Want to help us plan for our 50th anniversary? Consider these current openings:

Entry-level Program Assistants (2): UMBC’s Office of Institutional Advancement is seeking candidates for two entry-level program assistants that will help the university prepare for and execute its 50th Anniversary in 2016. The program assistant’s primary area of responsibility will be in alumni relations/engagement or communications. These full-time positions will prepare the successful candidates for a variety of potential careers in higher education, with practical experience in alumni relations, communications and marketing, institutional events, community relations, and development. See the full description.

Special Events Assistant: Reporting to the Director of Advancement Operations, the incumbent will be part of the Operations team and will assist with numerous campus events in a dynamic and fast-paced environment. The incumbent will work behind the scenes and is integral to the invitation process and overall front-line guest experience. See the full description.

Learn more about these and
other jobs currently available on campus.

The Development Coordinator will be responsible for researching potential grant funding, submitting grants and managing grants, coordinating a volunteer program and maintaining the donor and membership database and acknowledgment process.

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Erle Ellis, GES, Discusses the Anthropocene in Nature
• Kate Brown, History, in Time and Al Jazeera America
• Clifford Murphy, American Studies, in The Conversation
• Jason Loviglio, Media and Communication Studies, in City Paper
• John Rennie Short, School of Public Policy, in The Conversation

Read more at UMBC Insights!

Mathematics professor Manil Suri has been named a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. In this role, Suri will publish columns around once a month. To read an announcement published in Capital New York, click here.

In light of Pi Day celebrated on March 14 and this year celebrated as a once-in-a-century event with the full date in line with the first five digits of pi’s decimal expansion, Suri published his first column about understanding what pi truly is, the history behind it, and why it remains so significant.

At the beginning of his column, Suri explained how pi’s importance can be found in many places: “And yet pi, being the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is manifested all around us. For instance, the meandering length of a gently sloping river between source and mouth approaches, on average, pi times its straight-line distance. Pi reminds us that the universe is what it is, that it doesn’t subscribe to our ideas of mathematical convenience.”

Suri also discussed what pi can tell us about computers as they’ve developed over the last several decades: “With the advent of computers, pi offered a proving ground for successively faster models. But eventually, breathless headlines about newly cracked digits became less compelling, and the big players moved on. Recent records (currently in the trillions of digits) have mostly been set on custom-built personal computers. The history of pi illustrates how far computing has progressed, and how much we now take it for granted.”

To read the full column published in the New York Times, click here.