Though the researchers point that the study's sample wasn't representative of the U.S. population, the findings are potentially groundbreaking. Pew Research Center reports:

"Do conventional public opinion surveys under-report the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population? And do they underestimate the share of Americans who hold anti-gay views?

A team of researchers from Ohio State and Boston Universities say the answer to both questions is yes.

“We find substantial under-reporting of LGBT  [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] identity and behaviors as well as underreporting of anti-gay sentiment …even under anonymous and very private conditions,” the researchers wrote in a working paper just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The study was conducted by economists Katherine B. Coffman and Lucas C. Coffman of Ohio State University and Keith M. Marzilli Ericson of Boston University

They used a novel research method that, in addition to the usual privacy and anonymity afforded by the best practice survey techniques, goes further and makes it virtually impossible to connect individual respondents with their answers to sensitive questions. They call this technique the “Veiled Report” method.

Then they compared their findings with the results obtained as part of the “Veiled Report” experiment with responses from a control group that answered questions posed in a more conventional way. Their goal was to see how social desirability bias—the tendency for people to not to reveal behaviors or attitudes that they fear may be viewed as outside the mainstream—may affect reporting on these sensitive topics..."

Read more from the Pew Research Center by clicking "Visit Website" below.

The results of the UMBC Homecoming Spirit Office Decorating Contest were revealed last night at the Faculty/Staff Social. More than 30 offices participated this year and the CSEE Department’s entry took first place in the Judge’s Choice category, which was based on site visits by a panel of judges from the UMBC alumni association, and third place in the People’s Choice category, which was determined by an online vote. The first place showing in the Judges Choice competition comes with a trophy and ten tickets to the Homecoming community picnic.

Congratulations to the CSEE staff for the great job of decorating the ITE325 suite for UMBC’s Homecoming. See pictures of their Maryland Beach Picnic themed display and stop by ITE325 during the rest of this week to experience the full multimedia effect and let the Department’s staff know what you think of their effort.

Story from: http://alexeymk.com/a-brief-guide-to-tech-internships/

Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel, 

No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.

As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech internships, plus some bloviating about my experience. The TL;DR is, try to have at least two internships: one at a small start-up and one at a tech company.

Wait, who are you?

I'm a CS senior at the University of Pennsylvania. I have interned at Facebook (Summer 2010), where I worked on application privacy, and as a generalist at 2bkco (Summer 2011), a new startup from serial enterpreneur Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch).  Both internships were great and invaluable. They were also very, very different, in terms of both the type of work I had to do and what I gained from the experience.

1) How do I get a good internship?

Luckily, a number of great posts have been written about this subject already.

• Andrew Munn has a great piece on interviewing and applying for tech internships, focusing primarily on what larger companies are looking for.
• Gayle Laakmann, author of Cracking the Coding Interview, has a post on the difference between what startups and tech companies are looking for.

To which I add my two cents:

• Start thinking about summer internships around Winter Break. Make a list of potential companies and start applying.  Don't be worried if the entire process takes until April or so, though.
• Get a referral rather than applying directly whenever possible.   Ask upperclassmen you know (think: TAs that like you) who could make a referral.  For earlier-stage companies, if they don't have an explicitly-listed referral program, don't worry about it: email the CEO. Hint: they are probably at firstname@startup.com.
• Practice technical interviews. If you're nervous about writing code on the whiteboard, try some combination of being drilled by upperclassmen, buying (and practicing going through) Gayle's Cracking the Coding Interview. Others also recommend interviewing with the companies you aren't as interested in first, using them to train.
• Optimize for what you can get. Bigger companies are going to (generally) look for a high GPA and good performance on brain teasers.  Smaller companies are going to prioritize a history of initiative and automony, as shown by cool projects on your resume.  If you've got a high GPA (at least 3.7 at Penn, say) and are good at brain teasers, you should be OK with larger companies; if not, start with a start-up.
• Your timing is great! Literally everybody is looking for software engineers right now, and internships are one of the key ways to recruit for companies. The market could not be any better for us. If you feel like you're not getting anywhere, make sure to apply beyond whatever is immediately available on campus. Competing with the general populace may be easier than competing with others at your university.
• Consider a mass-application or 'summer program', which are often offered by venture capital firms and have gained popularity in recent years.  Make sure to check out (and potentially apply via): hackNY fellows,Andreesen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Fellows, Bane's StartUp Academy, NYC Turing Fellows, InterviewStreet and InternMatch. None of these are a substitute for applying to companies individually (and I haven't tried them myself) but given the reasonably short time required to apply, they are probably worth doing.
• Location is a pretty big deal. Try to be in the Bay Area (Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc) if you can - it's awesome. and there are a ton of other interns around.  I hear New York is getting pretty fun as well, but don't have any personal experience. Other tech regions like Boston or Austin (and maybe LA and Philly) aren't bad, but make sure not to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, living in the suburbs as the only tech intern at a huge company.  That does not a fun summer make.

