The Office of Summer & Winter Programs awards scholarships to UMBC degree-seeking students who enroll in Winter Session 2018.

Scholarship Eligibility Requirements:

·    GPA of minimum 3.2

·    100 undergraduate or 23 graduate credits earned by the end of the fall 2017 semester 

·    Demonstrated financial need based on FAFSA

Both full and partial tuition scholarships are awarded. The deadline to apply is Friday, December 1, 2017. For more information, visit the winter session website at umbc.edu/winter or email to winter@umbc.edu.

Luke 11:13 (NIV) – “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

“[…] Miracles are like warning flags. They signal the presence of a different order of reality that is present in the midst of our everyday world. David Hume thought of miracles as violations of the laws of nature. But there is another way of thinking about them. It is to see them not so much as violations of an existing order but as indications of the presence of a different order. On this view, miracles are not bizarre, random events. They are tokens of a higher order that is ultimately more real than our world of change and decay…

“To open the door to the possibility of miracles is not to open the door to every myth and legend. But how do we know the difference between the genuine and the fake? Once more we are back with the question of analogy… ‘Does the miracle story bear any analogy to my understanding of God and his creation?’ …It does not mean that in order to believe in miracles we have to abandon all our scientific understanding… scientific credibility is not the only kind of credibility at issue. There is also the matter of theological credibility. It is no less important to ask, ‘Does the miracle story fit with what we know of the character of God?’ …truth demands that we look for analogies not only with our understanding of nature but with God’s revelation of himself. The Christian operates with two frames of reference. One is our understanding of the natural world. The other is our understanding of God.” [C. Brown, That You May Believe: Miracles and Faith Then and Now]

“Here is how to receive. First, present your body to Him (Rom. 12: 1, 2). God can’t fill what He can’t have. Now I ask you: Are you ready to present your body with all of its functions and all that it contains—your mind, your personality, your spirit, your love, your ambitions, your all? That is the first thing. That is a simple, easy act—presenting the body. Are you willing to do it? Now the second thing is to ask (Luke 11: 9-11), and I set aside all theological objections to this text. They say that is not for today. Well, why did the Lord leave it in the Bible then? Why didn’t He put it somewhere else; why did He put it where I could see it if He didn’t want me to believe it? It is all for us, and if the Lord wanted to do it, He could give it without our asking, but He chooses to have us ask. ‘Ask of me, and I will give thee’ is always God’s order; so why not ask?” [Tozer, A. W.. How to be Filled with the Holy Spirit, Kindle Locations 424-428.]

Application: As a response to the Father in Heaven who gives the Holy Spirit, let ask. Just ask. Why not ask for the miracles in our lives?

– MK

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative- Career & Internship Information Session & TechTalk

Advancing Human Potential and Promoting Equal Opportunity

5:30-7:15pm  Wednesday, 1 November 2017,  Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th Floor

Join representatives from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to learn about career and intern opportunities and listen to a technical talk by Jeremy Freeman, James Wang and Elizabeth Caley. Open to undergraduate and graduate students from all majors with a focus or interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math).

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan in December 2015, is dedicated to advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity. We believe technology can help accelerate discovery and scale solutions to facilitate social change. We support science and technology that will help make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.

We’re hiring data scientists, software engineers, biologists, designers and more. See https://chanzuckerberg.com/careers for all the current positions. Internships will be posted shortly.

5:30 PM: CZI Overview & Career and Intern Opportunities

6:00 PM: TechTalk

• Jeremy Freeman, Manager Computational Biology
• James Wang, Director of Engineering, and
• Elizabeth Caley, Chief of Staff, META: AI for Science

7:00 PM: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Meet & Great (open networking)
Join us to hear about some of the projects underway to help accelerate scientific progress by bringing together scientists and engineers:

• Overview of Chan Zuckerberg Science — our goals and what we do to bring tools and platforms to scientists
• The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub — how an independent nonprofit research center brings together scientists, engineers, and data scientists to make fundamental discoveries and develop new technologies for the scientific community
• Scientific Knowledge — the products, projects, and collaborations that help accelerate the sharing and awareness of scientific knowledge for researchers

The post Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: Career & Internship Info. Session & TechTalk, 5:30-7:15 Wed 11/1 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Charissa Cheah, professor of psychology, has received a Fulbright to collaborate with  psychologists at the University of Palermo in Sicily to explore Muslim Tunisian immigrant adolescent identity development, civic engagement, positive youth development, and risk behavior engagement. The award is one of only six Fulbright awards open to all academic disciplines and specializations in the humanities, sciences, social sciences and the arts to conduct research in Italy.  

“My Fulbright will focus on religious Muslim Tunisian adolescents in Sicily. The island has a long tradition of immigration and cultural exchanges with North African countries which has resulted in higher levels of tolerance and multicultural ideology,” explains Cheah, who hopes the work will challenge people to think critically about behavior within a cultural context. “The work in Sicily will help provide greater insights and context for improving the work I do to understand Muslim American youth development and adjustment in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.”

Cheah’s cross-cultural focus is partially informed by her experience as a native Malaysian of Chinese ethnicity. “Malaysia is a multicultural society with a Muslim majority. At age 14 my family moved to Toronto and then I moved to the U.S. for graduate school. I found myself in many different contexts with various identities being salient on a daily basis.”

Learning to live among many different cultures throughout her youth and into her teen years gave Cheah first-hand knowledge of the cultural and social changes families make to create better living situations for themselves.

