Amelia Meman, GWST ’15, is the Assistant Director of the Women’s Center. Amelia uses they/them and she/her pronouns.

Burnt out? Me too.

This is not a new feeling for me. I have gotten to this same point during other parts of my academic and now professional career. This apex where I thought that if I was able to give it enough gas, stomp on the accelerator, and shut my eyes I could sail across the swiftly oncoming ravine. 

This is how I would like to navigate burnout. Goodbye, plebeian worries!
[Image description: a GIF from the movie Grease wherein main characters Sandy and Danny drive off into the sky in a red convertible. Sandy turns back to wave goodbye to the crowd.]

Let me tell you… I’ve never been able to sail over the ravine.

This is me. [Image description: a GIF of a small green car spinning out and finally falling off a small cliff.]

Burn out is unavoidable sometimes. Especially when we do not give ourselves the time and space to feel what we need to feel. It can come along for anyone doing anything. Maybe you don’t have the best apartment for experiencing alone time. Maybe you have way too many things going on between teaching your kids and managing online classes.

In my case, I just work. I work and work and work. My ridiculous proclivity for work inspired Rihanna’s classic. No joke! (I’m lying.)

I work because I really love my job and I feel a great sense of joy from having a purpose. I also work, because it’s my way of exerting control–and when you’re in a pandemic that has no end in sight, you crave a sense of control. So for this latest trip to Burnout Town, I have pushed aside my feelings and any sense of personal boundaries, so that I could focus on getting tasks and projects finished. 

I’m going to be using this ongoing metaphor of traveling on a road trip, so back to me in my car on a cliff: I pushed my car to its zenith mechanically and I also got a little (or maybe a lot) lost. The road was bumpy and dust was flying everywhere. The steering wheel was vibrating and I don’t remember when I last refueled, but all I wanted to do was get out of the rough patch we call Burnout Town by rocketing over the oncoming gulch. 

And now here I am, relating to you how to navigate Burnout Town, because I’m here now and it’s as crummy as the reviews it’s received on Yelp. 

Maybe you’re predisposed to burnout?

Before I get into the roadmap, this wouldn’t be a Women’s Center blog if I didn’t also mention how identity connects to burnout. Recently, I attended a presentation about the impact of COVID-19 on women in higher education. Needless to say, the numbers are fairly depressing, but they’re important to witness, because there is a sharp divide along gender lines and along racial lines (and disability lines and class lines, etc.).

The people who are doing both their professional work and family work are most often women. The people who feel most exhausted/overwhelmed are most often women. The people who are, in addition to working or searching for work, looking after children or elderly family members are, you guessed it, most often women. 

Ultimately, women are predisposed to burn out. 

And people with other marginalized identities are similarly situated. For example, women might bear the weight of stressors disproportionately to men, but when we dissect groups of women by race, we see that stressors are also disproportionately carried by women of color–especially Black women. 

Some might recall Sheryl Sandberg’s pop feminist concept of “lean in,” wherein, if you are a powerful woman at the top of your game, the feminist thing to do is to lean in and empower the other women around you rather than succumbing to the whitecisheterocapitalist competitive individuality that is typically ingrained in our definitions of success. What isn’t talked about is how white women frequently lean ON women of color for their social, emotional support. 

I appreciate what Loretta Ross said when she spoke out against racist/sexist stereotypes via the Women’s Center’s Telling Our Stories campaign; she said, “I am not your Tit,” which is to say: “I am not the person you can come to when you need to be nurtured, babied, supported unconditionally,” because as a Black woman, Loretta Ross doesn’t owe anyone that access to her energy, body, and psyche. Especially considering the long history of Black women being exploited as caretakers and caricatured as such (see “I am not your nice Mammy” by Cheryl Thomson).

Loretta Ross’s Telling Our Stories poster. [Image description: a graphic poster in yellow and navy blue. Top text reads “Women of Color: Telling Our Stories.” Below a cut out image of a Black woman wearing a bright red dress and red patterned vest is smiling. Next to her image reads, “My name is Loretta and I’m not your Tit.”]