2) How do I pick where to apply/work?

Before applying, consider: "Am I excited about the products this company makes? Would I be excited to know that I work there?" It's much easier to get motivated (and show excitement) for a company you are excited about. I was Dropbox user #2001, which I did not neglect to mention when I applied. It helped. I think.

I strongly advice looking for internships with a big tech company or a startup, rather than a non-tech company (esp. financial) company that happens to have engineers. The explanation is a little long, so I'll just assume you nod along hummingly here. For the inquisitive: here's a longer argument.

Picking a startup
You want to work for (and learn from) the start-ups that are going to be successful, but as the Venture Capital industry knows full well, it's not always easy to pick winners.

There are, however, a few hints that you can pick up on and prioritize for when thinking about where to work:

• Has the founder had a successful start-up venture in the past? They must have done something right; past performance appears to be the best guarantor of success for tech enterpreneurs.
• Is the founder (or a large portion of the founding team) technical? Are they writing code? Do they come from a strong technical background, whether at a startup or from a top tech company?
• Does the company or its employees have a track record of being good mentors?  I wrote a Mentorship Checklist: questions worth asking to find out.
• Is the company pre or post "product-market fit?"  That is, are they figuring out what the heck it is that they are going to do that makes money, or have they figured it out and are trying to scale and make sure the servers don't melt with all the new traffic?  Both are exciting times in the life of a start-up; consider a pre-product market fit company if you're looking to get a big opportunity to contribute creatively and try new things, and a product-market fit company if you are interested in the technical challenge of quickly scaling a codebase.
• Is this a 'well known' startup? One of the downsides about working at a startup is that it doesn't usually yield the brand recognition of a 'Facebook' or a 'Google' on your resume. Working at a small company people have heard of (TechCrunch coverage/Twitter buzz being a reasonable proxy for 'heard of') helps negate that. Think (again) Quora, Path, Uber, Square, etc - small teams but well-known products.

Picking between larger companies

• The easiest way to figure out if a larger company is worth working for is by their reputation: ask upperclassmen, friends and professors.  
• Does the company have an official internship program? Does it sound awesome? Can you speak to somebody (ideally from your school, but from the company if not) who has been through the program as an intern? Talk about both intern housing and make sure to run through the Mentorship Checklist.
• Sites like glassdoor.com, which offer anonymous feedback from employees, a tremendously useful service as you try to figure out if this is one of those 'magical companies'. The sample size is not large enough to use for companies smaller than a few hundred employees, unfortunately.
• It's not always immediately clear whether a company is or is not a 'tech company' - Amazon and Barnes and Noble both sell books online and have e-readers available, but (from my intuition) Amazon is a tech company that happens to sell books on-line, whereas B&N is a book retailer that has been forced online and into e-readers by the prevailing winds of change. Which one sounds more fun to work at?
• One sign of an innovative company is a technical or product person in the CEO role - think of Larry Page's involvement with Google products compared to somebody like Lowell McAdam (who?) at Verizon.  It's more fun to work for a culture trying to build the future than one trying to maximize this quarter's revenues and 'maximize shareholder value.'
• In general, newer companies will have less middle-management cruft and set-in-their-wayedness than older ones.  There are some older companies with solid programs, like IBM's Extreme Blue, and some newer companies with terrible reputations I would advise against.

3) What you learn
(or at least what I learned)

In short, working with top technical people will teach you software engineering 'done right' (IE, no more turning in ugly code for your homework assignment that is going to be auto-graded once and then filed away forever). That means different things at earlier and later stage companies, though, and I can only relate my experience.

What I learned at Facebook
First and foremost, I learned to write 'good code'. My first non-trivial commit (15 lines or so) was rejected 6 or 7 times until I finally put the right amount of spacing in an "if (" and fixed my trailing whitespace. These were important, brilliant engineers politely telling an intern, time and time again, something that he should have found in the coding guidelines doc. I've been a little bit embarrased to show a lot of my pre-Facebook code, as a result - the improvement, at least for me, was significant. 

