• Present research at Leadership Alliance National Symposium (LANS) as well as a UVA research symposium.
• Work hands-on with UVA faculty mentor(s) and graduate student mentor(s).
• Participate in workshops on research methods, statistical software, and the grad school application process.

• A $3000 stipend and some travel and meal expenses.
• Housing in a university residence hall.

• Be a member of a group that is underrepresented in educational research.
• Be a current junior, with 2 semesters or less to complete after the internship.

“So, What Can you do with Your Major?”

The Holidays are quickly approaching. Many of us will be traveling and visiting family and friends. Some of us may go to holiday parties filled with our parents’ friends and people we typically only see once a year. At all of these events you are more than likely going to be asked “So what do you want to do with your major?” you’ll probably be asked more than once. 

If you aren't quite sure what you want to do with your degree yet, this is probably a very frustrating question. When you answer that you aren't quite sure yet, you’ll get responses that almost definitely indicate that your relatives think you are doing nothing but sleeping in or going to parties. Other possible responses include your neighbor beginning to tell you how she ended up working at her dead end job that she hates, or your mom’s best friend telling you how wonderful her son is doing at college. No matter the response you get you probably won’t end up finding your dream career over Thanksgiving dinner or at that awkward holiday party. 

I am a biology major and I have known for a while that I want to work with animals in some way. I absolutely loved the vacation I took with my family to Yellowstone National Park. I told my relatives that I really liked the idea of working with the wildlife, like at Yellowstone. They then proceeded to think I wanted to be a forest ranger. For years they thought I wanted to be a forest ranger until they asked me about how UMBC was preparing me to be a forest ranger. I looked at them so confused! 

My career path has changed many times since I have been at UMBC. I wanted to be a bioengineer, then a veterinarian, then a geneticist, then I wanted to do something more computational, then I wanted to do biomedical research, and now I am applying to graduate school to study evolutionary biology.

Your career path is not always clear cut. You may even change majors from biology to chemistry and then from chemistry to economics, and then from economics to global studies. If you aren't sure what you want to do, come to the Career Center and set up an appointment and we can help you identify possible career paths related to your interests.

If you don’t want to end up hiding in the corner with your older sister who graduated over a year ago and still doesn't have a job, then come to the Career Center. You can also check out some of the career exploration tools on our website like the Woofound Compass which is a quick and easy personality assessment. And the Focus 2 is an excellent self-assessment tool that uses your interests, personality, skills, and values to develop a long list of possible careers. The Focus 2, along with career advisement provided by Career Specialists, can help you clarify your career path. We have several other career assessment tools on our website that you may find useful as well.

WAVE FELLOWS

Caltech is committed to promoting diversity within its educational programs and activities and strives to ensure that differing cultural, ethnic, social, geographic, and economic perspectives are represented.    Caltech's WAVE Fellows program aims to foster diversity by increasing the participation of underrepresented students in science and engineering Ph.D. programs and making Caltech's programs more visible and accessible to students not traditionally exposed to Caltech. The program supports Caltech's commitment to training a diverse set of science, technology, engineering, and math leaders.  The program is extended, but not limited, to underrepresented minorities, women, first-generation college students, geographically underrepresented students, and educationally and financially disadvantaged students.

In this week’s Ebiquity meeting (10am Wed Nov. 12), Jennifer Sleeman will talk about “Taming Wild Big Data”.

Wild Big Data is data that is hard to extract, understand, and use due to its heterogeneous nature and volume. It typically comes without a schema, is obtained from multiple sources and provides a challenge for information extraction and integration. We describe a way to subduing Wild Big Data that uses techniques and resources that are popular for processing natural language text. The approach is applicable to data that is presented as a graph of objects and relations between them and to tabular data that can be transformed into such a graph. We start by applying topic models to contextualize the data and then use the results to identify the potential types of the graph’s nodes by mapping them to known types found in large open ontologies such as Freebase, and DBpedia. The results allow us to assemble coarse clusters of objects that can then be used to interpret the link and perform entity disambiguation and record linking.