It’s not just annoyance or an unwillingness to get things done that makes stress such an issue for women and other minoritized folks: it’s really that consistently high levels of stress are deadly.

Stress is killing marginalized people

First, I should name that I am operating from the assumption that those with target identities face more stress than those with agent identities. The sociological concept that I am referring to here is called “minority stress theory,” which posits that minorities experience heightened amounts of stressors by virtue of living in a systemically oppressive society.

When we think about stress and where it lives in the body, I think many folks would locate stress in our minds. Stress, for us, is that little (or big) voice that tugs at your mind saying, “Hey, loser. Heads up: you have a huge project due tomorrow, you need to buy groceries, and all of your pandemic plants are dying!” In reality, though, everything is connected and stress manifests throughout a body. When we take in stressful inputs, or “stressors,” we might be thinking about a lot of things but we also might feel our heart rate go up, our breath catch more often, or our insomnia gets the best of us. Stressors impacting a body might also cause our necks and shoulders to get stiff with tension, as well as strengthen the headache making its way around your skull. 

Ultimately, stress has inextricably holistic effects and at high, prolonged levels, the effects of stress add up. In a 2007 article on the connections between racial bias and health outcomes, a team of scholars (Ahmed, Mohammed, and Williams) synthesized the many patterns and trends to form the conclusion that bias is not just a social and political issue, but a public health issue. This is an excerpt from the Ahmed, et al. paper that outlines the pathways from racial bias incident to adverse health outcomes (the figure below visualizes this relationship):

Allostasis is the body’s ability to maintain homeostasis and to adapt to stressful events by appropriately activating the neuroendocrine, autonomic, and immune systems, and then to return to the basal state when the stressful event is past. While allostasis is adaptive in the short term, the cumulative burden of cycles of allostasis in response to repeated or chronic stress can be damaging and lead to multiple disease states. The concept of “allostatic load” refers to the cumulative wear and tear that the body experiences on these multiple regulatory systems as a result of repeated cycles of allostasis as well as the inefficient regulation of these cycles… High allostatic load is associated with the metabolic syndrome, and predicts mortality, cardiovascular disease incidence, and decline in cognitive and physical function.

Williams, D. R., & Mohammed, S. A. (2009). Discrimination and Racial Disparities in Health: Evidence and Needed Research. Journal of Behavioral Medicine , 32, 20-47.

I don’t share this information with the intention of being a harbinger of death nor am I trying to scare everyone into therapy. I talk about this stuff because it not only puts into perspective the vast importance of mental health and wellbeing but also the ways in which oppression impacts a body at a biological level. Burnout and stress and anxiety and depression are social justice issues, because we live in a socially unjust world–so in doing this critical social justice work, we need to continue to center the oppressed and bring an intentional, critical awareness to the fact that being well and surviving burnout hinges on being able to survive constant systemic violence.

Roadmap through Burnout Town

Okay, so enough with my TED Talk, you’ve reached the point where we can roll up our sleeves and return to this grand road trip metaphor I teased at the beginning of this blog. Let’s put the pedal to the metal… or… actually…

STEP 1: Notice where you are, how you are feeling

I didn’t know I was going to rely so heavily on John Travolta for this blog, but here we are. [Image description: a GIF of John Travolta a la Pulp Fiction looking around as if he is lost. He is superimposed over a browser window that reads, “Unable to connect to the Internet.]

Burnout, for me, often exists in tension with my own sense of perfectionism and anxiety. This is to the point that I often don’t notice how I’m feeling until I’m crashing. You might do this, too: At noon, I promise myself that if I just get my inbox down to zero, I’ll be able to get up from my computer and eat my lunch. Cut to 3:58 pm where I am bent over my keyboard and finalizing the last reply to an email and feeling mighty resentful that I have a meeting from 4 to 5, and my lunch is still in the office fridge.

It’s really hard to know when to stop. 

Beyond the fact that we live in a Western, capitalist society that places value in the white knuckle pluck it takes to do the impossible–we’re just not always tuned into our bodies. That’s why this first step is the hardest because we have to learn what burnout feels like in our bodies and when to take notice. 