In general, the experience taught me that Code is Culture. The fact that top FB engineers were willing to spend so much of their time on code reviews was a fantastic way to show-not-tell Facebook's commitment to good code. I can't say that I've been able to pay the overhead of 100% code reviews on every project or team I've worked on since, but having the background of working in a 'code quality matters' team has infused the way I think about programming today.

I also learned that engineers are not immune to politics, even at great companies. I was playing around with a hackathon improvement to one of the sharing features, but the engineer who understood most of the code would not reply to my emails for weeks and claimed he was busy (which he was) when I walked over to his desk. My original pitch for the feature I wanted to work on was "You know what sucks about Facebook? X.  We should fix it." In retrospect, I did not do nearly a good enough job of trying to get the person on board or show respect for the work that had already been done.

What I learned at 2bkco
I joined the team several weeks after the engineering work had begun. It was very humbling to see the ease with which Eric would put together a component and then decide, several days later, that there was a better way to do something and throw it all away. When you know your code has a good chance of being thrown away, the priority becomes writing quickly in a way that can be cleaned up later (which is different than writing sloppily or writing 'homework' code).

I also got a lot of training in breadth: 2bkco required me to be close-enough to fluent in Javascript (Coffeescript), Ruby on Rails and HTML/CSS. It was too early in the life of the company for me to specialize, which meant a lot of time on Google and StackOverflow, learning how to do a ton of things as I went. I became much more comfortable forking Github projects of things that did sort of what I wanted.

Story from: http://alexeymk.com/a-brief-guide-to-tech-internships/

Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel, 

No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.

As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech internships, plus some bloviating about my experience. The TL;DR is, try to have at least two internships: one at a small start-up and one at a tech company.

Wait, who are you?

I'm a CS senior at the University of Pennsylvania. I have interned at Facebook (Summer 2010), where I worked on application privacy, and as a generalist at 2bkco (Summer 2011), a new startup from serial enterpreneur Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch).  Both internships were great and invaluable. They were also very, very different, in terms of both the type of work I had to do and what I gained from the experience.

1) How do I get a good internship?

Luckily, a number of great posts have been written about this subject already.

• Andrew Munn has a great piece on interviewing and applying for tech internships, focusing primarily on what larger companies are looking for.
• Gayle Laakmann, author of Cracking the Coding Interview, has a post on the difference between what startups and tech companies are looking for.

To which I add my two cents:

• Start thinking about summer internships around Winter Break. Make a list of potential companies and start applying.  Don't be worried if the entire process takes until April or so, though.
• Get a referral rather than applying directly whenever possible.   Ask upperclassmen you know (think: TAs that like you) who could make a referral.  For earlier-stage companies, if they don't have an explicitly-listed referral program, don't worry about it: email the CEO. Hint: they are probably at firstname@startup.com.
• Practice technical interviews. If you're nervous about writing code on the whiteboard, try some combination of being drilled by upperclassmen, buying (and practicing going through) Gayle's Cracking the Coding Interview. Others also recommend interviewing with the companies you aren't as interested in first, using them to train.
• Optimize for what you can get. Bigger companies are going to (generally) look for a high GPA and good performance on brain teasers.  Smaller companies are going to prioritize a history of initiative and automony, as shown by cool projects on your resume.  If you've got a high GPA (at least 3.7 at Penn, say) and are good at brain teasers, you should be OK with larger companies; if not, start with a start-up.
• Your timing is great! Literally everybody is looking for software engineers right now, and internships are one of the key ways to recruit for companies. The market could not be any better for us. If you feel like you're not getting anywhere, make sure to apply beyond whatever is immediately available on campus. Competing with the general populace may be easier than competing with others at your university.
• Consider a mass-application or 'summer program', which are often offered by venture capital firms and have gained popularity in recent years.  Make sure to check out (and potentially apply via): hackNY fellows,Andreesen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Fellows, Bane's StartUp Academy, NYC Turing Fellows, InterviewStreet and InternMatch. None of these are a substitute for applying to companies individually (and I haven't tried them myself) but given the reasonably short time required to apply, they are probably worth doing.
• Location is a pretty big deal. Try to be in the Bay Area (Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc) if you can - it's awesome. and there are a ton of other interns around.  I hear New York is getting pretty fun as well, but don't have any personal experience. Other tech regions like Boston or Austin (and maybe LA and Philly) aren't bad, but make sure not to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, living in the suburbs as the only tech intern at a huge company.  That does not a fun summer make.

