What Can You Do With Your Major?

So you are taking classes and obtaining a degree but are you wondering what’s next?

Well the Career Services has great resources to help you learn more about your major and career opportunities.

Major Sheets can help you look at some sample job titles within the various industries that match up to your degree

Links By Major provides you with websites and national organizations related to your major

Career Path can be used to view videos, suggested course selections and information on career paths that other UMBC students/alumni have taken; you will also find a sample resume for your major

The O*NET System is the nation’s primary source of occupational information. It can help you learn key attributes and characteristics of workers and occupations

For more information, you can check out the following:

http://www.careers.umbc.edu/students/majorsheets/

or stop by Math/Psyc 212 to view our hard copy Career Resources, and/or schedule anappointment with a Career Specialist

 We also suggest getting involved on campus and joining Academic and Departmental Clubs!

http://osl.umbc.edu/orgs/

We met Rajashree last Fall semester and we thought it would be a good idea to revisit our researcher's again to promote the hard work that she has been working on.

 Rajashree is a Bioinformatics & Computational Biology major and an undergraduate researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research probed into the micro-biological world of protein interaction which is essential to understand function within cells, pathways and relationship to diseases.

Read more about Rajashree's research here... 

Match Education (www.matcheducation.org) operates an elementary, middle, and high school in Boston for inner city students, and run an urban education tutoring program in Illinois in partnership with the Chicago Public Schools and the University of Chicago.

We’re looking for seniors who either

- want to spend a year working closely with students in Boston while training to be a teacher or

- want to spend a year in Boston or Chicago working closely with students before heading off to grad school or another career

Our teacher training program was recently recognized by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan for its innovation. Program participants receive training on how to become highly effective first-year teachers (there is a near 100% placement rate in high performing urban schools). In addition, teacher residents receive housing and a living stipend while completing their Master’s.

The teacher residency is only available in Boston, but we have tutoring opportunities (for folks just looking to do an urban education gap year) available in both Chicago and Boston.

Below are some links with additional information:

Match Education's "About Us" page

Our Graduate School of Education

Info on our 1-Year Tutoring Program

Info on previous program participants

You can contact the recruiting team directly at Recruiting@MatchEducation.org

Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series

The White House Climate Data Initiative

Eric Letvin
Director, Disaster and Failure Studies
National Security Council

3:00pm Tuesday, 29 April 2014, ITE 456, UMBC

Delivering on the commitment in the President’s Climate Action Plan, the White House recently launched the Climate Data Initiative — a broad effort to leverage the Federal Government’s extensive, freely- available climate-relevant data resources to advance awareness of and preparedness for climate change impacts. This effort will help give communities across America the information and tools they need to plan for current and future climate impacts. Data from NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense, and other Federal agencies was recently launched on climate.data.gov. Data and innovation challenges issued by public, private, nonprofit, and other organizations can help catalyze new, data-driven solutions that help communities understand and build resilience to climate change. NOAA and NASA recently announced an innovation challenge calling on researchers and developers to create data-driven simulations to help plan for the future and to educate the public about the vulnerability of their own communities to sea level rise and flood events.

Mr. Eric Letvin PE, Esq, is the Director of Hazard Mitigation and Risk Reduction Policy within the National Security Council in the Executive Office of the President. He coordinates the development and effective delivery of mitigation capabilities identified in the National Preparedness Goal, such as threat and hazard identification, risk and disaster resilience assessment, planning, and long-term vulnerability reduction.

When at NIST, Mr. Letvin is the Disaster and Failure Studies Program Director within NIST’s Engineering Laboratory. Mr. Letvin provides national coordination for conducting field data collection studies. He is also responsible for creating and maintaining a repository related to hazard events (earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, windstorms, community-scale fires in the wildland-urban interface, structural fires, storm surge, flood, tsunami) and human-made hazards (accidental, criminal, or terrorist), the performance of the built environment during hazard events, associated emergency response and evacuation procedures.

Before coming to NIST, Mr. Letvin was Leader of Infrastructure Research and Resiliency in the Homeland Security Group of URS. He has participated in numerous post-disaster studies including the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and Hurricanes Opal, Ike and Katrina. He has assessed over 200 buildings for risk from terrorist threats and natural disasters.

Mr. Letvin holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in environmental engineering from Syracuse University and received his Juris Doctor from the University of Maryland. He has taught many courses on risk assessments and protection of infrastructure for FEMA/DHS and made related presentations throughout the world over the last ten years.

Name:  Aaron Samuels

Internship, Co-op or Research Site:  BITHGROUP TECHNOLOGIES

Major(s)/Minor(s):   Psychology

Expected Graduation Year: June 2014

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

During the fall and part of the summer, I worked under the current Human Resource Manager, Robert H. Greene III, at BITHGROUP TECHNOLOGIES, an IT consulting firm that also provides a wide range of services to the City of Baltimore, MD. The majority of my time was spent shadowing Mr. Greene and observing the various daily activities he undertook, none of which were routine. On several occasions I was tasked with researching new potential employees, reviewing newly submitted resume's, updating employee profiles both on file and online, and organizing certain in office events.

