After two consecutive Student Government Association elections with uncontested presidential tickets, University of Maryland, Baltimore County students have a choice to make.
And that choice focuses on the definition of student engagement.
For presidential candidate Mehrshad Fahim Devin and his running mate Zachary Kay, student engagement means empowering students to “see their full potential,” according to Kay. But to presidential candidate Justin Levine and his running mate Zara Zeeshan, student engagement means allowing “all students … to vote on everything,” according to Levine.
While the candidates of each presidential ticket may disagree on the meaning, they both seem to agree on the need for increased student engagement in student government processes.
And as UMBC students adjust to distance learning, it will be even more difficult to garner support and interest, with elections coming up on April 20.
While senators and Finance Board representatives are elected by plurality, executive branch positions are elected by majority, and no person may be elected with fewer than five percent of ballots cast.
Election Board president Caleb Cagle said that with the inability to campaign on campus, “everything’s being done virtually.” Candidates running for all positions are encouraged to make their own websites or use their social media presence as a platform for their campaign.
The Election Board has even made the decision to supplement candidate’s campaigns with weekly wrap-ups of endorsements posted to myUMBC and have replaced in-person candidate information sessions with videos of each candidate answering student-submitted questions. (Questions can be submitted at “Ask the Candidates” at this link).
Cagle said that the Election Board is currently planning on ways to incentivize these initiatives, hoping that they will allow for “re-engagement” of the student body.
Both sets of candidates are hoping that their own laundry lists of student organization involvement will help them garner support — and hopefully, endorsements.
But for those without personal ties to the candidates, the changes they promise and the perspectives they have will have to be enough.
Communication and Continuity
Mehrshad Fahim Devin and Zachary Kay have a combined three years of experience in the SGA.
Mehrshad Fahim Devin. Courtesy of Mehrshad Fahim Devin.
Devin, who is a sophomore biology and physics major, began his time in SGA as a First Year Ambassador, but transitioned into a senator position his sophomore year, where he spearheaded an initiative linking UMBC to Arbutus businesses.
When Devin met Kay, a freshman political science and philosophy major and FYA, he immediately saw Kay’s potential and recognized that they both had the same goals within the SGA. Kay was drawn to Devin’s ability to make him feel like he could make a difference on campus.
That ability to communicate to students in the way they want — and sometimes need — to be communicated to is what Kay believes will allow them to engage more people in student government. But they both know it will not be easy.
“It’s one of the hardest problems to be able to solve in a four year span or even less than that: how do you make someone who feels like they’re just there to go to school and go home or go to school and then go to their dorm … open up the door to have more opportunities to make change?” Kay said.
Zachary Kay. Courtesy of Mehrshad Fahim Devin.
Kay, who is planning to focus on underclassmen engagement if elected, is excited for the prospect of getting to know the new freshman class. As Executive Vice President, he would lead the FYA program, and he is already planning to give up the EVP desk in the SGA office to the FYAs, hoping they will recognize the voice they have within SGA.
Devin, as president, would focus on upperclassmen, letting them know “the power they have within SGA,” he said, noting that all undergraduate students are members of the SGA.
Devin and Kay are hoping to use their familiarity with the systems SGA uses to jump right into problem solving.
“The more you get to learn about a system, the quicker you’re able to answer questions, the quicker you get to fix problems,” Kay said. “You’re able to move the system faster … We’re going to be able to find middle ground for students, organizations and faculty faster.”
They credit previous SGA presidents with providing them with a strong foundation to build from but are planning to expand on this foundation and pursue their own initiatives.
“We’re just going to work with the scaffolding that’s been provided to us to build a better structure,” Devin said.
“Your Voice, Your Choice”
Justin Levine and Zara Zeeshan are running for president and executive vice president, respectively, with a motto of “Your Voice, Your Choice.”
Levine and Zeeshan want to bring a direct democracy to SGA and hope that this change will allow for students to have direct power — in addition to a voice — in SGA meetings and in deciding on campus initiatives.
“By allowing all students to vote [on every initiative] they feel like they’re a part of something, and they really have power,” Levine said.