2) How do I pick where to apply/work?

Before applying, consider: "Am I excited about the products this company makes? Would I be excited to know that I work there?" It's much easier to get motivated (and show excitement) for a company you are excited about. I was Dropbox user #2001, which I did not neglect to mention when I applied. It helped. I think.

I strongly advice looking for internships with a big tech company or a startup, rather than a non-tech company (esp. financial) company that happens to have engineers. The explanation is a little long, so I'll just assume you nod along hummingly here. For the inquisitive: here's a longer argument.

Picking a startup
You want to work for (and learn from) the start-ups that are going to be successful, but as the Venture Capital industry knows full well, it's not always easy to pick winners.

There are, however, a few hints that you can pick up on and prioritize for when thinking about where to work:

• Has the founder had a successful start-up venture in the past? They must have done something right; past performance appears to be the best guarantor of success for tech enterpreneurs.
• Is the founder (or a large portion of the founding team) technical? Are they writing code? Do they come from a strong technical background, whether at a startup or from a top tech company?
• Does the company or its employees have a track record of being good mentors?  I wrote a Mentorship Checklist: questions worth asking to find out.
• Is the company pre or post "product-market fit?"  That is, are they figuring out what the heck it is that they are going to do that makes money, or have they figured it out and are trying to scale and make sure the servers don't melt with all the new traffic?  Both are exciting times in the life of a start-up; consider a pre-product market fit company if you're looking to get a big opportunity to contribute creatively and try new things, and a product-market fit company if you are interested in the technical challenge of quickly scaling a codebase.
• Is this a 'well known' startup? One of the downsides about working at a startup is that it doesn't usually yield the brand recognition of a 'Facebook' or a 'Google' on your resume. Working at a small company people have heard of (TechCrunch coverage/Twitter buzz being a reasonable proxy for 'heard of') helps negate that. Think (again) Quora, Path, Uber, Square, etc - small teams but well-known products.

Picking between larger companies

• The easiest way to figure out if a larger company is worth working for is by their reputation: ask upperclassmen, friends and professors.  
• Does the company have an official internship program? Does it sound awesome? Can you speak to somebody (ideally from your school, but from the company if not) who has been through the program as an intern? Talk about both intern housing and make sure to run through the Mentorship Checklist.
• Sites like glassdoor.com, which offer anonymous feedback from employees, a tremendously useful service as you try to figure out if this is one of those 'magical companies'. The sample size is not large enough to use for companies smaller than a few hundred employees, unfortunately.
• It's not always immediately clear whether a company is or is not a 'tech company' - Amazon and Barnes and Noble both sell books online and have e-readers available, but (from my intuition) Amazon is a tech company that happens to sell books on-line, whereas B&N is a book retailer that has been forced online and into e-readers by the prevailing winds of change. Which one sounds more fun to work at?
• One sign of an innovative company is a technical or product person in the CEO role - think of Larry Page's involvement with Google products compared to somebody like Lowell McAdam (who?) at Verizon.  It's more fun to work for a culture trying to build the future than one trying to maximize this quarter's revenues and 'maximize shareholder value.'
• In general, newer companies will have less middle-management cruft and set-in-their-wayedness than older ones.  There are some older companies with solid programs, like IBM's Extreme Blue, and some newer companies with terrible reputations I would advise against.

3) What you learn
(or at least what I learned)

In short, working with top technical people will teach you software engineering 'done right' (IE, no more turning in ugly code for your homework assignment that is going to be auto-graded once and then filed away forever). That means different things at earlier and later stage companies, though, and I can only relate my experience.

What I learned at Facebook
First and foremost, I learned to write 'good code'. My first non-trivial commit (15 lines or so) was rejected 6 or 7 times until I finally put the right amount of spacing in an "if (" and fixed my trailing whitespace. These were important, brilliant engineers politely telling an intern, time and time again, something that he should have found in the coding guidelines doc. I've been a little bit embarrased to show a lot of my pre-Facebook code, as a result - the improvement, at least for me, was significant. 