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

I enjoyed the "hands-on" experience I obtained throughout my time there. I spent the first half of my summer researching what an H.R. Generalist does but I could never get a full picture until I started working there. I also enjoyed sitting in on personal conversation involving employee disputes and personal issues, it was there that I found exactly what roll psychology played in this occupation. My manager was especially outstanding in these types of situations as well. It was almost as if he could read minds! That's how great he was at reading people. Not only that, but he always seemed to know the right way to approach delicate situations and how to acknowledge the employee's difficulties without compromising his own feelings on the issue.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

I don't think I would have obtained the intrapersonal social skills here at my old job. For example, I have always had trouble remembering names because I was never really motivated too until I came to the company. I've noticed a huge difference in how people react when you use their name versus a general pronoun. I know that sounds arbitrary and just a bit cheesy but it really is something I've come to value.

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

Never assume anything and always double check yourself: If there is something you don’t know or not sure of, FIND IT OUT! If you only feel like an employee remembers an important date or you believe that they may have completed a task, you should still follow up on it personally if it’s possible.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

I know now what I'm getting into, that was my main goal in doing this internship. I know now the person I have to become in order perform this kind of work. Now it's just a matter of getting certified.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

If you get an opportunity, take it! If you have the connections and resources, use them! Do not wait! What I loved most about this entire experience is that I could make mistakes and not be fired. And you will make mistakes. Better to do it as an intern than when you have a career on the line. This is the rationale behind an internship, so you can say on your resume. "Yes! I have experience!" Because as I've experienced with a lot of jobs I've applied for and from working here, most employer's today won't even look at you without this experience.

The NIST National Cybersecurity Center for Excellence (NCCoE) is seeking full- and part-time paid interns from UMBC graduate students studying cybersecurity at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG). The program is part of NCCoE’s ongoing efforts to build and sustain academic partnerships in the Montgomery County region.

The NCCoE internship will identify and immerse students in practical cybersecurity experiences at the NCCoE in Rockville, MD. NCCoE’s Cybersecurity Graduate Researchers will work in a state-of-the-art facility with expert cybersecurity practitioners from government and academia, along with engineers from some of the largest and most influential IT and cybersecurity companies in the world, including Intel, Microsoft, Symantec, HP, Cisco, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, and Hytrust.

During their internships, NCCoE’s Graduate Cybersecurity Researchers may assist NCCoE staff and contractors in areas such as:

the design and building of cybersecurity reference designs to demonstrate platform capabilities that address one or more challenges identified by industry.

mentoring undergraduate cybersecurity researchers and helping build teams to work on research projects.

working with NCCoE industry partners and collaborators to identify relevant commercially available technologies that can serve as a component of these reference designs.

supporting the NCCoE lab infrastructure, including the provisioning of hardware, creation and management of both virtual and physical equipment, and the installation and configuration of cybersecurity tools and components.

These NCCoE internships are open to UMBC cybersecurity students enrolled at the USG campus who are US citizens. The deadline for Summer 2014 consideration is Monday, May 5, however internships are available during the 2014-15 academic year as well.

For more information and/or to apply, please contact the USG Career & Internship Services Center at 301-738-6338 or Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

ACTIVE Center Open House

4:00-5:00pm Monday, 28 April 2014 in ENGR 231

The ACTIVE Center (Engineering 231) is a new classroom that was created by the CSEE Department with support from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation, BAE Systems, and Northrup Grumman. The ACTIVE Center is designed to facilitate active student learning and laptop-based laboratory activities, and features movable furniture and whiteboards, a smart projector, and flat-panel displays around the room. We are also developing and documenting a “virtual environment” for the classroom, by creating “design patterns” for how computing technology can be used in this type of space to facilitate student learning.

The classroom came online in February 2014, and four pilot courses are currently being offered in the space. On Monday, April 28, we will hold an open house and presentation in the ACTIVE Center to show the campus community how an intentionally designed classroom space can increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes. The open house will include a presentation by Dr. Marie desJardins, a Hrabowski Academic Innovation Fellow and lead PI for the ACTIVE Center project, and a Q&A session with instructors and students who are currently teaching and learning in the ACTIVE Center. We will share best practices for developing and using similar teaching spaces, and will present the current policy for requesting to use the space for future classes.

Please note that no food or drink (other than covered containers of water) are permitted in the ACTIVE Center, but light refreshments will be provided in the hallway following the presentation.

Capacity is limited, so please RSVP. For more information, contact Marie desJardins (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).