She carried this experience to graduate school where she had the opportunity for the first time to work with cross-cultural research in the Laboratory for the Study of Child and Family Relationships and the Center for Children, Relationships and Culture with director Kenneth Rubin, professor in Human Development & Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

“My dissertation was my first venture into doing a cross-cultural comparison where I tried to understand parenting beliefs and practices of European American families compared to mainland Chinese families. I wanted to understand the way the different families thought about developing their children’s social skills and how they interpreted negative and positive behaviors within particular cultural contexts.”

This pivotal point in her work led her to accept her first faculty position at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, where she helped to develop a program on culture and human development. Here she was able to work with Cree adolescents and study their identity development within a First Nation and the larger Canadian culture.

She was able to see how some of the issues that teenagers everywhere struggle with in terms of their own identity, their place within their peer group, and how they see themselves in relation to their family’s traditions and beliefs can present challenges when they must also learn to understand their identity within a different larger religious, ethnic, and/or racial community. Since her move to UMBC in 2004, Cheah has expanded her work to include Chinese and Korean immigrant families in Maryland, as well as families in Korea, Turkey, Italy, Malaysia and Zimbabwe.

“In my research on immigrant and minority families, I am particularly interested in what beliefs and behaviors are maintained from the heritage culture, what is changed, adapted, or given up and what new combinations of beliefs, behaviors, and practices come about in this new cultural context.”

When her graduate student Madiha Tahseen ’09, M.A., psychology, and Ph.D. ’15, psychology and applied developmental psychology, a former doctoral student and Muslim, Pakistani American, wanted to research Muslim American adolescents for her dissertation, Cheah felt it was a natural fit.

“I first delved into the field of psychology as a undergrad because I saw a lot of Muslim youth around me suffering from mental illnesses but that were not being addressed both within and outside of the Muslim community, ” recalls Tahseen.  “Clinicians were just not truly understanding what Muslim youth endure or how to treat their mental illness in a way that was supported within the cultural contexts of their lives.”

For Tahseen and Cheah, this was an opportunity to help provide context to what is often a very charged social political conversation about immigrant Muslim youth in the United States. Now she will expand the work to Muslim adolescents and their families in different contexts internationally, to further explore the roles of social, cultural, and political forces.

Cheah hopes the research will help to contribute to a body of work that helps move psychological theory beyond the traditional Western European-based data samples, and into a more culturally inclusive and relevant model.

“My colleagues and I who are cultural developmental scientists are trying to expand, diversify, and challenge people to think critically about culture and behavior. Our goal is to evolve the theory so that the standard won’t be based on just one cultural group. We hope to open doors and avenues for further investigation and self understanding. In the process, we aim to also diversify the body  of researchers doing this work and more accurately represent the world in which we live.”

The Fulbright program is designed to foster relationships between the scholars in the United States and of other countries who are needed to solve global challenges.

Banner image: Charissa Cheah, psychology by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

A 60-year-old Odenton man charged with indecent exposure following an incident last month on the 5^th floor of the Albert O. Kuhn Library has been released on $20,000 bail and is currently awaiting trial scheduled for Dec. 14.

Hubert Benjamin Shand was detained in Anne Arundel County on Oct. 10 after a warrant was issued for his arrest on Sep. 20, eight days after the incident took place. A witness to the incident reported it to AOK library staff who then reported the incident to UMBC police.

After being committed to the Anne Arundel Detention Center on Oct. 10, Shand was transferred to the Baltimore County Detention Center and then released eight days later upon posting bail.

Shand appears to have a history of this type of behavior. In April 2016, he was charged with indecent exposure at Towson University, found guilty, and sentenced to three years in prison at the Baltimore City Detention Center. He was released prior to the completion of his full sentence.

Library staff said Shand was a frequent visitor of the building, but little can be done to prevent incidents such as this one.

“Public institutions and public buildings are open to the public. You’re always going to have all types of people that come in,” said Patrick J. Dawson, director of the AOK Library and Art Gallery.

The Retriever Learning Center, a large study room within the AOK library, requires students to use their campus ID’s to enter. Library staff will often walk in and check to make sure people within the RLC are, in fact, students.

Dawson explained, however, that the reason they can do this is because the RLC is open twenty-four hours a day, well beyond the standard operating hours of the entire building. Campus ID swipe access can therefore not be applied to the rest of the building.

UMBC police issued a campus-wide alert the day of the incident detailing the suspect’s physical appearance and asking anyone with information to contact university police. At the time of the alert, police indicated they knew the suspect was a “black male, approximately 150 to 175 lbs., wearing a blue and white striped shirt, blue jeans, and salt and pepper hair with a beard and goatee.”

The policy for releasing campus alerts is ambiguous with certain crimes, such as indecent exposure, but Deputy Chief of Police Paul Dillon felt it was necessary.

“Does somebody who exposes [himself] to another person present a danger? You could argue both sides of that,” he said. “We chose to err on the side of ‘let’s do it and make our community aware.’ ”

The maximum sentence for indecent exposure in the state is three years along with a $1,000 fine, and while some states mandate that those charged with indecent exposure must register as sex offenders, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in 2009 that the criminal act is not a sexual offense by nature.

If Shand is found guilty, Dillon also added that he will be issued so-called “ban letter” from the university, making his mere presence on campus a criminal act of trespassing.

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