In general, the experience taught me that Code is Culture. The fact that top FB engineers were willing to spend so much of their time on code reviews was a fantastic way to show-not-tell Facebook's commitment to good code. I can't say that I've been able to pay the overhead of 100% code reviews on every project or team I've worked on since, but having the background of working in a 'code quality matters' team has infused the way I think about programming today.

I also learned that engineers are not immune to politics, even at great companies. I was playing around with a hackathon improvement to one of the sharing features, but the engineer who understood most of the code would not reply to my emails for weeks and claimed he was busy (which he was) when I walked over to his desk. My original pitch for the feature I wanted to work on was "You know what sucks about Facebook? X.  We should fix it." In retrospect, I did not do nearly a good enough job of trying to get the person on board or show respect for the work that had already been done.

What I learned at 2bkco
I joined the team several weeks after the engineering work had begun. It was very humbling to see the ease with which Eric would put together a component and then decide, several days later, that there was a better way to do something and throw it all away. When you know your code has a good chance of being thrown away, the priority becomes writing quickly in a way that can be cleaned up later (which is different than writing sloppily or writing 'homework' code).

I also got a lot of training in breadth: 2bkco required me to be close-enough to fluent in Javascript (Coffeescript), Ruby on Rails and HTML/CSS. It was too early in the life of the company for me to specialize, which meant a lot of time on Google and StackOverflow, learning how to do a ton of things as I went. I became much more comfortable forking Github projects of things that did sort of what I wanted.

UMBC’s CyberDawgs placed second at the 2013 Maryland Cyber Challenge (MDC3) finals that were held in Baltimore on October 9 as part of the CyberMaryland 2013 conference.

CyberDawgs-1 (pictured above) included William Thomas, Anthony Sasadeusz, Kenneth Johansen Jorge Teixeira, AJ Hallameyer, and Fahad Alduraibi.

During the finals, teams competed in a Control-the-Flag event where they attempted to gain (and maintain) control of other systems on the network – which were also being targeted by other teams seeking to gain and ‘own’ them as well.

All of UMBC’s three CyberDawg teams competed vigorously throughout the MDC3 season and maintained a very tight scoring situation for the college division. However, by taking second place in today’s finals, each member of CyberDawgs-1 will receive a $2,000 cash prize provided by the National Security Agency.

CSEE’s Dr. Richard Forno and Dr. Charles Nicholas are faculty advisors to the team.  UMBC is a co-founder of the Maryland Cyber Challenge.

Name:  Chris Harried

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: AmeriCorps State & National

Location of the Organization (City, State): Philadelphia PA, Atlanta GA

Major(s)/Minor(s):  Political Science

Expected Graduation Date (Month & Year): 2016

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service- learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

This summer, I served as an AmeriCorps Community Service Fellow with HOPE worldwide, an international non-profit organization. As a member of the inaugural cohort of the CSF program, the structure of the internship experience was not only new for the participants, but also those who helped coordinate the program.

The overall structure of the CSF program focuses on preparing individuals to have the necessary skills to be a valuable asset in the non-profit/non-governmental organization sector. This objective is accomplished through a rigorous but highly rewarding schedule compiled with a 2 ½ weeks training period and a 4 week guided service learning experience. During the 2 week training period, I completed day classes in the area of nonprofit leadership and management at Eastern University.  The first portion of my 4 week service period consisted of me serving as a camp counselor for diverse population of youth from across the Eastern United States. The second portion of my guided service experience (called “HOPE Youth Corps”) focused on me working with a group of inner-city youth in Northwest Atlanta.

On a daily basis, my essential responsibilities included:

-Provide instruction using Peacemakers Curriculum

-Facilitate instruction using the Environmental Education Curriculum.

-Plan and implement volunteer events and activities at assigned HOPE Youth Corps Site or summer camp

-Serve as a counselor, facilitator and mentor at summer camp programs

Some of my other responsibilities included:

Organize and Participate in Community Service Activities

Coordinate Functions of HOPE Youth Corps site and/or Youth Camps

Conduct fundraising activities for HOPE Youth Corps

Support functions for the summer programs such as a rotation food or site preparation schedule for the youth and organizing cleaning parties with the youth.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I absolutely enjoyed working as a mentor to the different groups of young people that the program served and learning more about their life experiences.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

