2014-2015 Career-Life-Balance Graduate Assistantship

Graduate Student Development Unit, The Graduate School at UMBC

Project: UMBC seeks to “celebrate” career-life integration through awareness raising education and training.

Awareness Campaign: UMBC will launch a campaign that will bring into focus the CLB policies on campus.

Seminars and Workshops: We will implement a series of campus–wide educational awareness programs that will focus on CLB policies.

Evaluation & Assessment: We will evaluate and assess the activities for the project.

Requirements include experience with: Logistics/coordination, marketing, basic website maintenance, evaluation and assessment, quantitative and qualitative methods. Knowledge of career-life-balance literature and research is a plus. We are particularly interested in qualitative coding, familiarity with narratives, and other evaluation and assessment methodologies. 

The candidate can be either a full-time master's or doctoral student. This is a 20-hour assistantship. The assistantship includes a stipend, tuition, and health insurance. Students who are interested in part-time, 10 hour positions will be considered. This position does not have any restrictions with regard to citizenship. Students from all academic disciplines are welcome to apply.

For immediate consideration, send a CV, a writing sample, and example of work that showcases skills with evaluation and assessment methods to promisestaff@gmail.com, with the subject: CLB GA Position. 

Hi everyone, it’s me, Yoo-Jin!  This week I’d like to reflect on my TED Talk, Ray Rice, and abusers/ perpetrators of relationship violence. First of all, I couldn’t have done this talk without the help of our coordinator, Megan, who brought her incredible insight and wit to help structure my talk. As I was preparing for my TEDx Talk, which was about reframing the way we think and talk about relationship violence (and as a result acted or didn’t act when faced with it), I found that with the media outcry of Ray Rice’s video of him punching his then fiancee, Janay Palmer, my talk became relevant in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. As I went through my talk this past Saturday, I talked to the audience about three steps we can take to prevent and recognize relationship violence:

1. Think 
2. Speak
3. Act

I addressed the ways we often think of relationship violence in our society- in the most extreme cases, often involving celebrities and catastrophes (physical abuse, death, viral videos). This also affects the way we talk about relationship violence, zooming in, how we talk about both perpetrators (as people who are distant from us) and victims (as people we blame, to distance from us because we wouldn’t make the same choices they did). Through my discussion, I went through the hidden, pervasive, and invisible forms of violence that happen everyday, and I will tell you, I saw some uncomfortable audience members in the crowd. Yes, violence is a difficult and possibly uncomfortable conversation for anyone.

However, this issue was brought home to me in a different way. I found myself struggling with this issue specifically, now with a person on the other end: an abuser. How do I handle this? How do I talk to someone who does exhibit concerning behaviors? How do I talk to this person, who I’ve known and loved for years? As I searched through resources, I found an incredible lack of tools and realized how both sides of this issue are important. Of course, victims and survivors of abuse are important and deserve support and resources but how do we even begin to talk to abusers? Abusers who could be our friends, our classmates, our coworkers? Just like victims can be anyone…so can abusers. Abusers are not demons who are always entirely bad, psychotic people- their behaviors are unacceptable, but does that make them less valuable as a human being? This odd dissonance and guilt is associated with so many different factors- it’s interesting how this dynamic can flip: determining who gets the empathy and who gets the blame? It is clear to me, that the person who must take responsibility for their actions is the person who abuses other people, because at the end of the day, violence is never okay and is never acceptable. I did want to acknowledge this challenge that I faced and will continue to face in engaging in productive and appropriately empathetic dialogues with the abusers who might need help or seek change.

Amanda M. Knapp, Assistant Vice Provost, Academic Standards and Policy Administration is featured in the Autumn 2014 issue of Buffalo Business Magazine.

In the article, Knapp discusses her career in higher education and the impact of her work, saying, “Serving others is the greatest reward, and I am honored to work with thousands of students from across the globe…”

Click here to read the feature, which can be found on page eight.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of three posts from Lexi, our summer intern here in the Alumni Communications office, about her experiences as a new-to-Baltimore student.

