Name: Amanpreet Aujla

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: John Hopkins Center for Learning and Health

Position Title: Research Intern

Major(s)/Minor(s): Biological Sciences

Expected Graduation Year: 2017

Briefly describe your internship, co-op,  or research opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

I worked at the Johns Hopkins Center for Learning and Health. It is a treatment research unit dedicated to providing and evaluating behavioral interventions that address problems of drug addiction, poverty, and unemployment. My fellow team members and I looked for participants in drug detox facilities who have had drug addiction problems. We provided these participants with medication to help block the effects of drugs but more specifically heroin. Additionally, I gave them jobs skills training including mathematical and reading skills and in addition provided them with income. However, if it is seen that they are using drugs while on the medication, the income is taken away. Therefore, these incentives are used to help participants stay abstinent. I recorded assessments of the participants to see progress. Furthermore, I looked at urine results and saw how many times drugs are used and additionally, blood tests are taken. I also made a video to showcase our research study  in order to gain more participants to join our study.

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

I found this internship through UMBC. I got my resume reviewed through an adviser and started applying on the jobs page. I got called into an interview in a couple weeks after sending in my resume. 

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I enjoyed making a difference in people's lives. Working with people who come from difficult backgrounds and have drug addictions, my ultimate goal was to help them get jobs and stay drug free. Getting to know each of my participants and working with a great team of researchers, I learned a lot about research and how everyone is so diverse. Seeing the participants grow as people, and noting how they worked so hard to get jobs made me happy and helped me realize that anyone has the potential to go forward. 

How do you believe you have made an impact through your work?

I believe I made an impact by creating a video that will now be used every time the researchers go out and look for participants rather than the staff presenting with a piece of paper. I also learned a lot about the participants and helped them obtain jobs. Furthermore, I helped with projects and assisted researchers with various tasks that helped me get a better understanding of how complicated research can be. 

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

I would say that UMBC is a great portal to obtain a job. Getting my resume reviewed helped me the most when it came to getting this internship. If it wasn't for the Umbcworks page, I would have never had this amazing opportunity. I also recommend that other students get in contact with faculty and try to get research with them. Every step counts and it is important to get started early so you are always ahead of the game. 

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Want to be the next Intern of the Week? Make sure to fill out this form and stay tuned. New interns are announced every Friday!

Meet Sean,
He is a Chemical Engineering major and corresponding secretary for Tau Beta Pi (TBP), the Engineering Honor Society. He is currently working on the synthesis and characterization of 3D graphene nanosheets to be used as support for electrocatalysts in a fuel cell.

Sean recently completed work at the University of New Mexico Nanoscience and Microsystems Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.

He hopes to complete a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and become a professor at a research university in the future.

PhD Dissertation Proposal

Secured Embedded Many-Core Accelerator for Big Data Processing

Amey Kulkarni

2:00-4:00pm Friday, 18 September 2015, ITE 325b

I/O bandwidth and stringent delay constraints on processing time, limits the use of streaming Big Data for a large variety of real world problems. On the other hand, examining Big Data in applications such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance unveils sensitive information in terms of hidden patterns or unknown correlations, thus demanding secured processing environment. In this PhD research, we propose a scalable and secured framework for a many-core accelerator architecture for efficient big data parallel processing. We propose to merge a compressive sensing-based framework to reduce IO Bandwidth and a machine learning-based framework to secure many-core communications. Four different reduced complexity architectures and two different modifications to Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) compressive sensing reconstruction algorithm are proposed. We implement the proposed OMP architectures on FPGA, ASIC, CPU/GPU and Many-Core to investigate hardware overhead cost. To secure communications within many-core, we propose two different machine learning-based Trojan detection framework which have minimal hardware overhead. To conclude this work, we aim to implement and evaluate the proposed scalable and secured many-core accelerator hardware for image and multi-channel biomedical signal processing on quad-core and sixteen-core architectures.

Committee: Drs. Tinoosh Mohsenin, (Chair), Mohamed Younis, Seung-Jun Kim, Farinaz Koushanfar (Rice University) and Houman Homayoun (George Mason University)

A resource round-up provided by Jess Myers, Women’s Center director 

In case you missed last night’s roundtable on White Womanhood and Critical Whiteness (or if you were there and want to keep the conversation going), I thought it might be useful to share some resources that have helped me on my ongoing journey of what it means to be a white woman and how I show up and impact those around me as a white woman. As I mentioned, white women need to “hold up the mirror” for ourselves and engage with our reflection of whiteness and white privilege. Having resources and community to help hold up the mirror for us and work through what we see is vital as we engage in this self-work. Below are (just) some resources I’ve found helpful and transformative in my journey. This is not an exhaustive list so I welcome suggestions as well!

