As the speaker at my high school graduation, I weighed in on the idea that college comprises, “the best years of one’s life,” arguing that it does not; life continually evolves, so one part cannot be definitively better than any other portion in particular.

However, having been in college for over a month has challenged my stance. At my graduation, I could not foresee college being substantially better than high school. I had viewed it only as a place to work hard and build up a resume so I could get into grad school. But I was wrong. Over the past month, I have felt as though my overall level of happiness has risen greatly above my average high school mood.

I attribute this general increase in cheerfulness to free time and freedom. I am no longer trapped in one building for seven hours a day, so I can explore a variety of extracurricular activities that I used to not have time for and ones that were not available to me in high school. Plus, I can choose what I want to do and when: if I want to get food from Late Night at one in the morning, I can walk out of my dorm and go; if I want to sleep over in one of my friends’ dorms, I can just do it; if I decide to nap for four hours or eat pizza for every meal for a week, there is no one here to stop me.

However, I also suffer consequences that are now exclusively my fault. Although the lack of parental guidance here is refreshing, it just means I am now my own source of guidance. While I can feel and enjoy the immediate effects of a freer schedule and less adult supervision, I also have to take on extra responsibility to ensure that I am safe, healthy and successful.

It is this trade-off that has challenged my opinion on whether or not one’s college years are truly, “the best years of one’s life.”

I truly am noticeably happier now than I was in earlier years, and I think it is entirely possible that I may look back on college and say that these years were the best of my life. However, I cannot possibly make that judgment now, nor should anyone else.

Falling for the belief that college is where you will be at your ultimate best is a disservice to yourself and your future. If you let yourself believe that college will be the best time of your life, you will be disappointed when you leave, even though you could have just as many incredible opportunities and experiences after graduation. So try to eliminate your expectations for the future and simply enjoy what comes to you when it does.

The prospect of finding employment while being a full-time student can be daunting. Students already have their classes and sometimes extracurriculars to contend with, so they think that they will not have time to get a job. Alternatively, they may think that no one will want to hire them due to their lack of experience. As a result of this limited thinking, students often miss out on opportunities for employment, internships, research and other relevant work experience.

People often think of employment solely as the end to be reached through education, but it can be very beneficial to gain work experience while in school. Working while in school can show a future employer that one is ambitious, able to handle a great deal of responsibility and has experience in a related field before their resume ever lands on the employer’s desk. Thus, it is important that students use the resources available to seek work if they are willing and able.

At UMBC, professors are too often neglected as a valuable asset: many still actively work in their fields, and often, they or someone they know are looking for assistance.

Another resource that is often overlooked is the Career Center, located on the second floor of the Math/Psychology. According to the director, Christine Routzahn, the center has three primary purposes: helping students understand their possibilities, helping them get experience and helping to build the network students have available to them. It accomplishes these goals through many useful programs and services such as Resume Review, Career Fairs, field trips to visit real employers and more.

Routzahn emphasized that the office is for everyone. “A misconception people have about the Career Center is that we only work with certain kinds of students,” she said. “We definitely have a high demand of certain companies and certain talent; however, we have opportunities for all students. We meet individually and we want to make sure that, whatever you want to do, that we can make those connections.”

There are many opportunities right on campus for students without access to transportation and for those with rigid schedules. Jobs can be found online through UMBCWorks or the websites for specific UMBC departments that may be hiring.

Sophie Shippe is a sophomore English literature and psychology major who works in The Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Orientation. Shippe said she enjoys having a job on campus because she can walk to her job within ten minutes and the hours are flexible because on-campus employers understand that school comes first.

Shippe said, “I like the connections that working on campus gives me because I have people that I can have as references for other positions at UMBC if I ever wanted a change, or it can be a reference to use outside of college. I’ve even made friends, and as a tour guide, it’s been amazing to find those interested students who are excited and want to learn from you.”

Through the Career Center’s resources, students can gain relevant work experience and jump-start their career while they are still studying, ensuring a smooth transition into the workplace upon graduation. It is never too early to start working toward future goals, and there are too many opportunities for students to let them go unused. Students need only seek them out.

