“What are you an expert at?” Corinne Janet and Andrea Davis posed this question to the attendees of the “Women & Leadership: Rising Above Barriers and Bias” seminar.

Answers ranged from cooking and painting to speaking multiple languages. At the heart of this leadership workshop was the push for women to begin owning their successes and speaking about them unabashedly.

The “Women & Leadership: Rising Above Barriers and Bias” program is part of the Women + Leadership experience, an ongoing initiative for women-identified leaders to “identify opportunities to engage, connect, and network with other campus leaders” as well as creating a personally meaningful campus leadership experience, according to the program website. The program was put on by Student Life’s Leadership Programs, Women Involved in Learning and Leadership and the Women’s Center.

The seminar was held in the Women’s Center as attendees sat in a circle on overstuffed couches and fluffy poufs. It was led by Janet, the Coordinator of Student Life for Leadership, and Davis, a senior majoring in sociology and africana studies, a Civic Engagement and Leadership intern and president of the Student Events Board. They asked each attendee to introduce themselves and invited everyone to participate in the discussion. This was as much a conversation about the unique challenges faced by women in leadership roles as it was an informational seminar.

“We[‘re] talk[ing] about the particular challenges that college women face in leadership as well as address[ing] some possible solutions we can work toward as a community to support one another,” said Janet.

Attendees broke off into small groups to discuss the benefits of holding leadership roles on campus, such as having a better understanding of the community and being able to affect change on campus. However, the conversation quickly turned to the struggles of being female in a position of leadership.

Davis succinctly questioned: “How do I [lead and] not seem like a bitch or too commanding?”

Other struggles included dealing with co-workers who assume that women will do the behind-the-scenes labor like planning events and sending emails, without receiving credit for their work. Imposter syndrome, in which individuals cannot internalize their own achievements, was also common. Women reported feeling like a fraud in their job and attributing successes to good luck instead of hard work.

Women also mentioned the struggle of the burden of effortless perfection. Janet and Davis led a popcorn reading of an article titled “Never Let Them See You Sweat: The Myth of Effortless Perfection” by Amy Yao.

“I feel like I need to have it all together all the time,” says Janet. “Hair, lipstick … I need to make it look seamless.”

Participants discussed that women not only need to consistently perform at a high level, they have to make it look easy for fear of judgement by peers and other women. Organizers also emphasized that women are judged more harshly for mistakes and expected to be constantly ‘on’ to not only excel in the workplace, but fulfill the societal expectations of women.

“Relearning [these] ingrained lessons [about gender and expectations] are really hard,” says Janet.

“Women feel like they’re representing the whole gender,” says Jess Myers, the Director of the Women’s Center.

Being a female leader is also a complex issue that not only deals with gender but intersects with sexuality, race and class as well.

Zhihong Pang, a freshman biology major, admitted that he was attending the workshop as part of an assignment for his first year seminar class, but that he realized that it’s really valuable information to be aware of.

At the end of the discussion, Janet and Davis provided some insight into ways that women-identified leaders can grow and challenge the obstacles.

Finding a mentor and a sponsor can be especially helpful. A mentor is a person who supports and encourages, while a sponsor is someone who connects leaders with opportunities. Mentors and sponsors can help women reach their goals by emboldening them to embrace and expound upon their achievements.

“Women aren’t delivering the message of their greatness,” says Davis.

Purpose

The purpose of this Notice is to alert the NIH extramural community that NIH is strengthening enforcement of longstanding closeout requirements, outlined in the NIH Grants Policy Statement Section 8.6, Closeout. NIH has consistently reminded recipients of their responsibility to submit timely, accurate final grant expenditure reports, and has communicated the critical need for recipients to reconcile cash transaction reports submitted to the HHS Payment Management System (PMS) with expenditure reports submitted to NIH.  In order to fulfill agency requirements under the Grants Oversight and New Efficiency (GONE) Act and HHS grants policy, NIH will no longer delay the closeout of awards unless the recipient submits a prior approval request to the IC providing an acceptable written justification..  Without prior approval from the awarding IC, NIH will initiate unilateral closeout for all awards that fail to meet closeout requirements within 120 days as required by the NIH Grants Policy Statement (NIH GPS) Section 8.6. See below for details.