It was standing room only at last night’s roundtable on White Womanhood and Critical Whiteness! We can’t stop here, though,  white women, let’s keep the conversation and learning going!

News Outlets and Blogs:

Colorlines 
“Colorlines is a daily news site where race matters, featuring award-winning investigative reporting and news analysis. Colorlines is published by Race Forward, a national organization that advances racial justice through research, media and practice.”
Twitter – Facebook – Website

Everyday Feminism
“Our mission is to help people heal from and stand up to everyday violence, discrimination, and marginalization through applied intersectional feminism.”
Twitter – Facebook – Wesbite

Feminist Wire
“The mission of The Feminist Wire is to provide socio-political and cultural critique of anti-feminist, racist, and imperialist politics pervasive in all forms and spaces of private and public lives of individuals globally. Of particular critical interest to us are social and political phenomena that block, negate, or limit the satisfaction of goods or ends that humans, especially the most vulnerable, minimally require for living free of structural violence.”
Twitter – Facebook – Website

Articles and Books:

White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (I personally recommend chapters 3 & 7)

When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress Women of Color by Mamta Motwana Accapadi (AND, just read this article as of 9/28 which is a great compliment: White Women’s Tears and the Men Who Love Them)

Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color by Mariana Ortega

Learn more about the term “white fragility” 

More thoughts about “calling in” and “calling out”

From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice by Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens

Conferences and Trainings:

Baltimore Racial Justice Action

• 13th of the Month Events
• Check out their resources page
• Facebook

Social Justice Training Institute

• This experience is no joke you all  – It CHANGED my life.
• There’s a student version of SJTI too!

Facing Race Conference

• This conference happens every other year. I was lucky enough to go on a scholarship when it was in Baltimore a few years ago. If you’re down to travel, do it!

Women’s Center Things!

Critical Social Justice
A year-long campaign with a week of concentrated programming and events each year. This year is October 19-23rd!

Our Lending Library 

Our Twitter and Facebook 

Internships are known as great opportunities for students to gain insight into their future careers, learn more about the working world, and start networking before they even graduate. But could they be something more?

This summer, UMBC students found that their internships could also enable them to profoundly impact local communities. While many Retrievers traveled to internships across the nation and the world—from Google in California to Grameen Bank in Bangladesh—others were focused on having an impact closer to UMBC’s Baltimore home.

UMBC students served as interns with non-profit organizations, government agencies, and companies essential to the Baltimore’s infrastructure, economy, and culture.

Rosa Rada ’17, interdisciplinary studies, helped improve community health through her internship with Baltimore City Health Department’s Baltimarket, which works to ensure food access throughout the city. “What I loved most about my position is that I was working for a program that was community-based and community-driven,” she said. “I was doing the work that I am most passionate about, in a city that I love dearly.”

In a survey of 2015 summer interns, UMBC’s Career Center found that over 70% of participating students increased their awareness of civic responsibility as a result of their internship and over 90% gained a deeper understanding of their career goals.

“We truly believe that internships can have a transformational effect, both for the students completing them and the communities in which they are working,” shared Kerry Kidwell-Slak, associate director of internships and employment at UMBC’s Career Center. “In these experiences, students are able to apply and test theories discussed in the classroom, and communities benefit from the new perspectives the students bring.”

Rachel Albert ’18, English and social work, worked to help asylum seekers adjust to life in the United States through her internship at the International Rescue Committee this summer. “I've really enjoyed the knowledge that what I'm doing, whether it's escorting clients to the hospital, talking with them, or making phone calls on their behalf, aids them as they begin their new life in Baltimore,” she said.

When interns engage with their community, employers take notice. “I would strongly recommend a UMBC intern to anyone wanting to provide a professional experience to impressive students ready and willing to jump into whatever is thrown at them,” said Tyler Stoddard, a case manager at the International Rescue Committee.

Meet some of UMBC’s summer interns, committed to making a difference in Baltimore!

To read more internship stories, check out #UMBCintern!

You can change the world! Our graduates have gone on to careers in politics, law, public service, social work, teaching, and yes, of course, medicine and scientific research. GWST trains you to read carefully, think complexly, and argue passionately. You will gain skills that will help you ace the LSAT and GRE, write a killer application essay for jobs, fellowships, and graduate school, and demonstrate to employers that you know how to work well in today’s diverse workplace. Far more importantly, though, a major in GWST sets you up for a lifetime of questioning hard, thinking deeply, and figuring out how to make real changes in the world around you—a life worth living.