Back in 2016, Trisha Wells from Student Affairs left a meeting with Assistant Vice President of Business Systems Joe Kirby to attend a campus budget meeting. She and Kirby had discussed plans to begin testing UMBC’s new electronic signature program, which utilized UMBC’s Enterprise DocuSign plan, by applying it to a department’s current business process. Their main difficulty, however, was finding a volunteer willing to dedicate the time to experiment with new software tools.

As Wells sat in the budget meeting contemplating this, she listened to Greg Capecci, manager of the Walker Ave. Apartments, describe the costs associated with Capstone’s $3600 contract with DocuSign. Wouldn’t it be perfect for Kirby to work with someone already utilizing electronic signatures and simply incorporate them in the UMBC enterprise plan? Before long, Kirby and Capecci were meeting regularly to discuss the different options and uses for electronic signature technology and how it can integrate with business practices that rely on paper or PDF/Word documents.

Since the Walker Ave. Apartments staff work with sensitive information such as Social Security numbers for license applications, it's no surprise that Capecci was already using electronic signature technology. The platform not only provides extensive data encryption and authentication, but also allows administrators to view specific data such as the IP address a form was signed from as well as dates and times a form was viewed.

With electronic signature technology, applications can travel quickly between the student, guarantor, and Capstone via secure email instead of slowly passing through certified mail. By transferring to UMBC’s enterprise contract, Capecci was able to maintain all of his old security and functionality while gaining access to Single Sign On, adding yet another layer of authentication. Also, the money Capstone saved by giving up its individual contract went directly back to the students in the form of cheaper license fees.

Moreover, students can access all of their documents through the same portal. All of their Capstone and UMBC DocuSign forms now use the same inbox, so students no longer have to navigate multiple online locations to view and sign important documents.  

In addition to making the licensing process cheaper, more efficient, and more secure for students, electronic signatures have also made things much easier for the Capstone staff. The templates they create for their forms can offer easy guidance and tooltips that help ensure that forms are filled out completely and accurately on the first try. This means staff spend less time correcting, reprinting, and resending forms on a day-to-day basis. On the rare occasion that a form does need to be resent, it can be done with just a few clicks. The intuitive interface and automated processes of electronic signature technology makes everyone’s work much more productive and streamlined.

Transferring from primarily paper documents to fully digital forms saved Greg Capecci the costs associated with printing, mailing, and storing a large volume of forms, the extra staff required to handle so many paper forms, and the time spent reviewing and correcting documents after submission. Switching over to the UMBC enterprise plan added further security and authentication options at no additional cost. In return, Joe Kirby was able to test the functionality of digital workflow in order to discover more ways it could enhance productivity for other departments on campus. For example, they were able to explore the use of shared envelopes between staff, enhancing their ability to collaboratively manage certain documents.

Now Assistant Vice Provost in the Division of Professional Studies (DPS), Trisha Wells recently partnered with Joe Kirby again to move DPS departmental program agreements into a DocuSign format.  Wells notes that "DocuSign is such a powerful workflow tool and I will continue to move additional business processes every chance I get!"

Stay tuned as more departments share their experience with electronic signatures.

More Info:

·      Visit the DocuSign myUMBC Group

·      Visit UMBC’s FAQ knowledge base

We have two amazing freshman running to be the SWE Freshman Representative, Mei and Kaitlynn! Learn more about them here.

On Saturday, the Meyerhoff Parents Association helped organize a food collection for Retriever Essentials at their Fall Family Luncheon.

The caring and thoughtful attendees filled up FOUR donation bins! This food will help stock our shelves for the coming weeks as the semester gets busier and students continue to be in need of free healthy food.

We are so thankful for the Meyerhoff Parents Association's thoughtfulness in organizing this collection. If your student group or department would like to host a food collection at an upcoming event or meeting, please email retrieveressentials@umbc.edu so we can help with the setup process.