I am by no means perfect at this, but some things that have helped me come into a more compassionate awareness of my body and my feelings are things like mindfulness and grounding activities. I’m particularly fond of the “body scan,” which asks you to check in with each part of your body to see how you’re doing.

There are a lot of grounding techniques and they’re all a little bit different, so if you haven’t found the one that resonates with you, fear not. Experiment and enjoy the process of finding what works for you.

STEP 2: Pull off the road and put the car in park

This is me. [Image description: a GIF of a child getting frustrated and repeatedly asking a person moving around in front of them to stop.]

Okay, so you’ve identified that something feels wrong and you’ve stopped your car. AWESOME! I mean, not awesome that something is wrong, but… well, you know. 

If it feels weird for me to celebrate your having to stop what you’re doing due to burnout, I want to be sorry, but I’m not. Here’s my thing: we don’t applaud saying “no” enough. 

Saying “no” is boundary-making/-maintaining and it’s critical to protecting your energy. Some may react to your boundaries with negativity. The classic, “What is wrong with you? Why don’t you want to come with me to the Chipotle grand opening?” But when you make the decision to stop because you’re being compassionate toward yourself, it’s the next step in working through the burnout. 

I don’t have much advice to share with you on this (other than to celebrate people’s “no” moments more often), but remember that even when you stop, it doesn’t mean you’re stopping for forever. It doesn’t even have to mean you’re stopping for the day. It just means you are striving to be present with yourself and that is a really good thing.

STEP 3: Take your time in running diagnostics and ask for help if you need it

Process, process, process. Lots of mental health professionals (including my therapists) will ask if you’ve processed these emotions–but what the heck does that mean? Well, I’ll tell you!

Processing emotion is.

It just is. We’re doing it all the time, we just don’t know it until we have some big bad emotion we don’t want to feel. We might be processing joy as we watch our kid giggle at something mundane. We might be processing anger as we get cut off by someone driving erratically. The process is the doing and emotion is always going through you.

But if you’re having trouble, start with noticing what’s happening in your body. For example, let’s try right now: take a breath and scan throughout your body; are your feet on the ground flat or are they bouncing? Are your shoulders up near your ears or are they drawn down? Do you feel more weight on one side of your body than another? Are your eyelids feeling heavy?

When we check in with our body, we can usually get a better idea of what’s happening. If your all tensed up around your shoulders and gritting your teeth, you might be angry. If you’re stomach hurts and your breathing a little heavier, you’re probably nervous. There’s a whole science to this “emotional sensations” stuff:

Full article from Greatist is here: Where Are Emotions Felt in the Body? [Image description: an infographic showing representations of emotion as they are felt through the body.]

And yeah, maybe you already knew that tears coming out of your eyes meant that you were feeling sad, fair enough, but the next step of understanding your emotions is to work through it. You can do so by talking it out, writing about it, doing some movement-based thing like dancing or walking, hugging a loved one for a long time. There are a whole bunch of things that you can do to work through your emotions. 

But what I really want to point out is that, foundationally, “processing emotion” is just feeling emotions. It’s not about expelling them, wringing them out of our bodies, or fixing our brains. Feelings are normal and valid and important–and try as we might, we cannot escape them, so we better get comfortable with having them along for the ride.

STEP 4: Get back in the car, and go where you need to go whether that’s a rest stop, the McDonalds drive-thru, your grandma’s house, or a gas station

Once you’ve done your body scan and taken the time to identify the emotion(s) or stressors that are impacting you, go take care of yourself. I know I just said this piece can be as simple as taking a walk, but there is a little more maintenance and intentionality involved.

You have to actually slow down and make a plan to get better. For me, that sometimes just means blocking off time in my calendar for human moments like going to the bathroom, eating my lunch, or talking to a friend (usually not all three at once, though). For others, maintenance might be finding a therapist, taking a nap, or finally making the doctor’s appointment you need to make. Regardless of what it is, make a plan to do it and then… do it. 

Follow through with your care plans and maintain their value. Others might question your priorities or consider it too “woo” to take a 10 minute meditation break–but their judgment isn’t helping you feel better so why listen to it?

