The Summer Undergraduate Research Program [SURP] is an intensive, nine-week internship designed to provide research experience and mentorship for undergraduate students who are interested in biological research. Under the guidance of a faculty mentor, students will complete an independent research project and present their findings at a competitive poster session. 

The program runs from Monday, June 10 through Saturday, August 10, 2013(Monday, June 10 and Saturday, August 10 are travel days). Students must be able to commit to this entire period in order to participate.

Areas of Research

Students will be paired with a faculty mentor after selecting one of the following areas of interest:

• Basic Science: Conducts structural, genetic, molecular, cellular, developmental and evolutionary biology;
• Human Biology: Interdisciplinary research; conducts lab-based and computational research at the interface of basic, clinical and population sciences;
• Public Health: Uses large populations as a "laboratory" to look for links between cancer and its possible triggers, from diet and lifestyle to environmental and genetic factors. Conducts statistical, epidemiological and prevention studies around the world;
• Clinical Research: Works to develop and analyze new treatments for cancers and other Diseases; and
• Vaccine and Infectious Disease: Integrates computational, laboratory and clinical research method to advance the understanding of microbial pathogenesis and infectious disease processes.

• In many situations, people face a choice between doing something in a way that feels right, resonates, comes from the heart, makes sense, and fits the moment; or doing the thing in the way that they think they are supposed to do it. Examples: Giving a speech; proposing marriage; dealing with somebody’s emotional crisis; disciplining a child; interviewing a job candidate; responding “heroically” to a threat. More often than not, the genuine approach produces more satisfying results. And more often than not, people  instead choose to do what they think they are supposed to do. (Part of the problem is that people’s sense of what they are supposed to do comes from many sources, including media, that present the relevant situations in misleading ways. For example, the media may capture the mechanical aspects of an effective speech but not the way the words match the emotions of the moment).

• Situations take a while to play out. There’s no need to panic, or to assume that what initially seems to be true will always be true.

• People tend to overreact.

• A situation that has been imagined, read about, etc. may not be easily recognized when it becomes a real situation. This is because the feel of the imagined situation may have been very distinctive, but the real situation feels much more like every other real situation. Examples: “corruption,” “falling in love,” “heroism.”

• In many situations, a variety of motivations drive people’s choice of actions. These motivations can range from deeply spiritual to simply practical. However, over time, the more abstract motivations tend to be forgotten, and the more practical motivations remembered and acted upon. It’s hard to cling to a concept; but practicalities—deadlines, costs, etc.—are hard to forget, and create their own inertia. As a result, people repeatedly find themselves going through the motions: continuing to do things that they once made the choice to do, but without retaining any sense of connection to their deepest needs and motivations. They feel lost, and their activities provide no real sustenance.

• People are not their roles.

• Many situations apparently resolved through formal processes, such as hiring staff, or creating legislation, are really resolved through a complex combination of formal and informal processes. Very often, the informal processes—which may be unacknowledged and hidden from view—are the more important ones.

• The key to effective communication is to understand one’s audience. And a lot of people can’t or don’t bother to understand many audiences for their communications.

• People may have to hear the same good idea many times before it enters their consciousness.

• Ideas are not appreciated or rewarded in proportion to their truth, beauty, explanatory power, or even social value. Other factors typically matter more. Among them: The credentials of the idea’s originator (however arbitrary their connection to the idea); the prospect that somebody can turn a profit from the idea; and the degree to which the idea departs from, or even improves upon, accepted wisdom (the more it does, the less likely it will be appreciated and rewarded).

• Often people want things for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. It’s just something that they feel—maybe the subtle combination of a number of subjective factors (“I want Chinese food—even though we had Chinese last night;” “I want to go home now;” “I want this job despite the fact that it pays less than the other one”). Because they are personal impulses rather than the products of reasoning, these desires can be difficult to assert or defend. In forums where a collective decision is being made, logical arguments may be favored and impulsive arguments dismissed. But the impulses are real, and their connection to people’s welfare is real as well. It is perfectly legitimate to act on such impulses, and to resist the people who try to defeat them with arguments. 

• Many actions appear to reflect clear, easily inferred motives but in fact do not. People and institutions do all sorts of things that may seem planned, polished and connected to a strategic agenda, but actually are the products of inertia, laziness, whim, jittery responses to incomplete information, or other motives more complex or confused than they seem.

