The University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Athletic department welcomed Brian Barrio to the Retriever Nation in December, from his former position as athletic director for Central Connecticut State University. Along with his previous athletic administrative experience, Barrio has an educational background in communications and law, one he used as associate commissioner for the America East. In this position, Barrio worked with the America East’s nine universities to enforce NCAA compliance regulations and to oversee the welfare of student athletes.

By combining his knowledge of athletic compliance with his history of connecting with student athletes, Barrio looks to expand the reach of UMBC’s Athletic Department into the greater UMBC community.

After watching the men’s basketball team beat the University of Virginia in 2018, as well as softball and the men’s lacrosse conference championship wins last spring, Barrio said he knew that something good was happening at UMBC. As soon as he arrived at the school, he began meeting with the coaches and athletic staff to find out exactly what the foundation of UMBC’s athletic success was built on.

Besides hearing about the camaraderie between student athletes and coaches on different teams, Barrio was pleased to learn how much importance was placed on academics.

“I’ve been overwhelmed with how seriously everyone in the athletic department takes the academic mission,” Barrio said. “It’s really heartening to me because that’s kind of my background and what I’m about.”

This focus on academics is something that Barrio states is missing from many college athletic programs across the country. In the face of scandals, like the University of Missouri’s three-year probation for having a tutor do the work of 12 student athletes and the University of Oregon’s two-year probation for falsifying the grades of track and field athlete, Barrio believes these incidents would never happen at UMBC.

However, Barrio argues that the classroom is not the only source of education. To him, the playing field, the pool and the track are part of a “co-curricular education” that is equally important in the development of UMBC’s student athletes.

“We teach things like work ethic, accountability and teamwork,” Barrio explained. “Things you may not learn in your chemistry lab, but are important to becoming the person you want to become.”

This additional education comes as part of Barrio’s holistic approach to athletics. Unlike other athletic leaders, Barrio believes that a student athlete’s experience in college athletics should be transformational, not transactional. Rather than viewing student athletes as a source of revenue, Barrio sees them as people. With this perspective, Barrio is more concerned with how the athletic staff, particularly the coaches, are enriching the student athletes’ lives. Coaches are an integral part of a student athlete’s life and, to Barrio, they should remain so, even after a student athlete’s four years at UMBC conclude.

“One of the things that I tell coaches all the time, and I’ve told all our coaches already, is if five or 10 years after your student athletes are leaving your program, they’re not inviting you to their wedding, then you’re doing something wrong,” Barrio said.

While continuing UMBC athletics’ academic success and the enrichment of the lives of student athletes, Barrio hopes to improve on areas where the department is struggling, such as revenue generation and budgeting. Barrio is pleased to see how much UMBC Athletics accomplishes on such a small budget, but believes there is still a lot of room for growth.

“A dollar that we spend more efficiently is as good as a dollar that we raise, so we’ve got to become really smart and really efficient,” Barrio explained.

With this attitude, Barrio hopes to rework the way that UMBC athletics markets its games to students and the community, as well as how the department spends money. For marketing, Barrio believes the department needs to fine-tune its message to UMBC’s unique student body. Instead of focusing on what works for other universities, Barrio challenges the athletic marketing team to advertise its games in a way that speaks to UMBC’s more academically oriented audience.

UMBC’s Athletic Department has experienced steady growth since 2018 and Barrio hopes that a new perspective on how the department operates will only serve to accelerate that trend.

I landed at LAX on a Sunday night, just a few minutes shy of midnight. I’d been bouncing from airport to airplane for the last 10 hours. When I turned on my phone, I got a notification. It was time to check in for my flight back to Maryland, which would take off in approximately 20 hours. In that 20 hours, I needed to sleep, eat and sightsee. But most importantly, I needed to do well in four hours of interviews that would determine if I would get a job at a self-storage start-up in Los Angeles. And, if I had a few extra minutes, study for an algorithms quiz.

There is a kind of in-the-moment exhaustion that comes from hard work with no immediate results. It is, in my opinion, the primary emotion of college. We all work and study, paying for the privilege to do so. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very lucky to have the opportunity and financial resources to go to college, but sometimes it feels like you’re trying to break through a brick wall with your forehead.

For seniors, that feeling is only compounded by the uncertainty, effort and rejection brought on by the job search. Last semester, I applied for almost 50 jobs. I completed more than 25 interviews, some on campus, some over the phone and some, like the L.A. interview, on-site. After weeks of practice, months of worry and years of study, I got two job offers: the culmination of 16 years of education, even more so than my upcoming graduation.