I also understand that not everyone has understanding bosses or even the private space to meditate–and that’s why it’s important to create a plan that takes into consideration access, compatibility, and any communication that needs to happen beforehand. Normalize burnout, anxiety, depression, etc. Normalize the need to take time for yourself and to be curious about your healing journey. You’re worth it.

STEP 5: Know that it’s okay to get lost

I’m ending this blog here, with the sentiment that it’s okay to get lost. It’s okay to be burnt out. It’s okay to discover your rock bottom. It’s okay that this is hard freaking work. We’re in a pandemic, for goodness sake; and COVID-19 is not a scapegoat. It’s genuinely a massive shift to the gravity of our lives. 

And regardless of worldwide killer viruses, our lives are always complex. Burnout is just another means to learn more about our bodies, emotions, and human needs. Getting lost is just another form of discovery.

Burnout, stress, emotional angst–it’s real, it happens, and the important thing to know is that:

• this is temporary
• you’re not alone
• it’s not over, and 
• getting lost is sometimes part of the journey.

Regardless of where you are, you can find yourself. 

So even if you’re gunning the engine to get over the cliff or beyond the next highway or just out of this weird muddy rut, you can still slow down. Pull over. Take a beat to look up and be curious about the resilience of stars. Be in awe of the innumerable possibilities of where a breath can take you next. You got this.

Remotegrity was the first voter-verifiable Internet voting system used in 2011 for a public office election in Takoma Park, Maryland

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Alan Sherman and collaborators develop VoteXX with new strategies for secure online voting

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Over the past several months, the topic of online voting has been at the top of the minds of millions of Americans and has been widely debated. Supporters often highlight how it would increase voter turnout through improved accessibility and convenience. Privacy and election integrity are among the top concerns about implementing an online voting system.

Researchers from UMBC and xx.network have been working to design an online voting system that is resistant to coercion and would provide a secure way for people to cast their ballots from computers, tablets, and smartphones in the future. Alan Sherman, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, is developing the system, VoteXX, with David Chaum, a cryptographer known for his work on privacy-centered technology, and Richard Carback ‘05, M.S. ‘08, Ph.D. ‘10, computer science, who has spent his career deflecting would-be hackers.

The security of devices that voters might use to cast their ballot is a significant concern, notes Sherman. He explains that malware on the devices that voters use might change the votes or spy on the voter.

Alan Sherman, right, talking with Rick Forno on campus in 2018. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

As described in a press release and the researchers’ new whitepaper, VoteXX allows voters to confirm that their ballots were accurately cast, collected, and counted. This system uses ideas from an earlier system, Remotegrity, that the collaborators developed and used in a municipal election in Takoma Park, Maryland, in 2011. Voters received secret vote codes on a scratch-off card via traditional mail, which they used to hide their votes from the software and hardware. Remotegrity was based on Scantegrity, an earlier in-person verifiable voting that was also used in binding elections in Takoma Park, Maryland.

VoteXX uses a combination of simple strategies and complex cryptography to create a more secure online voting scheme. For example, to address the issues of coercion and vote selling, VoteXX allows voters to cancel or change their vote up to a certain deadline. David Chalm explains how this simple capability undermines vote selling. “You make it possible to flip (change or cancel) that vote outside the voting process. Because a vote buyer cannot be sure you didn’t or won’t flip your vote, they can’t be sure that a voter has been honest with them, making it useless to buy votes.”

This “vote flipping” approach provides a subversively simple yet powerful tool to voters. It’s accomplished by creating a “flip code” during the registration process that allows the voter to flip their vote after casting.

You can read more about this research in a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks.

The post Alan Sherman and collaborators develop VoteXX with new strategies for secure online voting appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Autumn is a senior Meyerhoff Scholar (M29), pursuing a BS in Chemistry and a BA in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies dual degree, a member of the Honors College and currently a student staff member at the Women’s Center.