I’ve learned more about what it means to be a leader and how to engage others in meaningful acts of service. I also gained hands-on experience in program coordination, event planning, and community service engagement. I was fortunate enough to learn more about the importance of humility and what it means to lead others by serving them. HOPE worldwide is a respected and recognized non-profit organization that has helped meet the needs of millions of the world’s most destitute citizens. Their staff and systemic approach to identifying and addressing needs are valuable assets that have helped me to expand my worldview and enhance my problem-solving abilities.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

Internships are an invaluable source of real world experience that allots one the chance to explore different career options while still being in school. The Shriver Center at UMBC provides a diverse and engaging portfolio of internship opportunities. The staff are extremely knowledgeable and possess a vast array of resources to help move students forward in the college career.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

Being selected to serve this summer as an AmeriCorps Community Service Fellow with HOPE worldwide has allocated me the opportunity to grow immensely in my character, my professionalism, and my overall attitude towards community service in general. As a facilitator of a conflict resolution curriculum, I personally gained a large assortment of tools that I can utilize in my interactions with others. Although I was assigned to be a leader and was expected to be a resource to the individuals I worked with, I felt that our relationship was mutualistic, with me learning as much from them as I hoped they were able to learn from me.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process / the Shriver Center:

I am so glad that the Shriver Center staff worked with me to help me earn credit for the time I served on AmeriCorps.

Name:  Chris Harried

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: AmeriCorps State & National

Location of the Organization (City, State): Philadelphia PA, Atlanta GA

Major(s)/Minor(s):  Political Science

Expected Graduation Date (Month & Year): 2016

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service- learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

This summer, I served as an AmeriCorps Community Service Fellow with HOPE worldwide, an international non-profit organization. As a member of the inaugural cohort of the CSF program, the structure of the internship experience was not only new for the participants, but also those who helped coordinate the program.

The overall structure of the CSF program focuses on preparing individuals to have the necessary skills to be a valuable asset in the non-profit/non-governmental organization sector. This objective is accomplished through a rigorous but highly rewarding schedule compiled with a 2 ½ weeks training period and a 4 week guided service learning experience. During the 2 week training period, I completed day classes in the area of nonprofit leadership and management at Eastern University.  The first portion of my 4 week service period consisted of me serving as a camp counselor for diverse population of youth from across the Eastern United States. The second portion of my guided service experience (called “HOPE Youth Corps”) focused on me working with a group of inner-city youth in Northwest Atlanta.

On a daily basis, my essential responsibilities included:

-Provide instruction using Peacemakers Curriculum

-Facilitate instruction using the Environmental Education Curriculum.

-Plan and implement volunteer events and activities at assigned HOPE Youth Corps Site or summer camp

-Serve as a counselor, facilitator and mentor at summer camp programs

Some of my other responsibilities included:

Organize and Participate in Community Service Activities

Coordinate Functions of HOPE Youth Corps site and/or Youth Camps

Conduct fundraising activities for HOPE Youth Corps

Support functions for the summer programs such as a rotation food or site preparation schedule for the youth and organizing cleaning parties with the youth.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I absolutely enjoyed working as a mentor to the different groups of young people that the program served and learning more about their life experiences.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

I’ve learned more about what it means to be a leader and how to engage others in meaningful acts of service. I also gained hands-on experience in program coordination, event planning, and community service engagement. I was fortunate enough to learn more about the importance of humility and what it means to lead others by serving them. HOPE worldwide is a respected and recognized non-profit organization that has helped meet the needs of millions of the world’s most destitute citizens. Their staff and systemic approach to identifying and addressing needs are valuable assets that have helped me to expand my worldview and enhance my problem-solving abilities.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

Internships are an invaluable source of real world experience that allots one the chance to explore different career options while still being in school. The Shriver Center at UMBC provides a diverse and engaging portfolio of internship opportunities. The staff are extremely knowledgeable and possess a vast array of resources to help move students forward in the college career.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

Being selected to serve this summer as an AmeriCorps Community Service Fellow with HOPE worldwide has allocated me the opportunity to grow immensely in my character, my professionalism, and my overall attitude towards community service in general. As a facilitator of a conflict resolution curriculum, I personally gained a large assortment of tools that I can utilize in my interactions with others. Although I was assigned to be a leader and was expected to be a resource to the individuals I worked with, I felt that our relationship was mutualistic, with me learning as much from them as I hoped they were able to learn from me.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process / the Shriver Center:

I am so glad that the Shriver Center staff worked with me to help me earn credit for the time I served on AmeriCorps.