We are always in need of the following, which can be brought to donation bins in the Administration Building, Commons, or the AOK atrium:

You are invited to a screening of the film, “In Their Footsteps: An American Muslim Civil Rights Journey,” on Thursday, October 11, from 8:15pm to 9:15pm, in Lecture Hall One. The MSA will co-host the screening in collaboration with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the UMBC Black Student Union (BSU).  

Click here to watch the trailer.  RSVP is requested at: intheirfootsteps.eventbrite.com  Admission is free and light refreshments will be served.

 

The goals of the screening are: 1) to get feedback from attendees and 2) to have the attendees go beyond being inspired, to sign up during/after the screening with actions they can sign up for to start doing racial justice work. For this last piece, we will be reaching out to other organizations  as well as professors on campus who are involved with racial justice work.

If writing papers is something you struggle with, then it can be tempting to just throw down your thoughts as best as you can, and not look back before you turn it in. However, revising is vital to the process of writing a good paper, and it can even improve your grade if you do a thorough job.

Here are a few pointers on how to revise your paper effectively. 

Print your paper out. 

This step may seem unnecessary, but there is a difference in mentality when you are looking at your paper in a word processor on the computer and when you are looking at your paper on physical paper. When you are working in Word or Google docs, it’s much easier to erase and replace, and then try and reword what you replaced it with, and then get caught up on that one word you want to use — in essence, the text in your electronic document is too malleable. In order to get through your paper quickly and efficiently, it’s best to have your words in an unchangeable form. This allows you to isolate the problem areas without the ease of slipping into composing mode. Of course, if you don’t have access to a printer, this step isn’t necessary for the process — it just helps. 

Read your paper aloud. 

You may have heard this before, and rolled your eyes and said, “Yeah, okay professor,” but it really works when you’re self-editing. When reading silently in your head, there there are a lot of things you can easily skip over (if you don’t believe me, go back and read that sentence again — out loud if necessary). There is something about reading out loud that makes our brain pay more attention to the things we’re reading, to make sure we’re saying it correctly, and so it’s a lot harder to skip over silly small mistakes, like accidentally omitting a word, or spelling something wrong. 

Not only does it help with catching careless errors, though. It can also help you figure out how your ideas sound out loud; and how your ideas sound out loud to you is a good way to gauge how your ideas will sound to someone else, whether they are reading in their head or not. And if a sentence doesn’t make sense to you out loud, it most likely won’t make sense to the person who is trying to read your paper. This is a great way of catching problem areas in your essay before you give it to your professor to read.

If this feels too silly for you, then try reading it out loud to someone you trust. 

Utilize the prompt. 

If you’ve finished your paper, that likely means that you think you’ve answered all the prompt has asked of you. But some students miss some points because they haven’t returned to the prompt and double-checked that they have everything they need in their paper. Don’t be this person! Return to the prompt and identify the specific things that were asked. Then go back into your paper, and underline or highlight each of these elements where you find them in your paper. If there is something that you don’t find, make sure you add it before you turn it in. 

Show someone else. 

This is one of the best ways to get feedback, and its how the pros perfect their work all the time. Take your paper to your mom, or your best friend, or your younger sibling. Have them read it and tell you what they think. And if you can’t find anyone willing or able to read your paper and offer helpful feedback, bring it in to us! We are always happy to help. 

Happy writing! 

Have a question? Submit it to us, or come see us in the Writing Center for some more great advice!

Follow the UMBC Writing Center Blog here: https://umbcwritingcorner.wordpress.com/blog/

Beginning Monday, October 8th, walk in advising hours are temporarily suspended in order to accommodate scheduled advising appointments for Spring 2019 registration. For more information about scheduling your advising appointment, please see this post and refer to the new registration guide in myUMBC.

Spring 2019 Registration: Advising Appointment Information

Current Students:

Winter Classes:

New Students Admitted for Spring Semester:

Newly admitted students for the spring may not register for courses until Winter Orientation. Please sign up for Orientation here.

Questions?