All posts by: Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque

Résumés in hand, 2,000+ hopeful and prepared Retrievers attend the 2024 Career Fair

On a perfect 55-degree sunny February day, hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students across all colleges stood in a line that began at the RAC and wrapped its way to Sherman Hall. Instead of exercise gear, Retrievers were dressed to impress with résumés in hand, ready to land a summer internship or a job with one of the 180-plus employers across multiple industry sectors at UMBC’s Spring 2024 Career and Internship Fair.  

“We are excited to help employers develop a strong talent pipeline and diverse future workforce, shaping the leaders and innovators of tomorrow,” said Paige Bauder, associate director of employer relations and recruitment programs at UMBC. 

A LinkedIn post of college students at a career fair
Image courtesy of Christine Routzahn, director of UMBC’s Career Center.

The leading edge

“Give strong handshakes. Maintain eye contact,” said Leon Tang ’26, information systems, in a booming voice, as he scanned IDs as a volunteer at the event. 

A person wearing a gold colored t-shirt holds a digital scanner for students to scan their plastic IDs
Leon Tang welcoming Career Fair attendees. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

“Some people might come in nervous. It’s over 180 companies, so it can be pretty hard,” said Tang. He currently has two internships, one as a business technology intern at Agile Care Enterprises, based at bwtech@UMBC, and another as a research assistant in the information systems department. “It’s a good way to tell everyone to be calm and be confident. It’s the little things that can go pretty far in obtaining something.” For the nearly 2,200 Retrievers that made it through the door that day, this was sage advice.

A professional headshot is one of those little things. After making it past Tang, Bhargavi Gudapati, a current master’s student in information systems, headed straight back to grab the 10th spot in a line that, over the next four hours, would consistently have dozens of excited and grateful students waiting for their free headshot. Gudapati, an international student from India, has attended every career fair since she arrived in 2022. She wants to get ahead of the steep competition of international students looking to launch the next phase of their career in the U.S. 

A student sits on a stool while a photographer takes their headshot at the UMBC RAC
Spring 2024 Career and Internship Fair headshot station. (Image courtesy of Christine Routzahn)

“It’s incredibly important to get to know employers in person instead of only on their online portal,” says Gudapati. “You want to know what they require and the current technology they are using.” 

One of those employers, Ed Belsinger ’90, M.S. ’93, mechanical engineering, is a newbie to UMBC’s career fairs. He proudly wore his UMBC sweatshirt and a smile that became a beacon of friendliness in a sea of students seeking opportunities. Belsinger is the director of product development at RPM Tech, a company that turns an idea into a prototype and a prototype into a fully manufacturable product. Because RPM does all the engineering and design in-house with a full shop and lab, it can offer students a wide range of expertise. 

Belsinger notes that RPM is currently in a growth mode and has three internships available as well as full-time positions. “As an alum, I said, ‘This is a great school—we have to go there.’ Whether it’s an internship or someone right out of college, we’re looking for students with curiosity, who want to learn, are willing to do new things, to be challenged, and be part of a team.”

Students at a career fair talk with employers
(l – r): Ed Belsinger (in grey) and Jonathan Dao (in black). (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

Hoping to grab one of the RPM internships is Jonathan Dao, computer science, a first-year student waiting in line to speak with Belsinger. “I saw tech in the name and wanted to learn more. I want to see if I can start early to have a competitive advantage,” said Dao. “I think first-year students should definitely give the career fair a shot. Come in with confidence, try rehearsing how to present yourself, and dress well.”

Part of the team

Sekinat Dosunmu ’24 agrees with Dao’s approach. After spending her first year of college remote, she has made it a point to attend every career fair in person. Toward the end of the day, she lined up at the FBI table, ready to discuss what the FBI had to offer someone like her with a global studies major, an Africana studies minor, and certificates in tech and intercultural communication. As she stepped forward, a recruiter immediately welcomed her.

While waiting to continue talking with Dosunmu, other recruiters shared that the FBI welcomes all majors, including the arts and humanities. They noted that the most important skill the FBI is looking for is how someone approaches and solves a problem in a team environment.

The artists approach

Solving problems creatively is the bread (or blood) and butter of C.C. Smith ’24, theatre, formerly known as Dracula in UMBC’s fall 2023 production of Dracula: a Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really. That role earned him an audition for a film later on in the day, so Smith is hurrying through the fair.

Later in the spring, UMBC’s Career Center hosts boutique career fairs, one of which is focused on creative careers, and on March 7, it will host the CAHSS Career Connection Social for arts, humanities, and social science majors, but that doesn’t stop Smith from checking things out. As an actor, Smith explains, you never know when someone is looking to do a commercial. “This is my first time here. I would like to see more performing arts employers in this larger career fair, especially with how good the arts programs are here,” says Smith. “As a senior, it’s still important to be poking around this fair.” 

