Attention all UMBC student employees!  

What could be better than having an on-campus job?

Having an on-campus job and getting a notation on your transcript that tells employers you made the effort to enhance your professional development!

Interested in gaining a competitive edge in the job market? Sign up for PRAC 102- Building Skills for Career Success this Spring semester. Don’t worry, it’s not a formal class! With the minimal commitment of attending a few workshops and career events, you will be better prepared for the world of work and have the proof on your college transcript to show your employer.

DEADLINE TO REQUEST ENROLLMENT: Friday, February 29

Make your campus experience count! Enroll TODAY! Enrollment is limited to the first 40 student employees. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by!  

Open to all levels and majors. You must be a UMBC student employee working at least eight hours per week on campus. 

How to Register Online

1. Log in to Handshake, then navigate to Career Center > Experiences.

2. Click “Submit an Experience” and select “Career Center – On-Campus Student Employment (PRAC 102- Building Skills for Career Success)” as the Experience Type. Fill in the required fields and submit.

3. Your registration will be reviewed within two business days. The Career Center will enroll you directly upon review along with sending you additional details.

QUESTIONS, please contact Stephanie Taylor (staylor18@umbc.edu) 

Summer 2023 

Hennigan Lab

Developing new methods to measure atmospheric gas-phase ammonia

I am excited to deploy the instrumentation that we have been working on to collect data. It will be satisfying to see real tangible results come from something that I have worked on with other students!

The best part of my research is the people I work with, everybody in the lab is excited to be here and work on their respective projects.

Search for faculty and read about their research through their website or their department website. Then send an email to a professor who does research that speaks to you and/or aligns with your career goals.

AIChE ChemE Car Team Lead

Industry or M.S. in Chemical Engineering

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-welling-352602248/ 

BEYA STEM Career Fair (FREE --Both In-Person or Virtual)

Friday, February 16, 2024

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Time: 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Registration Deadline: Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Open to ALL Students (undergraduate and graduate)

Jobs--full-time, part-time, internships and graduate admissions

This event is sponsored by Career Communications Group (CCG) and is part of their large annual conference, which will be held at the Baltimore Convention Center. Representatives from major corporations and universities will be available to meet with students pursuing careers in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields as well as Business, Finance, and Marketing. Why should you participate?

•       FREE Career Fair (in-person & virtual options)
•       Career seminar Options
•       On the spot job offers
•       Networking with recruiters
•       Learn and network with the country's best and brightest STEM minds

Registration is required. Your registration will give you access to the in-person and online Career Fairs. The UMBC Career Center will provide a free shuttle bus to the Career Fair on Friday. If you would like to take the free shuttle bus, you must register with both BEYA and the UMBC Career Center by Tuesday, February 13.

•      To register, please follow the instructions at: https://careers.umbc.edu/beya 

Please be sure to upload your resume at the time of registration.

 Contact Diane Crump-Fogle (crump@umbc.edu) or Chrisi Giannakaris (chrisig@umbc.edu) at the UMBC Career Center for additional information

Towards Democratizing AI: Scaling  and Learning (Fair) Graph Representations in an Implementation Agnostic Fashion

Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Ohio State University

Abstract: Recently there has been a surge of interest in designing graph embedding methods. Few, if any, can scale to a large-sized graph with millions of nodes due to both computational complexity and memory requirements. In this talk, I will present an approach to redress this limitation by introducing the MultI-Level Embedding (MILE) framework – a generic methodology allowing con-temporary graph embedding methods to scale to large graphs. MILE repeatedly coarsens the graph into smaller ones using a hybrid matching technique to maintain the backbone structure of the graph. It then applies existing embedding methods on the coarsest graph and refines the embeddings to the original graph through a graph convolution neural network that it learns. Time permitting, I will then describe one of several natural extensions to MILE  -  in a distributed setting (DistMILE) to further improve the scalability of graph embedding or mechanisms -  to learn fair graph representations (FairMILE).  

The proposed MILE framework and variants (DistMILE, FairMILE), are agnostic to the underlying graph embedding techniques and can be applied to many existing graph embedding methods without modifying them and is agnostic to their implementation language. Experimental results on five large-scale datasets demonstrate that MILE significantly boosts the speed (order of magnitude) of graph embedding while generating embeddings of better quality, for the task of node classification. MILE can comfortably scale to a graph with 9 million nodes and 40 million edges, on which existing methods run out of memory or take too long to compute on a modern workstation. Our experiments demonstrate that DistMILE learns representations of similar quality with respect to other baselines while reducing the time of learning embeddings even further (up to 40 x speedup over MILE). FairMILE similarly learns fair representations of the data while reducing the time of learning embeddings.

Dr. Menyuk is the winner of the 2024 G. G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization. This award is made annually by SPIE the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and it honors exceptional contributions to the field of optical polarization.