• Social change happens in a gestalt—not as the result of any single well-conceived, well-executed program, policy or intervention. There is no single initiative that will save the world. This is because people, institutions, relationships and cultures are extremely complex. Any single action aimed at social change, however well-conceived and widely supported, is likely to be challenged, diverted, thwarted, misunderstood and/or misapplied in a thousand different ways. But honest, thoughtful efforts can have a cumulative effect. Slowly, person-by-person, relationship-by-relationship, they shift the underlying culture and expectations. So the good that we do is not always the immediate good that we intend.

• People express opinions for a lot of different reasons. That they really, deeply believe in what they are saying is only one of them.

• Overly zealous advocacy of a certain perspective alienates people who might otherwise have adopted that perspective in due time.

• The most insidious way to attack or undermine an idea is to call something else by its name.

• There are many situations that feel rotten, even when handled perfectly. (Examples: consoling somebody on the death of a friend; apologizing for a mistake that caused a lot of harm). So it is a mistake to assume from the rotten feeling that you have said or done the wrong thing.

• A picture left in the same place on the wall long enough will become invisible.

• Some things can be learned only through experience.

• When the true relationship between cause and effect is unknown, very simple patterns can appear vastly more complicated than they really are.

• Perceptions freeze more easily than situations. Once a person has formed a perception of a situation, he or she is likely to miss the fact that the situation has shifted subtly or gradually over time.

• Ambiguities in the early part of an arrangement can be costly to resolve. They may be the only things making the arrangement possible. Business deals, marriages, friendships—all may depend on the parties failing to reveal and resolve conflicts in their perceptions about the facts behind their transactions. If one of the parties, at the commencement of an arrangement, sees that these unresolved conflicts may exist, it can be very tempting to keep quiet about them and hope for the best. But the cost of cleaning up the messes that can arise when these conflicts come to light later, long after all parties have begun to take actions consistent with their own perceptions, can be far, far greater. In general, it is much better to name and attempt to resolve ambiguities on the front end of an arrangement rather than risk the catastrophe of having them derail the arrangement later.

• Justice is often associated with equality. “Splitting the difference” has a ring of fairness to it. Exhibiting “balance” in reporting on a situation—for example, devoting the same amount of journalistic space to each side of a controversy—seems evenhanded. But in situations in which there actually is a fundamental underlying inequality, treating people equally is fundamentally unjust. For example, if two people disagree about ten aspects of a transaction, but one of the two people is correct about all ten aspects and the other is simply lying for his or her own gain, it would be unjust to conclude that each person must be right about five of the ten sources of disagreement, or to simply “split the difference.”

• The two major sources of happiness are self-expression and love. And in truth, they are the same things.

The following part-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9254730 - Government Relations - World Wildlife Fund
9254674 - Seasonal Sales and Stock Associates - EXPRESS (Columbia Mall)
9254560 - Shift Manager - Jump!Zone
9254717 - IT Help Desk - Baltimore Aircoil

The following full-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings! 

9254679 - CargoTel, Inc. - Client & Product Support Manager
9254678 - The Baltimore Montessori School - Assistant Teacher
9254670 - CareFirst BlueCross/BlueShield - Technician Enrollment, 5132
9254731 - SRA International, Inc - Linux Administrator
9254681 - Project Engineer - The Morin Company, LLC

On-Campus Interviews offer students a chance to conveniently interview for professional positions on campus.  Employers travel to our campus for the specific purpose of interviewing preselected students for currently open positions.  This is a great opportunity to interview with employers specifically interested in UMBC students and offers the advantage of a smaller applicant pool.  Interviews take place during the fall and spring. The logistics (viewing positions, applying, signing up for interview time slots, etc.) are all handled via UMBCworks.

Don't miss out on employers coming to UMBC to recruit YOU this fall! The following is a list of employers coming to conduct on-campus interviews with application deadlines in the next month.

**Sherwin-Williams

Interviewing on 12/7/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks:  11/23/12)
Position:  Management/Leadership Training Program
Majors:  All Majors

A full list of On-Campus Interviews scheduled this fall is available on our website calendar and on UMBCworks, please check regularly for any updates or changes that may occur.

This is a part/time project (20 hours/week, start date: ASAP, end date: May, 2013, negotiable) which will require the student to spend concentrated few hours a day at the NASA/GSFC facility at Greenbelt, MD. If the student has the ability she/he would be encouraged in the data analysis to develop statistical models relating the measurements. The student would also help out with other analysis and measurement activities that our group is doing. Please see attached an abstract describing the project, and let me know if you can help and/or need further information.