Levine and Zeeshan are proposing a weekly town hall, in addition to the regularly scheduled Senate and Finance Board meetings, where students will meet to discuss issues they have and changes they would like to see. At this town hall, students will then vote for what they want SGA to fix, and then later SGA meetings will focus on implementing these changes.
Justin Levine. Photo courtesy of Justin Levine.
Levine, who is a junior history major, is a former FYA and SGA senator — positions he held as a first-year student at UMBC. What he saw was, in his belief, a lack of transparency and debate in an organization that he felt should protect student interests.
“One of my regrets is not being more active then,” he said. “I didn’t speak up as much as I should have. I want to change that now.”
Levine has been best friends with his running mate, Zeeshan, who is a junior anthropology major, since sixth grade, and Zeeshan said that her Type-B personality fits with Levine’s Type-A personality to make them “a very good team.”
Zeeshan is hoping as executive vice president to work on initiatives surrounding commuter students. As a commuter student herself, she has noticed a lack of school pride in her community, coupled with “unreliable” programs meant to help commuters engage in campus life.
While Devin and Kay have a few more years to re-run if not elected, Levine and Zeeshan do not. As rising seniors, they hope to continue to grow the student organizations they are involved in if they are not elected and stated that they plan to advertise SGA meetings within those organizations.
Additionally, they have stated that some current candidates for Finance Board and Senate positions are interested in their direct democracy proposal and hope that, even if not elected, those individuals will work to create that change within SGA.
“I really think it sells itself,” Levine said. “It’s pretty exciting, at least to me, to say you actually have power, you’re able to vote on something.”
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When the University of Maryland, Baltimore County announced that courses would be moving online for the remainder of the semester, students and faculty in the sciences found themselves facing a particularly formidable challenge. How were they going to transfer their lab courses online? In most cases, there was no way for students to do the experiments, which often require expensive instruments and equipment, at home.
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is one of several departments at UMBC that feature lab courses as a prominent part of the curriculum. Anticipating that the coronavirus would upend the semester, the department’s chair, Dr. Zeev Rosenzweig, actually began preparing for the possibility of distance learning at the end of February, a few weeks before any official announcements came from the university.
Part of this preparation involved filming labs. Rosenzweig estimates that most chemistry lab courses involve between ten and fourteen lab assignments, half of which the students had completed by spring break. The plan was to have the chemistry teaching assistants film themselves conducting the experiments, explaining what they were doing and pointing out trouble spots the students might run into. Then, they would send the data they gathered to the class.
“Every experiment in the lab has two majors parts for it; one is to get the data and one is to analyze the data to derive conclusions,” Rosenzweig explains. This method allows students to witness the process of gathering the data and to continue to analyze it as they would if they were in class.
Rosenzweig’s plan came to an unexpected halt when the university decided to close the physical campus during spring break, however; he had wanted the teaching assistants to record videos during the break when they were not busy with schoolwork. In the end, he says, they were only able to record around 35 percent of the videos they had planned. He and the department’s faculty were able to find some videos of experiments similar to the ones used in UMBC’s chemistry classes online, using resources from other schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He notes that interactive simulations, in which students would be able to conduct the experiment in a virtual space, do exist in some fields, like medicine. But the software for digital chemistry labs does not exist in a usable form yet. “Maybe because of this crisis, we’ll see more rapid development such that these simulations will be more available,” he says.
In the end, between the recordings made by the teaching assistants and the resources found online, Rosenzweig estimates that there are video simulations of 85 percent of the experiments used in the departments’ classes. “There are some experiments that we cannot find appropriate simulations [of],” he explains. “[But] it’s something that we can live with for this semester.”
Dr. Marie van Staveren teaches an upper-level chemistry lab course for juniors and seniors, which, prior to moving online, would meet in the lab for a total of eight hours each week. Like many of her colleagues, van Staveren prepared to begin distance learning by having her teaching assistants spend the week before spring break running experiments and collecting data that the students could analyze at home. Additionally, she has adjusted her course to place a heavier emphasis on computational chemistry.
