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Through the winter, the Women's Center staff will be working remotely and in-person. We encourage campus community members to contact us through email at womenscenter@umbc.edu or via phone at 410-455-2714. Staff will generally be most available between the hours of 10am - 4pm. We appreciate your patience in our response to your email or returning your phone call.
On Study Day (Wednesday, 12/14), 12/15, 12/16, 12/19, and 12/20 the Women's Center lounge will be open from 11 am to 3pm.
During the Winter Term, the Women’s Center Lounge will re-open on Tuesday, Jan 3rd and will be open from 10am to 3pm Tuesday through Thursday. The Women’s Center will be closed on Fridays.
Women's Center staff will be working remotely on Mondays and while our lounge will be closed, staff are still available to support the UMBC community - please reach out to a staff member directly or through our shared email or phone.
Our normal Spring hours will resume on January 30th with the beginning of the Spring semester.
The Women's Center lactation room continues to be available by reservation. For details, contact us at womenscenter@umbc.edu.
Individualized Support Meetings:
Women's Center professional staff are available for individual meetings and support which we can provide via phone or video chat and in some cases in-person; to schedule an appointment, email womenscenter@umbc.edu or call 410-455-2714. If you are already working with a specific staff member and need to set up additional meetings, feel free to reach out to the staff member you have been working with directly (via email or even g-chat!).
Visit our website for all the ways we can provide support.
If you haven't already, follow us on social media where we're sharing resources and communicating with our community!
Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Please also feel free to communicate with us through any of these channels.
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Other Helpful Resources:
To report and seek services for incidents related to sexual violence, relationship violence, and all other sexual misconduct, complete the online form located on the Office of Equity and Inclusion's website. TurnAround's 24/7 helpline is 443-279-0379. For a full list of off-campus resources, visit Retriever Courage.
For UMBC community members who need access to healthy food and other essential supplies visit Retriever Essentials or the myUMBC Retriever Essentials group for up-to-date information on how to access food and toiletry items.
For information about Academic Success Center's services and support (tutoring, Writing Center, SI Pass, academic advocates, etc.) visit their website.
For access to health and human services information, visit 2-1-1 Maryland or dial 2-1-1.
For UMBC-related COVID-19 updates, visit covid19.umbc.edu or email covid19@umbc.edu.
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Nilanjan Banerjee, professor of computer science and electrical engineering (Marlayna Demond '11/UMBCUMBC researchers designed the Cybersecurity for Manufacturing Operational Technology (CyMOT) program to help manufacturing professionals grow their cybersecurity skills, protecting the sector from cyber threats and increasing their career opportunities. Now, the program has received significant additional funding to expand its impact.
The CyMOT program -- launched in 2020 in collaboration with the Chicago-based MxD (Manufacturing x Digital) and UMBC Training Centers -- has been renewed with a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense's Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation (OLDCC). The funding will support the implementation of new training curricula around machine learning and cybersecurity.
"In recent years, there has been a large number of cyber attacks on the manufacturing sector," says Nilanjan Banerjee, professor of computer science and electrical engineering and the grant's principal investigator. To address this rising concern, Banerjee explains, CyMOT aims to "make sure that people that are in the manufacturing business can get trained and upskilled in cybersecurity concepts around manufacturing."
Read more about the CyMOT program in this UMBC News article.
]]>Attention all UMBC student employees!
What could be better than having an on-campus job?
Having an on-campus job and getting a notation on your transcript that tells employers you made the effort to enhance your professional development!
Interested in gaining a competitive edge in the job market? Sign up for PRAC 102- Building Skills for Career Success this Spring semester. Don’t worry, it’s not a formal class! With the minimal commitment of attending a few workshops and career events, you will be better prepared for the world of work and have the proof on your college transcript to show your employer.
DEADLINE TO REQUEST ENROLLMENT: Thursday, March 2,2023
Make your campus experience count! Enroll TODAY! Enrollment is limited to the first 40 student employees. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by!
Open to all levels and majors. You must be a UMBC student employee working at least eight hours per week on campus.
Log in to Handshake, then navigate to Career Center > Experiences.
Click “Request an Experience” and select “Career Center – On-Campus Student Employment (PRAC 102- Building Skills for Career Success)” as the Experience Type. Fill in the required fields and submit.
Your registration will be reviewed within two business days. The Career Center will enroll you directly upon review along with sending you additional details.
QUESTIONS, please contact Stephanie Taylor (staylor18@umbc.edu)
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Content Note: This post is written by Rachael Joslow, a third-year student at UMBC. I am a transracial adoptee adopted from Vietnam who grew up in Georgia for most of my childhood and adolescent life. I hope to highlight my experience growing up as an adopted child discussing my personal feelings on adoption and the ambiguous loss that I experience. I would like you, as the reader, to acknowledge and learn the realities of adoption through my experiences.
In my previous blog, I discussed my personal experience with being adopted and included some other stories of adoptees (My Personal Experience with Being Adopted). Within that blog, I addressed common questions those would ask of me if I mentioned that I was adopted. These questions being: "What was it like being told that you were adopted?" or "Is it hard being adopted?" My focus from my last blog was to give awareness on the topic while being vulnerable about my own experiences and those of other adoptees who have shared their stories online.
