Former UMBC women’s lacrosse player Jen Kasper O’Brien ’09, American studies, has been named the head coach of the new Virginia Commonwealth University’s women’s lacrosse program, set to start intercollegiate competition in 2015-16. O’Brien will begin recruiting and will coach the Rams’ club lacrosse team in Richmond in 2013-14 and 2014-15.

“Tony and I are very excited for Jen and her new adventure,” co-head coach Amy Appelt said. “It was always great to compete against her when she was coaching at Johns Hopkins and we are very proud that a fellow Dawg is taking her career to the next level. We wish her the best of luck from the Dawg family.”

Kasper O’Brien competed with the Retrievers from 2003-07, redshirting her junior season after suffering a season-ending knee injury, and concluded her career with 84 goals, 45 assists and 129 points. The two-time captain earned America East All-Conference Second Team honors as a junior and a senior.

The Eldersburg, Md., native spent the last five seasons as an assistant coach at Johns Hopkins University, working primarily with the Blue Jays’ offensive efforts. Kasper O’Brien helped JHU to a top-40 national ranking in goals per game in each of the last five campaigns.

Kasper O’Brien began her coaching career at Stanford in August of 2007 as an assistant coach and was elevated to co-head coach early in the 2008 season. She helped guide the Cardinal to a 12-8 record and a fourth straight Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Tournament Championship.

A version of this story originally appeared on UMBCRetrievers.com.

I am the Coordinator for Academic Advising in the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS) at UMBC.  Prior to taking this position, I served as an Academic Advisor for Life Sciences in UMBC’s Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry & Biochemistry for six years. However, my background in science goes back much farther than that…

I was a Biology major at Salisbury University, mainly focused on ecology and botany coursework. I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years as an intern with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Bureau of Fisheries at their Region 7 Field Office. Meanwhile, I decided that I also wanted to help new students adjust to life at Salisbury. I was selected for a leadership role in their New Student Experience Wilderness Orientation program - a position that I held from the end of my freshman year through the summer after my senior year - and served as a Peer Instructor for the New Student Experience Classroom Orientation twice.

After earning my B.S. in Biology, I worked as an Environmental Education/Public Use intern with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia.

Ultimately, I found that helping students find their way through their first year in college was more rewarding to me than surveying streams or conducting nature programs.  I returned to Salisbury for a Master of Education degree focusing in Post-Secondary Education, continuing to work with the New Student Experience programs and interning with University Admissions. After completing my graduate degree, I worked for several years in Student Activities and Registrar’s Office positions before becoming an academic advisor.

What is my mentoring philosophy? 

Mentees: The responsibility to make decisions that move you in the direction of your goals – and to accept the consequences of those decisions – now rests firmly on your shoulders. I see myself as a coach, helping you prepare in advance for the moments when decisions must be made, and giving you signals from the sidelines. I can provide guidance, information, or even just a listening ear when you need to “talk things out.” I can share with you the good and bad decisions that I made as a student, and what difference those choices have made for my life in the long run. I also know that you may be out of your comfort zone in so many ways during your first year - our conversations can be about more than just your academics.

What do I enjoy most about mentoring freshman students? 

I enjoy the “A-HA!” moment, when students finally feel at home in their chosen field. Sometimes, the process of choosing the field that suits them best takes some trial-and-error, but that makes it all the more rewarding. Having begun my UMBC career as an advisor to freshmen in the Life Sciences, I’ve now been here long enough to watch former advisees walk across the stage at Commencement – some in the major they started in, some not – and I am so proud of them! I look forward to seeing you do the same.

Want to learn more about me? Watch for information on our first Group Mentoring meeting!

You can also follow me on Twitter, G+, and Pinterest!

One of the key concepts in any responsive design is the change of viewport size. That’s because mobile viewports vary greatly from desktop viewports. To control the viewport size we traditionally use the viewport meta tag.

However, the viewport meta tag, like all the worst browser developments of the last forever, isn’t W3C valid. It was originally introduced by Apple in Safari and has since been adopted by other browsers. This results in an inconsistent implementation.<!–more>

Happily, the W3C have ridden to our rescue once again by introducing the @viewport CSS rule.

Old school

Using the old meta tag approach, this is how we’d tell the browser what size the viewport should seen as:

<meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width'>

The CSS rule

Quite apart from being invalid, the viewport instruction isn’t data, it’s presentation. So, sticking to our data and presentation separation principles, the viewport instruction needs to be in CSS, not HTML.

The W3C solution in CSS looks like this:

@viewport {
    width: device-width;
}

Or alternately, you can set the viewport with a number, like so:

@viewport {
    width: 640px;
}

You can use the @viewport rule in conjunction with @media queries to force any viewport larger than 960 to shrink to 960px, like so:

@media screen and (min-width: 960px){
    @viewport {
        width: 960px;
    }
}

Additional properties

The @viewport rule also allows us to zoom into a page by default, and even set the maximum zoom:

@viewport {
    width: 960px;
    zoom: 1;
    max-zoom: 3;
}

It is possible to block zooming altogether by setting the user-zoom property to fixed. However zooming, especially on smartphones, is necessary for accessibility and I would recommend using this property.

One more very useful property allows us to lock our web page into landscape or portrait mode:

@viewport {
    orientation: landscape;
}

Browser support

Here’s the bad news: currently this rule is only supported by Internet Explorer 10 and Opera, and requires the -ms- and -o- browser prefixes respectively.

Whilst that is disappointing to say the least, the fact that viewport functionality is already available in most browsers should mean this is a simple rule to pick up. Hopefully we’ll start seeing it introduced in nightly builds very shortly.

Do you care about standards-compliance? Do the W3C help or hinder progress on the web? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, window image via LostBob Photos

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