I need to make a disclaimer! I think that it is important to know from the forefront that I am both a STEM student and a humanities student, but the primary focus of my career will be in STEM. Here at UMBC I am pursuing both a BS in Chemistry and a BA in Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies (GWST), and I am a Meyerhoff Scholar so it puts me in a bit of an interesting and unique place to write this blog post critiquing the institution of STEM (by STEM, I am referring to the collection of established scientists that shape the major trajectory of the larger infrastructure of research) from a critical humanitarian perspective because I have a foot on both sides of the channel separating science from humanities and humanities from science. I firmly believe that institutions need to be constantly critiqued and changed in order to remain effective at generating knowledge and not stagnant. After graduation, I plan on pursuing a PhD in a chemistry related field and a career in STEM research, but it is extremely important to me that i do not abandon the framework of thought that I developed within my GWST studies. 

Just focusing on UMBC, it is pretty clear to me that our school heavily values its science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) students. A recent editorial in The Retriever detailed the large inequity in funding and resources between UMBC’s STEM programs and UMBC’s non-STEM programs. Just going by raw money, “The College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science (CAHSS) total budget was $39,796,930” compared to “the Engineering and Information Technology and Natural and Mathematical Sciences [Colleges] (COEIT and CNMS respectively) had a total combined budget of $46,064,518,” the editorial goes on to say that the differences in budgeting do not reflect the number of majors offered by COEIT/CNMS and CAHSS. the problem with undervaluing arts and humanities in favor of valuing STEM research and institutions isn’t a problem that is isolated to UMBC or the University System of Maryland’s budgeting process. 

Image Description: This historical engraving, which depicts a large statue of a man straddling an entryway to a harbor, of what artist Martin Heemskerck believed the Colossus of Rhodes looked like with the superimposed text reading “STEM” on one side of the entrance, “HUMANITIES” on the other, and “ME” on top of the statue itself.

This budgetary discrepancy between STEM and non-STEM fields is indicative of a larger problem within society and STEM in general, where science is valued at a higher level than arts and humanities. This disparity gives rise to attitudes of STEM elitism within the science communities.

One of the most pervasive effects of this STEM elitism is the self-imposed isolated mindset. STEM often believes that it is on its own quarantined island, insulated from politics, social issues, and personal biases. The common belief is that STEM research is pure, factual, and just an analysis of how physical phenomena interact with each other. STEM is growing bacteria cultures or doing an electrochemical experiment and just being focused on the chemistry behind it. I mean, how can these bacteria or this newly synthesized compound be impacted by humanities or social science research? 

 This concept is unique amongst the STEM fields as other fields such as social sciences or humanities are often required by the nature of their research to account for and adjust on behalf of external and internal biases. However, STEM research, despite popular belief, is not immune to these biases. What can STEM learn from the humanities in terms of addressing these issues?

The Notion of STEM Superiority 

Accessibility

At UMBC, STEM students are somewhat isolated from the rest of the campus. Whether it is by the student’s own choice or just the actualized reality of their academic career, STEM students usually have to go out of their way to meaningfully interact with non-STEM students. This is, of course, due to the nature of STEM classes being extremely regimented, time intensive, and exclusive. Granted, every single major will separate as the classes become more specialized and start requiring more prerequisites to take, but the extent to which STEM classes separate is not the same as within humanities classes such as GWST courses. For example, many upper level GWST courses only require one or two prerequisite courses to take. For instance, I can take Queer Theory, a 400-level course that is crosslisted as a graduate level course within the GWST department here at UMBC after only taking one prerequisite class (Intro to Critical Sexuality Studies, a 200-level class). This is compared to a 400-level CHEM course, Inorganic Chemistry, which requires more than four prerequisite classes that take over two years to complete following the normal and recommended 4-year plan.

(Un)Biased Knowledge Making?

I think one of the fundamental and one of the most pervasive beliefs surrounding the concepts of “STEM Superiority,” can stem from the fine distinctions between the research environments. STEM research focuses primarily on discovering knowledge pertaining to how the natural world exists, and to explain why natural phenomena happen and how they interact with each other. On the other hand, humanities research details how humans react to the world, and how humans interact with each other. Some scientists believe  that because they are studying the fundamental phenomenon of the universe, the social sciences and potential impacts of human biases play no role in their research. At first glance, this might seem like a reasonable understanding of the situation because bacteria, solutions and spectrophotometers aren’t human and cannot be discriminated against! On the surface, this may be true but there are very significant factors that scientists should consider while doing their research. Scientists are human, and therefore have human biases, opinions and prejudices, whether they are well defined or not. Nobody can truly live an apolitical existence, and that includes scientists.

