UMBC's Division of Professional Studies seeks a graduate assistant to assist its
    marketing department.
    
    Typical Duties:
    - Maintain data files and  facilitate the distribution of mass email distributions;
    - Assist  in maintaining social networks (Twitter, Facebook, myUMBC) in an engaging,
    yet appropriate manner;
    - Distribute flyers across campus;
    - Occasionally designing flyers and hand-outs;
    - Regularly conduct internet research and compile/summarize efforts;
    - Contribute to discussions/brainstorms about marketing content and design;
    - Assist with other day-to-day marketing projects, such as video production and
    participation at in-person events.

Qualifications:
    

- An outgoing and responsible graduate student, or senior who plans to stay at UMBC
    for graduate school;
    - Organized, efficient and able to manage several projects simultaneously;
    - Efficient at using the internet and other resources for research;
    - Capable of compiling and presenting research to marketing team;
    - Capable of writing and communicating clearly;
    - Have a basic understanding of marketing, particularly advertising and social media;
    - Skills in graphic design, video production or past experience in social media
    marketing a plus.
    

About the Division of Professional Studies:
    The Division of Professional Studies at UMBC offers a variety of high-quality
    master’s, graduate certificates, special courses and non-degree training programs.
    Building on UMBC’s strength in cutting-edge research and academic excellence,
    these programs provide relevant skills, knowledge and credentials in high-demand
    areas of study.
    

Deadline:
    ASAP, ideally by 5 p.m. October 29, 2012

Send resume and cover letter expressing your interest to:

Julie Gilless" <jgilless@umbc.edu>

Parents and Families,

Please be advised that the following message was sent to all residential students on October 29, 2012 regarding Hurricane Sandy.

The Pew Research Center reports that social media has become a feature of political and civic engagement for many in the U.S.

“Some 60% of American adults use either social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter and a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that 66% of those social media users—or 39% of all American adults—have done at least one of eight civic or political activities with social media.”

Wellesley computer science professor Panagiotis Metaxas has a short article in Science, Social Media and the Elections, on how social media can be abused in elections. An example he cites is the suspicious one-day spike of 110,000 Twitter followers received by a US presidential candidate recently and the subsequent analysis that showed showed that most of the followers were unlikely to be real people.

IEEE Spectrum has an interview with Professor Metaxas in which he discusses the issues surrounding social media and elections and mentions his recent paper, How (Not) To Predict Elections, that concludes that predicting election outcomes using the published research methods on Twitter data are not better than chance.

A novel use of social media to predict elections was show by FiveOneNine Games, who crunched the data from use of their election-themed Facebook game Campaign Story to predict that President Barack Obama the winner.