And after that graduation, I’ll be moving 3000 miles away to begin my career as a software engineer at Microsoft.

There are a few standard responses I get when I tell people my plans for after graduation: “You’re so lucky” (yes), “you must be so smart” (kind of), “so, are you just really good at coding?” (definitely not). None of them get at the real reason I got this job. Yes, I was really lucky. And yes, I’m a pretty good computer scientist (but nowhere near the best). Being smart and good at your major can get you a good job, but to go the extra mile, you need stamina, the ability to not take anything personally and enough preparation to take advantage of any luck you might have.

The Microsoft interview process moves much faster than you might think. My first interview was on campus at the end of October, I flew out to Seattle for a day of interviews in the middle of November and I signed my offer letter before Thanksgiving. It’s still a little hard to believe it happened. But I’m going back to Seattle over spring break to look at apartments, all because I impressed five people over the course of a few hours. Not that the interview process is easy — far from it. But compared to the years of work it took to get in the room, answering a couple algorithms and data structure questions were a walk in the park, the final push in the last mile of a marathon.

On the day of the Microsoft interviews, I arrived before the sun came up. I’d already finished interviews at the L.A. start-up and Google, so I basically knew what to expect. There was a corral of other students wearing various interpretations of business casual attire. They fed us a breakfast of various pastries and cut fruit as interviewers came out, calling the names of their targets.

Each interview took 45 minutes. After you finished, you were returned to the holding pen to nervously look up answers to things you thought you got wrong and drink a little too much caffeine. Then, a 15-minute break passed before you went back again to a slightly different room and a slightly different interview.

Once everyone had completed their four interviews, they gave us each a slightly-too-large branded hoodie and released us back into the wild. We all ate lunch together and speculated about jobs, trying not to get our hopes too high or imagine what our lives could be if we got the job. We wandered around Microsoft’s campus, through walking paths and woods, gardens and green spaces. In some places, you could barely see the tops of the glass buildings over the redwoods. The sun was shining, and we were in giddy limbo.

After we’d all said our goodbyes and gone our separate ways, I went back to my hotel. It was only four in the afternoon. I should have gone out. I should have walked around the city, found a nice bar, sat and had a drink in the place I was hoping to call home. Instead, I went up to my room. I changed into sweatpants and wrapped myself in a bathrobe. I ordered $50 of room service (thank you, Microsoft travel allowance). I sat and watched the sunset over Lake Washington, demolishing a massive burger, a plateful of fries and a drink more expensive than my usual daily food budget. I may or may not have cried at the sunset over Lake Washington. I was completely and utterly exhausted. If I didn’t get the job, I wasn’t sure if I would have the energy to keep at the interviewing grindstone.

In the days after, my only other offer expired. It was from the start-up in L.A., the one I spent 48 grueling hours traveling to secure. I let it. By all accounts it was a stupid move. I had no promise of an offer from Microsoft, but I knew L.A. wasn’t the place for me and a start-up wasn’t the job for me. I was back where I began, with many, many rejections and no clear job after I graduated. It was quite possibly the most anxious time in my life. I could have accepted the start-up’s offer, but instead I forced myself through the final push. I’d come too far and worked too hard to compromise.

Three days later, Microsoft called with the offer. For the first time in years, I relaxed.

I did a few things that gave me the tools I needed to take advantage of the luck I had. First, I practiced interviewing like a skill. Throughout the summer I met with other computer science majors and we took turns interviewing each other, using practice interview questions we found online. Next, I applied to jobs like crazy and made each application count. For two months, I applied to five jobs per week, tailoring each resume and cover letter to each job. I made it a goal to get 30 rejection letters instead of a job, reframing what could be demoralizing and turning it into something to work towards. Finally, I researched the company before every interview I had. I learned what projects each company had recently launched, the market share of their products and the structure of their engineering teams. If they had open-sourced code, I did my best to understand that too.

All three of these things boil down to one key trait: I put in the effort to show I cared about every position I was applying for. I used all the discipline and skills I developed over the course of my degree, and it worked.

UMBC has been a wonderful home for the past four years. I’ve made friends and grown into an adult, all while building the portfolio I needed to move on to the next stage in my life. But I’ve also sat crying in front of my computer, typing away at a project because I don’t have time to take a break for a panic attack. I know starting a new job will be an incredibly stressful experience, but I’ve reached a place where all that delayed gratification is beginning to catch up to me. My work was validated. I get to move to an exciting new city and start a job I only fleetingly dreamed of getting, in large part because I had the will to keep trying my hardest till the very end.