I wanted to recap some aspects from my last blog, because many have come forward to ask me more about what it is like being adopted and how those experiences have shaped me. As it is touched on from my previous blog, many positive adoption experiences from adoptive parents overlook the negative and traumatizing experiences of many adoptees, specifically transracial adoptees. Some adoptees learn that their adoptive parents carry a savior complex over their adoptive children, especially for transracial adoptee cases where they are from foreign countries and the parents are a different nationality/ethnicity. Unfortunately, it does come up in adoption very often, especially when adoptive parents believe they are "saving us" from the situation that we're in. And to be clear, it's not that adoptees are not grateful-it is valid for us to feel uncomfortable being paraded as trophies for adoptive parents to receive a gold star on their "good deeds" list.
A quote from an article titled "What We Lost" resonated with me about the frustration adoptees feel towards society telling us that we should be grateful for everything and not express our sadness or negative feelings towards being adopted.
"Society's narrative of adoption tells adoptees, in no uncertain terms, that if we were given to a loving home, we shouldn't feel this pain, this chasm, this rip, this tear. We were saved, after all. We're so much better off. We're the lucky ones. Our parents must be such wonderful people. We must feel so grateful. How lucky. How special. We were meant to be together. Everything worked out just the way it was supposed to in the end."
This quote calls out people who don't take adoptees' feelings into consideration when we, adoptees, talk about our feelings on adoption. People tell us constantly how we should feel instead of giving us a moment to speak about our lived experiences. There is no time for us to pause or talk about it as a whole. In addition, these experiences contribute to this sense of loss that I've been bearing over the years that is specific to adoptees. It is constantly brought up in different ways how I'm adopted and I have no connection to my birth parents. Because this is an extremely vulnerable topic for me to discuss, I've had to take extensive time to write this blog in order to give myself space to take breaks until I felt ready to come back to it. However you feel about adoption, a common experience that many adoptees share would be the sense of loss from identity, as well as the relationships we have missed out on.
Ambiguous loss is a type of grief that lacks closure and information regarding the loss of a loved one or the loss of a connection with a loved one. Ambiguous loss is common in cases when we have no contact with somebody even though we know where the person could be or what has happened to them. Examples include divorce, estrangement, immigration, a loved one who is incarcerated, and of course, adoption.
Thinking about my birth parents feels weird. I visited Vietnam back when I was eleven years old and struggled with finding my connections back to my culture, the country I was born in. From my perspective, I've experienced a lot of ambiguous loss ever since I was able to understand that I was adopted, as early as five or six years old. There are no names on my original birth certificate on who my biological parents are. I don't know the language nor have I experienced Vietnamese culture growing up. I considered myself white-washed for a long time because I did not have what others might consider key Asian experiences. It felt like I did not deserve to call myself Vietnamese because even though I was considered Vietnamese in appearance, I do not have those interpersonal connections to my ethnicity. I'm Asian but I'm also not Asian.
What I mean by that statement is that I lack the cultural background that a Vietnamese-American/Vietnamese person might experience normally. It was made apparent to me growing up through middle school and high school that I was different from other Asian peers. I don't know a lot of cultural foods and I did not grow up with the same household items. Even out in public, it is made apparent by strangers where people don't realize that I'm standing next to my mom. It's a weird paradox to be seen as Asian in some settings and not Asian in others. There's also an internal loss where I feel left out from being Asian.
From the same article, "What We Lost," this next quote resonates with me on what ambiguous loss feels like and expressing heavy feelings towards what it's like to not have a relationship with one's birth mother as an adoptee.
"Adoption loss is an ambiguous loss. While it changes shape over time, it is often life-long. It is without end. I have lost my entire family and yet, there are no bodies to bury, no socially acceptable ritual or process meant for me to understand this loss and how to live with it. My mother went on living, became someone else's mother, while I lived my young life with only the presence of her absence and the fracturing unknown. Maybe she's alive; maybe she's dead. Maybe she loves me; maybe she has forgotten me. Maybe anything."
It's difficult to put it into words. I have no idea where my biological parents are, if they are still in Vietnam or even alive. I'm constantly mourning over the loss of everything in those relationships that I never had with my birth parents. However, it's not like I'm sad-it feels empty. I have spent most of my life pondering whether or not I cross their minds. These feelings of mine are real and okay for me to feel. On this note, I can still be grateful to my mom and love my mom while appreciating her for everything. While she has given me so many opportunities throughout my life, she also does not hold it above my head that I should be grateful because she adopted me.
It feels nice to put these feelings into words and share them, because not many people are aware of what adoptees go through in their lives. This is my experience with adoption and ambiguous loss and I hope that I've left you as the reader with some things to think about. And as always, please make space where you can and listen to adoptees' feelings and voices when they share their experiences.
The article I attached is where I got the two quotes from. It is a heavy read as it talks about the writer's personal experience with being adopted and meeting her birth mother. It is important to be in a clear headspace before reading this story:
What We Lost: Undoing the Fairy Tale Narrative of Adoption
Articles that talk more on white saviorism:
A Savior No One Needs: Unpacking and Overcoming the White Savior Complex
What Is White Savior Complex-And Why Is It Harmful?