Luna Siesko ’25, visual arts, and Alexander Schobitz ’22, visual arts, agree with Smith that UMBC students excel in the arts, and would like local employers to know about that. Siesko, a photographer and videographer at commonvision, UMBC’s design shop, used her skillset to bring personally designed business cards and résumés to the fair. Siesko is unsure what she is looking for but hopes that by speaking with some of the employers, like the folks at the Baltimore County Arts Guild, she can get a sense of how to best move forward. 

College students at a UMBC career fair, wearing backpacks, stand in front of tables speaking with employers
Luna Siesko at the Baltimore County Arts Guild table. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

“We’re a small non-profit five minutes from UMBC. We want to make sure that artists feel seen and heard and know there is a place for them to work,” said Gloria Fajimolu, program and events manager at the Baltimore County Arts Guild, a new employer at the Career Fair. “We’re very welcoming. If a student doesn’t get the internship or the job, they can still be a paid instructor. If they are in animation, we will pay them to teach animation classes to the community.”

A person sits at a table speaking with students at a UMBC career fair.
Gloria Fajimolu, program and events manager at the Baltimore County Arts Guild. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

As a recent alum, Schobitz has one goal—to get a job in animation. He is grateful UMBC gives alumni access to the career fairs and Handshake, a job listing app. “I apply to about 10 jobs per day. I use sites like Indeed and Handshake to find jobs and apply,” says Schobitz. “While I was a student, I used UMBC’s résumé services and made a lot of appointments. I’m still trying. I won’t give up.”

The end and beginning

A long line of students stand outside the UMBC RAC in between tall brick buildings waiting to enter a Career Fair to find internships
UMBC students lineup for the Spring 2024 Career and Internship Fair.
(Image courtesy of Routzhan)

Back at the headshot line, Cristian Castro, M.S. ’24, cybersecurity, joined the still-growing line as the last wave of students filed in. Castro is from Colombia and is looking to find a company to sponsor him to work in the U.S. “The Career Fair is a very good opportunity to see what’s out there. A professional photo is important in a LinkedIn profile,” says Castro. He also found some job leads earlier this year while representing UMBC as part of the Society of Advancing Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. “When it comes to what happens after graduation, every detail helps.”

Follow the Career Center on myUMBC and RSVP to the CAHSS Career Connection Social on Thursday, March 7, to network with alumni and employers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

For the third time in five years, UMBC is named a Fulbright Top Producing Institution

Within just a few months of living in Piątek, a small town in central Poland, Leah Michaels, M.F.A ’19, intermedia and digital arts, has already traveled to Romania, where many recipients of the Fulbright U.S. Student award placed throughout Europe gathered at a media literacy conference. She has also had an opportunity to research Polish film at Poland’s Film Archive and connect with a local genealogist who helped her find details about her Polish roots for a short documentary she is producing about her ancestry.

Michaels and nine other UMBC Fulbright student recipients researching and teaching English abroad this year helped propel UMBC, once again, to the elite ranks of a Fulbright Top Producing Institution, as reported today in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The designation recognizes colleges and universities with the highest number of students selected for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international academic exchange program. UMBC first received this designation from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in 2019 – 2020 and again in 2020 – 2021. 

UMBC is one of 57 doctoral universities nationwide and three in Maryland to receive a Fulbright Top Producing Institution designation for Fulbright U.S. Students in 2023 – 2024.

A digital blue, gray, and white graphic of a shield and a globe with words written in white

More than 2,200 U.S. students from hundreds of colleges and universities are awarded Fulbright grants annually. However, only a few of these institutions are designated top producers yearly. In the last decade, UMBC students and recent graduates have received over 60 Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, South America, and Europe.

“This achievement is a testament to your institution’s deep commitment to international exchange,” wrote Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a letter to President Valerie Sheares Ashby, congratulating her on UMBC’s Fulbright Top Producer designation, “and to building lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”

Mutual understanding

In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Fulbright recipients play a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy, establishing long-term relationships between people and nations through graduate study, research, or teaching as English Teaching Assistants (ETAs). ETAs develop their own language skills and knowledge of the host country while teaching English to elementary, middle school, or college students.

A large group of Fulbright students stand outside raising flags of different countries celebrating UMBC being a Top Producing Institution designation
2019 – 2020 UMBC Fulbright U.S. Student recipients. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

“As a public research university, it is imperative that we provide students with opportunities for global engagement,” says David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education. “Fulbright is among the most prestigious of these opportunities.”