UMBC ACM techTalk

Increasing Base-Station Anonymity in
Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks

Profesor Mohamed Younis
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:15pm Wednesday, 12 November 2014, ITE 325b

In many applications of ad-hoc networks, the bulk of the traffic is targeted to few nodes. For example, in wireless sensor networks the base-station (BS) collects data from a large number of sensor nodes. Another example is a surveillance network in which the gathered intelligence data about criminal activities flow towards field commanders and/or an in-situ BS. Such a network operation model makes the BS a critical asset for these applications. An adversary can nullify the value of a network by simply disrupting or physically damaging the BS, without targeting individual data sources. The failure of the BS can also cause a loss of important data that may not have been processed and can cause a major negative impact if the BS represents a commanding authority for the network. Therefore, concealing the location and role of the BS is of utmost importance for maintaining a robust network operation.

Packet encryption does not achieve BS anonymity since an adversary can intercept the individual wireless transmissions and employ traffic analysis techniques to follow the data paths without knowing the content of intercepted traffic. Since all active routes end at the BS, the adversary may be able to determine the BS’s location and launch targeted attacks. Similarly, camouflaging or hiding the BS does not provide protection when its location is unveiled via traffic analysis. Employing spread spectrum signaling methods is not a sufficient BS anonymity countermeasure as adversaries are becoming more advanced and equipped with sophisticated intercept technologies. In addition, signal spreading reduces rather than eliminates the prospect of transmission detection. This talk will highlight the traffic analysis threat, present anonymity assessment metrics, provide an overview of effective cross-layer techniques developed in the ESNet Lab for increasing the BS anonymity, and outline open research problems.

Dr. Mohamed Younis is an associate professor in the department of computer science and electrical engineering at the university of Maryland, Baltimore County. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology. Before joining UMBC, he was with the Advanced Systems Technology Group, an Aerospace Electronic Systems R&D organization of Honeywell International Inc. While at Honeywell he led multiple projects for building integrated fault tolerant avionics and dependable computing infrastructure. He also participated in the development of the Redundancy Management System, which is a key component of the Vehicle and Mission Computer for NASA-s X-33 space launch vehicle. He has published over 150 technical papers in refereed conferences and journals. Dr. Younis has five granted and two pending patents. In addition, he serves/served on the editorial board of multiple journals and the organizing and technical program committees of numerous conferences. Dr. Younis is a senior member of the IEEE.

Renetta Tull, associate vice provost for graduate student development and postdoctoral affairs and director of PROMISE, will chair the “Women in Engineering, Partnerships and Professional Development” session at the 2014 World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF), which will host the International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning. She will also present her research on graduate student diversity and Maryland’s Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) at the conference.

Additionally, Tull has been invited to participate in meetings for the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies based on her work with women in STEM through the National Science Foundation ADVANCE project and Latin and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions.

Click here to read more about Tull’s work.

It’s time for Winter Commencement and we need your help!

Planning is underway for the upcoming 2014 Winter Commencement Ceremonies and we are looking for volunteers to help with different parts of the ceremony. Be sure to sign up as soon as possible so you have the best opportunity to select your choice job.

Please visit the online sign-up form to see what roles to see which roles are available and make your selection. You will receive a confirmation e-mail after you submit your selection. NOTE: fewer number of volunteers are needed for the graduate ceremony.

As a reminder, the dates for the ceremonies are:

Graduate Commencement
Wednesday, December 17 – 10 a.m.
Retriever Activities Center

Undergraduate Commencement
Thursday, December 18 – processional begins at 9:40 a.m.
Retriever Activities Center

Volunteer training for both ceremonies is scheduled for Tuesday, December 16 in the RAC. Undergraduate training will be at 1 p.m. followed by the Grad School training at 2 p.m.

If you have any questions, please contact Erin Johnson, ejohnso@umbc.edu.