Emily Hobby is a senior computer science major and creative writing minor graduating in May.

Retriever Essentials partners are committed to providing the help and care UMBC students, faculty, and staff members deserve. All of these organizations work toward ensuring academic and career success of UMBC members. They actively strive for enhancing social justice and equity within and outside the community.

Community Partnership is an integral pillar of Retriever Essentials’. Without our partners we would not have been able to reach to the point where we are. We are able to assist the UMBC community because of their contributions. It is through many offices and departments across the campus that Retriever Essentials is able to collect and distribute food items, personal care products, and meals swipes. 
 
Our partners support our efforts to meet the students where they are in order to ensure their well-being and success. This Giving Day, February 27th, please support Retriever Essentials and its partners so we all can better serve our UMBC community. 

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Department of Economics is introducing a new course for the upcoming fall semester to promote students’ personal financial literacy.
The formal title for the new FINC 150 course is Financial Literacy and was designed as an introductory class for all majors. This hybrid course will be taught by Dr. Douglas Lamdin, who normally teaches upper-level economics classes.

After the Great Recession, Lamdin studied the financial knowledge of individuals and subsequently edited Consumer Knowledge and Financial Decisions, a book that addresses college students’ relationships with finances. “Working with the authors of these chapters increased my awareness of this topic and it got me interested in developing an introductory course for all majors,” Lamdin said. “I thought that UMBC students should have access to a course like this, so that’s the genesis of FINC 150.”

Once Lamdin developed the idea for the course, he brought it to the attention of faculty members within the Department of Economics, who were quick to support the idea. The next step was to create a syllabus and fill out several forms to show before the UMBC Undergraduate Council, a committee within the Faculty Senate. Once a proposal for a new course is pitched before the council, the course plan gets reviewed and sent back to the course’s department for revision. After the revised course gets the approval of the Undergraduate Council, it must be approved by the Faculty Senate as a whole before getting sent to the Registrar’s office to be put into the course catalog.

The overall process of creating a new class takes several months. Although FINC 150 was approved by the Undergraduate Council in early December and the Faculty Senate soon after, it is still waiting to be approved to qualify as a general education course, a process which Lamdin predicts will take until summer to finish. The only prerequisites for the course are a score of 3 or higher on the LRC/PLC MATH placement test or MATH 104 or MATH 106. Similar courses at other universities are listed as general education, which Lamdin believes will help influence FINC 150 general education eligibility.

“The course will be more applied and relatable than ECON 101 or ECON 102 … This subject is multidisciplinary,” Lamdin said. “Psychologists, sociologists, lawyers and even social workers have taken an interest. I hope to introduce those perspectives.”

The university as a whole has been making an effort to promote financial literacy among its students through the Financial Literacy and Education program, which began in 2011 and has been continuously expanding. The Financial Literacy and Education program oversees FinancialSmarts, which provides resources such as the CashCourse, a free online class that teaches responsible spending habits.

“It’s really important to acknowledge the fact that the financial decisions you are making today are going to impact you for the rest of your life,” said Hannah Sadollah, the Financial Literacy and Education program specialist. “We just want everyone on the same page to understand that financial literacy is crucial and it’s great that this class will reinforce that value.”

The views expressed in this article are the views of the author.

Bernie Sanders’ rally in Durham, New Hampshire was nothing if not star-studded. Besides Sanders himself — a figure currently leading Democratic polls in the lead up to the primaries — the rally saw the likes of civil rights activist Cornel West, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actress Cynthia Nixon and a performance from the band Sunflower Bean. All of these figures and more took the stage, but a casual observer could be forgiven for not knowing about them. The most advertised presence at the rally, and the presence that took the most focus in the public eye, was the well-loved band The Strokes. This was the crucial aspect of the Durham rally that set it apart from many others of its kind. 

This is not the first time an artist has been called on to support a political cause, nor even the first time Sanders has made the call. In the past, rapper Killer Mike of Run the Jewels fame, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon have all rallied for the candidate. The stratagem of using music as a means to appeal to a wider audience is familiar territory for Sanders, and it illustrates how he has pulled the attention he has in the most recent primaries.

In the past few decades, music and politics have collided more and more, but these instances are often met cynically by the public. In the 2016 election, punk band Le Tigre reunited just briefly enough to drop the single “I’m With Her”, a pro-Hillary track met with a tepid, if not hostile, response. Many argued the track represented less a genuine support of Hillary and more an awkward attempt at garnering attention from a left-wing audience. 