Who is Doing the Research?

These biases, opinions and prejudices can have an impact on the so-called “impartial research” of the scientist. One of the most obvious forms can be analyzed by asking “who is doing the research?” The vast majority of researchers are male, white, and were educated in Western Countries. This can be seen extremely clearly in the breakdown of Nobel Prize winners. As of 2020, no Black scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry or in Physiology or Medicine, and only five women have won the prize in Physics (2.2%), nine in Chemistry (4.7%) and twelve in Physiology or Medicine (5.4%). While the demographics of the recipients of the Nobel Prize are not the most representative study of diversity within STEM (or a good signifier of the diversity in STEM because it is a cherry picking of the scientists with the “most significant” research) further evidence of the imbalance within STEM can be signified by the existence of both the Meyerhoff Scholars and Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) Scholars programs at UMBC, with both programs’ main goals being to increase the diversity of underrepresented minorities in STEM. Even within UMBC where the overall student body is composed of 52.1% racial minorities, only 29.1% of our faculty are a part of racial minorities. 

Is Science Apolitical?

The lack of diversity can probably, at least, be blamed for the long, storied history of severe ethical breaches. From the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where the Public Health Service non-consensually experimented on Black men by infecting them with syphilis and subsequently refusing to treat their symptoms all in the name of science, or the continued use of Henrietta Lacks’s cervical cancer cells without proper consent of the Lacks or the Lacks estate to the use them in medical research, science sometimes fails to address how real people are affected by the research that is performed. A lot of research is innocuous and will never affect the layman, but these potential ethical violations are not just historical. Even now, the eugenics implications of being able to selectively edit genes through CRISPR-CAS9 are being hotly debated, especially since two of the major scientists behind finding the enzymes just received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry! Further discussion also needs to be had about the gross amount of waste that chemical and biochemical research produces in both the forms of single use plastic and chemical waste and the numerous pressures that scientists face to capitalize on and make money from their research.

Now, I’m not saying that gross injustices and ethical violations will stop if scientists saw the need to incorporate social science and critical social justice methodologies into their research paradigms, but I do believe that scientists would be more likely to think of the implications of their methods and results within the larger context of the social-political system. While this problem is endemic of the entire system of knowledge-development in science, I think the problem of scientific research not acknowledging the larger work of humanities research and how they intersect can be traced back to how scientists are trained to be scientists. If primarily undergraduate institutions put more of a focus on building bridges between the pure science majors and the humanities majors instead of exclusively focusing on hard science, the students would be much more likely to carry this understanding of the wider world onto graduate school and the rest of the careers as scientists, hopefully eventually changing the entire research ecosystem acknowledge the greater impact of their scientific research.

America’s higher education institutions are historically built upon white supremacy and colonialism, and universities have a vested interest in maintaining their large endowments and reputation within the larger world. Regardless of the feelings and opinions of the people who are actually doing the research at the institutions, a large part of research is funded by the government to promote and further the oppressive agendas of the imperialistic state; for example millions of dollars are being pumped into research and development of the components of novel weapon systems for the military every day. 

While a single researcher or lab cannot change the entire institution, I believe that if enough of the STEM academy educate themselves and their colleagues about how science is much more than just looking at imagery data and making conclusions from a graph, STEM will be able to acknowledge and take from humanities and social sciences research to enrich methodologies and be more readily held accountable for its actions and digressions. 

Events this Week:

11:00-11:30 AM – Overview: Internships and Early Careers
Overview of the Internship and Entry Level Opportunities available at APL and a review of the application process and timeline.

11:45 AM-12:45 PM – UMBC Alum Panel Discussion
Hear from UMBC Alumni what a day in the life is like at APL.

1:00-1:45 PM – Where to Go From Here
Opportunity for students to ask questions to Recruiters and UMBC Alumni.

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