Walk In Advising Hours June 20th - July 15th

Tuesday 6/21, 6/28, 7/5, 7/12
1:30pm-3pm

Friday 6/24, 7/1, 7/8, 7/15
10am-11:30am

Monday, Wednesday, Thursdays - NONE

Advisors are also available by appointment. Our advising offices are located in ITE 202-206. Email and telephone contact information is available here.

**If you are a new freshman or transfer student for Fall 2016, please be sure to sign up to attend orientation. You will meet with an advisor and register for classes on your orientation date. It will not be possible to register for classes in advance of orientation. If you have questions or concerns after you have attended orientation, you are welcome to email an advisor, attend walk-in advising hours, or schedule an appointment with an advisor.**

Dr. Gunes Koru and Dr. Dari AlHuwail won the 2016 Summer Institute in Nursing Informatics Research Poster Award for their poster presented titled "Identifying Home Care Clinicians Information Needs to Achieve Better Care Coordination in Fall Risk Management".

The UMBC Training Center will hold an online webinar 11:00-11:40am on Thursday, 30 June 2016 about its new, live online versions of its Certificate in Cyber Foundations and our Certificate in Cybersecurity. Each of the courses is comprised of a bundle of classes designed propel you through the training needed to reach specific career and skill-level goals.

This program provides candidates with the skills, knowledge, and credentials required to successfully begin a career in Information Technology and be poised to begin the training necessary to enter the Cybersecurity field. To earn the Certificate in Cyber Foundations, students will be guided through these three courses: CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, CompTIA Security+. Each of these courses will prepare you for respective CompTIA Certificate Exams and includes exam vouchers.

The nationally recognized cybersecurity programs at UMBC Training Centers were designed in collaboration with senior executives from Fortune 500 companies and well-known government agencies and teach highly focused skills through practical experience as well as UMBC Training Centers’ signature Rapid Applied Learning approach.

Register for the webinar here.

In response to horrific news of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016, President Freeman Hrabowski and Provost Philip Rous shared this message with the campus community:

We are deeply saddened by the senseless and appalling act of terror and hatred that took so many innocent lives early Sunday morning in Orlando. On behalf of the UMBC community, we express sympathy for the families and friends of the victims, the people of Orlando, the LGBTQ community, and all victims of terrorist acts across the globe.

 

This horrific act of violence and intolerance impacts our own UMBC community. We remain committed to ensuring a safe environment for our students, faculty, and staff, and we value the contributions every individual makes to our campus. We are reminded of how important it is to support one another, across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, and we hope that our culture of inclusiveness and acceptance at UMBC will be a source of strength as we stand together to uphold our collective values.

 

As we consider the difference the UMBC community can make during this challenging time, we encourage students, faculty, and staff to take advantage of the following campus resources:

 

• LGBTQ Faculty/Staff Association: lgbtfsa@umbc.edu
• Counseling Center: (410) 455-2472
• International Education Services: (410) 455-2624
• The Mosaic and Interfaith Center: (410) 455-2686
• Women’s Center: (410) 455-2714
• Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs: (410) 455-2393

Our thoughts are with the individuals and families affected by this tragedy.

UMBC’s LGBTQ Faculty and Staff Association has also issued a statement. “It is very clear,” the group writes, “we must continue to fight for the lives and dignity of all members of our community.” Read the full statement on the group’s website.

Image: Flags and students in the UMBC Commons. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing lasted several hours, showcased thousands of performers, and featured an elaborate fireworks ceremony, wowing the many spectators who viewed it in person and on high-definition television. But what the viewers saw was not entirely real.

The song that accompanied the entrance of the Chinese national flag was lip-synced. The impressive fireworks display was pre-recorded. But for one emerging cultural and media studies scholar watching on television, the event sparked provocative research questions. Fan Yang saw the opening ceremony incidents as emblematic of a larger struggle taking place within China’s economy.

Yang, an assistant professor of media and communication studies, wrestles with this in her new book Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press 2015). The thought-provoking work closely examines China’s cultural dilemma as it deals with competing visions for the nation’s economy since it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.

The book traces interactions between Chinese government policies to enforce its nation branding—the idea that China should make its own products to comply with the intellectual property rights regime, and the “counterfeit culture” of making, buying, and selling unauthorized products.

After living in several regions of the country and experiencing its vastly diverse landscape, Yang first became interested in this analysis when she began to think critically about the idea of national culture as a unified notion and started to push back against dominant Western perceptions that Chinese culture has an inherent propensity for faking.

“That kind of discussion of culture to me is not the most helpful,” explains Yang. “Not only because it understands culture as a fixed idea that never changes, but also that it doesn’t take into account the fact that many other places in the world have had this reputation of faking.”

Throughout the book, Yang weaves in examples like Beijing’s Silk Street Market (a popular tourist destination), the cultural formation of the term shanzhai (imitation and counterfeit brands and goods), and the concept of the Chinese Dream to illustrate the complex cultural dilemma that China is experiencing.

“There is a need to think about what China really means not just for China, but for the world. Looking at the interactions between culture and economy in China is a way for us to broaden the scope of cultural studies in the West,” Yang says.

In an increasingly globalized world, Yang is hopeful her book will make an important contribution to generating discussions about how a “rising” China is viewed by people in the West.

“The imagined contention between superpowers of China and America is overly simplistic and doesn’t account for a lot of complexities,” she says. “The kind of analysis that I performed I hope will reorient our thinking of China as at once aspiring to join the First World while still encountering ‘faking’ as a ‘Third-World problem.’”

For news media interviews related to Yang’s book, see below:

Fan Yang on fakes, pirates, and shanzhai culture (Sinica Podcast) 

Images: (1) Silk Street Markets by Tim Riley, CC by-NC-ND 2.0. (2) Fan Yang, photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.