“I’m With Her is a sorry, deflated version of the Le Tigre that informed my feminist awakening,” wrote Christina Cauterucci for Slate.com. Elsewhere, popular music critic Anthony Fantano cited the song as one of the worst of 2016, explaining that its connection to the 2016 election made it “all the more bitter on the ears.” On the other side of the fence, Donald Trump faced similar backlash when using both “We Are the Champions,” by Queen, and “It’s the End of the World,” by R.E.M. Both Brian May of the former and Michael Stipe of the latter expressed their resentment at being used for political ends. 

“Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you,” Stipe wrote after the event in an email. “Sad, attention-grabbing, power-hungry little men.” 

With all this in mind, similar criticism could be directed towards Bernie Sanders, but it seems to be a minority. Most major publications offer only praise, both to the performance itself (which covered songs from The Strokes’ 2001 debut “Is This It?” All the way to the upcoming “New Abnormal,” released April 10) and Sanders’ inclusion of it in his rally line up. The support is almost certainly a welcome surprise to the Sanders campaign team, but the question remains: why did it work?

The answer lies in the perceived intention of The Strokes, as well as Sanders himself. Le Tigre and Donald Trump faced flak for artificially forcing the art with the politics, while The Strokes’ support of Sanders appeared entirely genuine.

In a statement before the show, Julian Casablancas, the group’s frontman, explains: “Bernie Sanders represents our only chance to overthrow corporate power and help return America to democracy. This is why we support him.”

Such a statement is innocuous in a vacuum, but after all of the criticism that followed the 2016 elections, its inoffensiveness, just as much as its authenticity, is something of an exception to the rule. 

The meeting of art and politics is nothing new, but the effort of Sanders and his campaign team to meld the two appropriately is rare. Killer Mike, Ezra Koenig, Justin Vernon and The Strokes all seem genuinely behind the politician they are rallying, and for a public actively involved in these artists, this is a serious advantage for Sanders. Art can be the voice of a whole group of people, and in the future, any politicians who wish to merge pop culture and policy might take a page from the Sanders playbook. 

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County police department hired John Schaible, the new Emergency Preparedness Director, to help prepare and organize UMBC in case of an emergency situation. It is what he has done for the past 12 years at the United States Department of Homeland Security. Prior to his career at DHS, he was a Security Forces Operations Officer in the United States Air Force for seven years.

Schaible started at UMBC on Feb. 3. Prior to that, Mike Pound, the Director of Environmental Safety & Health and UMBC Police Chief Paul Dillon oversaw the Incident Command System at UMBC. The ICS is a management system set up as an example to be implemented at different institutions and governments, which was developed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

UMBC’s pandemic plan was put in place when the H1N1 or Swine Flu epidemic was rapidly spreading across the United States. Though few pandemics have hit UMBC’s campus, there is much talk about the Coronavirus, or COVID-19, affecting study abroad and international students at UMBC and across the nation. “[Here at UMBC], we started by putting a team together, about a month ago, to talk about what we are doing as a university,” said Dillon. 

The group, made up of a variety of on-campus groups including the Provost’s Office, University Health Services, Chartwells, Student Affairs and others, meets on a weekly basis. “The group has met four times, just to make sure the communications have gone out correctly. We’re putting information in the correct places for our students, faculty [and] staff to access,” said Dillon. “A message went out on January 27th to the entire campus, on where we’re at as far as the global situation, as far as the university situation, as far as our students that are studying abroad.” A second message was sent out on Feb. 19.

Schaible’s job in emergency preparedness mainly focuses on organization in the face of disaster. “I’m making sure that the incident management team structure is in place to define all the key players’ roles and responsibilities not just for this incident, but for any other incident that might occur,” said Schaible. 

Coronavirus has not hit anywhere in Maryland or even regionally; however, Dillon and Schaible ensured students that having an emergency plan in place in case campus needs to be shut down is a “good plan.”

“[The plan] was updated last year. It has to be updated annually. It will be updated as lessons learned occur, so everything we learn from doing this will change things for next time,” said Dillon.

Dillon states that UHS is in daily communications with the Baltimore County Department of Health and has a set of questions for students who are sick, and generally the healthcare professionals are advising students to stay home and self-isolate. 

“One student had come from China, a month ago, and she self-isolated in Texas for several weeks. She did all the things she was supposed to do, and she’s fine,” said Dillon.

For now, Dillon and Schaible agree that Coronavirus is not an imminent threat to UMBC students, but communication and emergency preparedness is always key to campus safety. “Monitoring the situation regionally is our main focus right now and ensuring that the information that comes to us gets out in the appropriate ways,” said Schaible.