Even though everyone on the East Coast eats relatively the same things – meat, seafood, corn, potatoes – there are two foods that are incredibly underestimated by those not from the Delmarva and Pennsylvania area: Old Bay and scrapple.

I grew up with Old Bay as a seasoning for anything and everything crab. Crab bisque, steamed crabs, crab cakes, even on some sushi that had crab in it. You could say I liked it. I didn’t have an obsession with it, but I thought it tasted good on crab dishes. Then I came to Maryland, land of crabs and Old Bay. I soon found Old Bay on my potato chips, in my burgers, and on my french fries. I didn’t complain; I thought, Maybe this was just a Baltimore thing. They gotta live up to the “Crab Capital of the World” standard. Sure, it’s good, but I didn’t see the need to put Old Bay on every meal I ate. Until one day, not too long ago, I was feeling creative, and put Old Bay in my mac ‘n cheese.

Holy crab, I have never been more pleased with my cooking. It was salty, yet refreshing. Spicy, yet savory. The cheese and Old Bay mixed perfectly. I’ve been missing THIS? I thought to myself. I finally understood. It was amazing, and after that fateful dinner, I never looked back. I keep a small shaker of Old Bay in my purse now for special occasions. Don’t judge me, I’m sure some of you do it, too.

But there was a small curve ball to some of my more foreign friends: scrapple.

One of my roommates is from Massachusetts. They have similar seafood, meat, and vegetables to us here in the mid-atlantic, but she had never heard of scrapple. I take it some of those reading this won’t know what it is, either. Well I’m not going to tell you, and I would suggest you don’t ask. Scrapple is meat, and that’s all you need to know.

For Easter during my sophomore year, my roommate came home with me to Delaware soshe didn’t have to stay at school for the holiday. My mom is an excellent cook, which no one who has eaten anything she’s ever made can deny. So when she put down a plate of scrapple in front of us for breakfast, in all its square, brown, squishy, burnt-looking glory, my Bostonian roommate was very skeptical. She poked it, picked one up, and put it on her plate. I did the same, but took three slices. I love scrapple. She asked what it was after dissecting it. I just smirked. I tried to tell her gently that it tastes really good, but if you know what’s in it, you won’t want it.

I think she had decided she didn’t like scrapple before she even tried. The instant it touched her tongue, her face turned green and she spit it back out onto her plate. I’ll admit, depending on how it’s cooked, scrapple can have a pretty weird texture to it. But put a little dab of syrup or a dollop of ketchup on it, and that’s one of the best breakfast sides you can make. Heck, even a scrapple sandwich is good (a specialty of the Delaware State Fair).

When we got back to school, I was still a little shocked my roommate had never heard of scrapple before. So, I asked around. Turns out, scrapple is very much a Delaware and Pennsylvania thing, and isn’t common in Maryland. A lot of people are missing out on this loosely-dubbed delicacy.

In one short year, my food world had been nearly turned upside-down. Old Bay goes with anything, not just crab-related foods. Scrapple is either considered gross and disgusting or simply isn’t offered. In a few short months, my culinary mind had been fried. I bet if someone put Old Bay on scrapple, more people in Maryland would eat it.

-Lexi Coon

On Thursday, September 11, Jim Bailey ’03 and ’08 M.A., history, spoke at the 9/11 Commemoration and Flag ceremony at Fort McHenry.

Bailey, a park ranger at the fort, spoke about the moment that changed the country, as well as the community spirit that arose out of tragedy. The national 9/11 flag, which was created out of historic pieces from all 50 states, is on display at Fort McHenry.

This weekend also marks the 200th anniversary of the “Star Spangled Banner” and Bailey will portray Major George Armistead, the commanding officer at Fort McHenry in 1814.

Click here to read about the 9/11 commemoration ceremony and here to read about the national anthem celebrations.