Background

Recipient Responsibilities

The requirement for timely closeout is generally a recipient responsibility. However, NIH may initiate unilateral closeout if a recipient does not provide timely, accurate closeout reports or does not respond timely to NIH requests to reconcile discrepancies in grant records.

NIH recipients must submit a Final Federal Financial Report (FFR), Final Research Performance Progress Report (F-RPPR), and Final Invention Statement and Certification (FIS) within 120 calendar days of the end of the period of performance (project period), as required in section 8.6 of the NIH GPS. The reports become overdue the day after the 120 calendar day period ends. Cash transaction data continues to be submitted directly to and processed by PMS. It is the recipient's responsibility to reconcile reports submitted to PMS and to the NIH awarding Institute or Center.

NIH Actions

NIH is committed to addressing and reducing grant closeout delays and to enhance compliance with HHS regulations and policies, and the GONE Act.  Therefore, NIH will strictly enforce its closeout policies. When recipients fail to submit timely reports, NIH will initiate unilateral closeout. It is important to note that for financial closeout, if a recipient fails to submit a final expenditure FFR, HHS policy directs NIH to close the grant using the last accepted Federal Cash Transaction Report’s cash drawdown amount. This could be considered a debt or result in disallowed costs.  In addition, failure to correct recurring reporting problems may cause NIH to take one or more actions that may include, but are not limited to, corrective actions, withholding of further awards, suspension or termination.

With the beginning of December marks the deadline for submissions to Bartleby, UMBC’s student-run creative arts journal. Every year, in April, Bartleby is published with over 50 pieces of student art. These pieces are divided into four subcategories of poetry, nonfiction, fiction and visual art.

This year, Bartleby’s review process has undergone a massive change. Previously, every submission was reviewed digitally via email submission, a process that usually lasted about three weeks. This year, the pieces will be reviewed by a group in a reviewing session. Each subsection will have a specific group of Bartleby staff that will be tasked with reviewing each submission in a group discussion.

Morgan Zepp, Senior Editor of Bartleby, and English and global studies double major, has led the change from completely digital reviews to group discussion reviews. With the new review process, it is expected to end earlier. Zepp said, “The sessions will be held in person before finals, making it faster.” Originally, the digital reviews took until about New Year’s Eve to complete, but with the group review sessions, the staff hopes that the review process timing will be more efficient.

The review sessions are divided by sections and are estimated to last two hours each. There is an exception for poetry, which will likely have two sessions due to the large amount of submissions that are received in that category. The way the review process will work revolves mostly around discussion. Zepp said, “In the sessions, the people who are [advocates] for the piece will talk and then the people who are on the other side will also have a chance to speak.”

With the change of review style, the submission date flexibility has also changed. In the past, the deadline for submissions could easily be extended by a week. With the time for review discussions set in stone, the deadline cannot be moved. The deadline for submissions was December 1.

Along with the changes in review process, Bartleby has made some changes in order to be more involved with the campus community. This semester, they held two workshops where students read their creative work aloud and engaged in a group discussion, getting feedback from not only Bartleby staff but also tutors from the Writing Center. They plan to hold more workshops in the spring to continue assisting creative writers on campus.

The guidelines for submissions can be found on their website. For submissions, there are four categories that writers can choose from: poetry, which usually has about fifteen to twenty pieces get published, visual art, which also has about fifteen to twenty pieces published, nonfiction, which has ten pieces published and fiction, which also has ten pieces published.

Bartleby will be published in April and, along with a reading event held in the Albin O. Kuhn Library, the journal will be freely available to all students on campus.

Opeyemi Ajayi:

"Morphological properties of S. aureus biofilms developed from micro-patterned protein base layer"

Adam Day:

"Adaptation of Screen Printing for 3D Bioprinting Applications"