Professor Menyuk's award is focused on his nearly forty years of contributions to the understanding of the interplay of polarization effects, nonlinearity, and noise in optical systems. Dr. Menyuk has carried out work that spanned the optical fiber revolution that started in the 1980s and continued through the early 2000s. At the beginning of this time, internet connections were slow and unreliable; but in the end, internet traffic became fast enough to enable the video streaming applications that we now take for granted. Equations and algorithms that Dr. Menyuk developed played an important role in this development. For the past twenty years, his work has focused on frequency combs - a technology that has revolutionized time and frequency evolution and will likely lead to a redefinition of the second. It has long been known that light comes in two polarizations. These polarizations can be separated by polarized lenses. Road glare or glare from the hood of the car is preferentially in a horizontal direction, and a polarized lens that lets through vertically polarized light eliminates a large amount of this glare. In optical fibers, the light in two different polarizations will move at two different speeds, which can lead to signal distortion.

In 1981, a team of scientists at AT&T Bell Labs found that nonlinear effects in optical fibers will lead to the creation of solitons. In an optical fiber, light at different frequencies will move with different speeds. Any optical signal is made up of multiple frequencies, which will spread and distort the signal. This effect is called dispersion. However, in an optical pulse with sufficient energy, the frequencies begin to interact, which is referred to as a nonlinear interaction, and can become bound to each other. With the right energy, dispersion and nonlinearity exactly compensate, and the pulse travels without distortion. This pulse is called a soliton. Dr. Menyuk showed that the same nonlinearity that compensates for dispersion can compensate for the difference in speed between the two polarizations, referred to as birefringence, if this difference is not too large. In most practical cases, this difference is too large, and Dr. Menyuk working with many collaborators showed that randomly varying the birefringence in the fiber, which can be done by spinning the fiber, will then eliminate the distortion.

In more recent work, Dr. Menyuk has focused on micro resonators (tiny optical resonators) where, once again, solitons can be created and minimizing the interaction between different polarizations is important. This work is ongoing and has already led to important results that has been accomplished in collaboration with researchers at NIST and will be published in part in a forthcoming Nature article, 'Kerr-Induced Synchronization of a Cavity Soliton to an Optical Reference'. Most recently, Dr. Menyuk has been named the director of a new research center at UMBC, The Center for Navigation, Timing, and Frequency Research (CeNTaVR).

Read more about Curtis R. Menyuk and the 2024 SPIE G.G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization: https://spie.org/news/curtis-r-menyuk-the-2024-spie-gg-stokes-award-in-optical-polarization

By Carrington Cline

Positionality Statement:

This post is written by Carrington Cline, a junior and student staff intern at the Women’s Center. This blog post articulates my encounters with the media’s portrayals of Black women, as it relates to the internal and external pressures that pushed me towards an unwavering focus on academic and career success. It also explores the epiphanies that were crucial for feeling more complete in life without relying on external validation. I’m sharing this blog for all the over-achieving women of color, aiming to encourage them to realize that their existence is inherently good enough.

If you grow up believing you’re nothing, you have to prove that you’re everything.

I’ve started to realize there is an aspect of my life that I’ve failed to recognize, something that has grown just as I have throughout college, a need for external validation. Though this need is something I have recently recognized, is it not a foreign feeling. I feel as though this need for validation comes from the fact that women of color aren’t allowed to feel confident about or secure in themselves. There is something to be said about the way perceptions of Black women, and all women of color, impact their confidence in academic or professional spaces. From as young as first grade I vividly remember the representations of Black women and girls in the media fundamentally altering my perception of self-worth. Mainstream media paints a narrow and limited picture of Black women, communicating to Black girls that their options are limited, and that success is reserved for others who don’t look like us. This distorted narrative evolved into my reality and as a result, I became an overachiever. Stretching myself thin by taking every opportunity that came my way, fostering a belief that my value relied solely on my ability to exceed expectations and challenge stereotypes. But I still found myself anxious, self-conscious, and unhappy with the way I viewed myself.

I am valuable, even when inactive.

My turning point was when I started to value myself in other ways. Fashion and music, among other things, became unprecedented avenues of self-love that started to impact my confidence more than my achievements. Above all else though, I realized that my intrinsic worth wasn’t dictated by any external factor. I needed to learn that I am valuable even when I’m not productive, that my pride shouldn’t come from my achievements, but from simply embracing myself as I am. Notions of ‘exceeding expectations’ are man-made concepts used to keep those in subordinate positions working, in the hopes that they may one day rise through the ranks and find themselves in the dominant position. Existing beyond the lens of expectations, whether it be personal or societal, is integral to embracing the human experience. 

Most importantly, enjoying the smaller things in life, the ones that are easy to disregard, helped me exist fully most of all. My identity as a Black woman is fluid and ever-expanding, and the fundamental multifacetedness of the Black experience operates far beyond any confine or limitation.

This blog is dedicated to all the hard workers, all the women of color who feel they need to take on every opportunity that comes their way, as though their existence alone isn’t enough. For those who relate, I implore you to take a step back and look at where you are now from the perspective of your younger self. 

You do not need to be productive to be proud, just existing is more than good enough!

If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.

– Vincent Van Gogh