take to prevent and recognize relationship violence:

1. Think 
2. Speak
3. Act

I addressed the ways we often think of relationship violence in our society- in the most extreme cases, often involving celebrities and catastrophes (physical abuse, death, viral videos). This also affects the way we talk about relationship violence, zooming in, how we talk about both perpetrators (as people who are distant from us) and victims (as people we blame, to distance from us because we wouldn’t make the same choices they did). Through my discussion, I went through the hidden, pervasive, and invisible forms of violence that happen everyday, and I will tell you, I saw some uncomfortable audience members in the crowd. Yes, violence is a difficult and possibly uncomfortable conversation for anyone.

However, this issue was brought home to me in a different way. I found myself struggling with this issue specifically, now with a person on the other end: an abuser. How do I handle this? How do I talk to someone who does exhibit concerning behaviors? How do I talk to this person, who I’ve known and loved for years? As I searched through resources, I found an incredible lack of tools and realized how both sides of this issue are important. Of course, victims and survivors of abuse are important and deserve support and resources but how do we even begin to talk to abusers? Abusers who could be our friends, our classmates, our coworkers? Just like victims can be anyone…so can abusers. Abusers are not demons who are always entirely bad, psychotic people- their behaviors are unacceptable, but does that make them less valuable as a human being? This odd dissonance and guilt is associated with so many different factors- it’s interesting how this dynamic can flip: determining who gets the empathy and who gets the blame? It is clear to me, that the person who must take responsibility for their actions is the person who abuses other people, because at the end of the day, violence is never okay and is never acceptable. I did want to acknowledge this challenge that I faced and will continue to face in engaging in productive and appropriately empathetic dialogues with the abusers who might need help or seek change.

MARINE BIOTECHNOLOGY major?

Well, you're in for a treat! The Office of Undergraduate Education here at UMBC helps students of ALL majors get involved in studying relevant topics that they are most passionate about or interested in.

This process provides tons of networking experience, meaningful relationships, opportunities to intern and travel places, and well as potential monetary benefits!

If you are wondering about ways to deepen your learning experience or ways to set yourself up for future success, give it a shot! You'd have your very own personalized research project, mentor, student profile, etc. AND more items to put on  your Resume'.

Come out to our HOW TO GET STARTED IN RESEARCH Workshop on Monday, September 22 at 12 noon in Lecture Hall 3 for more info!!

Clink the link provided to see what other students in your major have done! You've got nothing to lose but EVERYTHING to gain.

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 6:30pm on Thursday, September 18 at Betamore (1111 Light St.) in Baltimore (map). The meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

The meetup is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. It’s also a great way to meet others in Baltimore’s computing community to network and find out about internships and jobs.

The September meeting will go through the next Test-Driven Development (TDD) exercise focusing on solutions using pair programming, test-driven development, clean code and refactoring.

Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and unit testing environment. Be prepared to pair up, code, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. .