Computational chemistry involves taking what is already known about the properties of chemicals and using that information to predict the outcome of an experiment. “In previous versions of this class, it was a very small part of the course, but I amplified it because it’s something we can do remotely,” she says, explaining that this will teach the students “how the program works and what kind of math is the right kind of math” to use in different situations.
Still, some elements of van Staveren’s class have been scrapped entirely. She usually assigns a project, for example, in which students dig through the various pieces of equipment that are stored in the lab — many of which are old or broken — and try to build a brand new instrument out of the available parts.
“They learn a lot from picking up a piece of equipment and saying, what does this thing do?” she says. “I can’t come up with a way to meaningfully make that remote.”
van Staveren is well aware that many students will not be coming out of this semester with all the knowledge that they need to succeed in future lab classes, regardless of the quality of the online education they receive. The hands-on experience is vital, she believes: “Imagine you are going to a restaurant and the chef learned how to cook on the internet and they’ve never cooked before. They’re probably not going to cook very well. Even if they learned theory and watched a lot of videos.”
Still, the fact that this applies to all students currently enrolled in a lab course makes things a little easier. Over the next few years, when van Staveren looks at a student’s transcript and sees that they were enrolled in general chemistry in spring 2020, she will know to expect some gaps in their knowledge. And she will be ready to work through them.
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UMBC is again one of the top 500 universities in the world, according to the QS World University Rankings.
In their recently released subject area rankings, UMBC is #362
worldwide in the broad category of life sciences and medicine,
performing particularly well in biological sciences. The world rankings
also recognize UMBC for strengths in computer science and information
systems and in physics and astronomy.
“UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) has
been incredibly successful in recruiting great teachers and researchers
as faculty,” says Keith J Bowman, dean of COEIT. “It is gratifying that employers and our colleagues recognize the quality of our programs and our people.”
UMBC performed among the top 8.8% U.S. universities in the global ranking and ranked #68 among U.S. doctoral universities.
The newly released U.S. Newsgraduate program rankings highlight UMBC as having some of the best engineering programs in the U.S. The publication recognizes a broad range of UMBC engineering focus areas, including environmental, computer, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering.
In the humanities and social sciences, the UMBC School of Public Policy is listed as offering one of the top 100 public policy graduate programs in the nation.
Business First also just released its annual ranking of 500 four-year public institutions across the U.S. UMBC is one of the top two public universities in Maryland, and ranked #53 in the nation, improving by six places from last year.
Banner image: UMBC logo on campus. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.
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Congratulations to the UMBC Cyber Dawgs for winning the 15th Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) which was held this Friday and Saturday. UMBC placed first in a field of teams from eight Universities who made the regional finals out of an initial set of 27 qualifying teams. By winning the regional competition, UMBC will represent the Mid-Atlantic states in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition to be held on May 22-24, 2020.
The MACCDC has been held annually since 2006. Each year, it develops a new realistic challenge using the latest technologies currently in use. This year’s scenario involves student teams working for a fictitious Artificially Intelligent Institute (AII), a multinational corporation with offices in the Mid-Atlantic region. It was described as follows.
“As a leading provider of advanced AI surveillance tools to intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as private-sector organizations, the main business driver of AII is to show how new surveillance capabilities are transforming government’s and organization’s monitoring capabilities. As part of their duties, Blue Teams are expected to defend their systems against aggressors. Early intelligence reports suggest that rouge Hackistanian antagonist are interested in stealing AII’s intellectual property, source code, and customer database. Hackers contracted and working directly for the country of Hackistan are also interested in disrupting IoT devices on-premises at the various AII regional offices.”
The MACCDC team was chosen from members of the CyberDawgs student group, composed of students from a variety of majors who share a common interest in computer and network security. No prior experience is required to join and any UMBC students who want to learn more about cybersecurity and learn new skills in the field are encouraged to subscribe to its mailing list and attend meetings.
The CyberDawgs group is advised by CSEE faculty Charles Nicholas and Richard Forno.
The post UMBC Cyber Dawgs win 15th Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
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