While Michaels has flourished in Poland, her 2023 – 2024 Fulbright class peers have also settled into their placements, which generally start in September with the new school year. Paul Ocone ’22, individualized study, is conducting research at the Meiji University School of Global Japanese Studies in Japan, and eight ETAs are teaching English across Europe and Asia: 

  • North Macedonia: David Bullman ’22, ancient studies
  • Romania: Tiffany Powell, M.A. ’23, teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL)
  • Slovak Republic: Sianna Serio ’23, computer science
  • South Korea: Tasneem Mansour ’20, modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication
  • Taiwan: Nailah-Benā Chambers ’23, global studies; Kara Gavin ’20, English; and Milan Richardson ’23, bioinformatics
  • Turkey: Grant Clifton, M.A. ’23, TESOL

“Being named a Top Producing Fulbright Institution is a tremendous honor—it not only shows the world what we already know about our amazing students, but it also lets our current students know that the Fulbright is a realistic opportunity for them,” says Brian Souders, Ph.D. ’09, language, literacy, and culture, M.A.’19, TESOL, and associate director of global learning at the Center for Global Engagement (CGE). Souders has led students through the Fulbright application process as UMBC’s Fulbright Program advisor for the last decade.

For Michaels, the experience has been life-changing. “My home city has been incredibly welcoming. I learned Polish folk dances, made Old Bay pierogi from scratch with some of my students, and joined a school trip to an art gallery,” says Michaels.

The Fulbright family

The Fulbright experience also includes college and university faculty and staff, as well as artists and professionals from a wide range of fields, who can join over 400,000 Fulbright alumni. 

In October 2023, Renique Kersh, vice president of student affairs, and Souders traveled to Germany after receiving Fulbright International Education Administrator awards. Katherine Heird, director of education abroad and global learning, received the same award to travel to Taiwan in spring 2024. The award is geared to provide staff who support Fulbright applicants with a greater understanding of higher education worldwide. 

Many UMBC faculty members and staff have received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award over the years. This year, Lynn Cazabon, professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts, received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to work at Queensland University, Australia, to create a public artwork based on local communities’ responses to climate change. Cazabon received her first Fulbright award in 2015 to the University of Liepāja, Latvia.

Fulbright Scholars globally are also drawn to UMBC’s welcoming community. Shannon Sauro, associate professor of education, hosted Jules Buendgens-Kosten, a research assistant at the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany. Buendgens-Kosten joined UMBC as the institution’s first Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence to teach and share their research on inclusive education in teaching English as a foreign language to students in UMBC’s TESOL master’s program. 

UMBC has also been selected as the only U.S. institution to host an orientation for newly awarded Scholars-in-Residence. Madison Pickard, M.A. ’24, modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, graduate assistant, and CGE’s special programs coordinator, notes that UMBC was chosen for its emphasis, expertise, and dedication to inclusivity for all regarding disability and identity.

“Fulbright’s Top Producing Institutions represent the diversity of America’s higher education community. Dedicated administrators support students and scholars at these institutions to fulfill their potential and rise to address tomorrow’s global challenges,” said Lee Satterfield, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. “We congratulate them and all the Fulbrighters who are making an impact the world over.” 

Read about more about past Fulbright cohorts at UMBC. This year’s Fulbright U.S. Student Program application cycle opens on April 2, 2024. Learn more about applying.

American Council of Learned Societies spotlights UMBC’s CoLab as an interdisciplinary leader

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has chosen UMBC’s Interdisciplinary CoLab for its “Undergraduate Spotlight” series. ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 80 scholarly organizations that has supported and amplified American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences since 1919. Over the last six summers, UMBC’s CoLab has provided students with an innovative team-based applied learning opportunity through a three-credit paid internship in narrative-based research. 

ACLS writes, “Unlike traditional group work in a college classroom, wherein majors from the same discipline are all trying to master the same material, CoLab projects require students to use their own skills and appreciate the skills of others.”

Professional research experience

CoLab gives interdisciplinary student teams a professional research experience while learning how to tell effective stories and create valuable public-facing results for community partners. “I wasn’t aware of the [Baltimore Immigration] museum prior to my internship,” shared CoLab alum Johanna Alonso ’20, English, about her team’s project “Baltimore: The Second Ellis Island. “I think the real benefit of the CoLab is that it exposes students to people, places, programs, and projects we may never have encountered otherwise.”

Co-directed by Carole McCann, professor and chair of gender, women’s, + sexuality studies, and Donald Snyder, a principal lecturer in media and communications studies, UMBC Interdisciplinary CoLab is a partnership between the Provost’s Office, the Dresher Center for the Humanities, and the Office of Summer, Winter, and Special Programs.

“ACLS is a very prestigious national academic organization,” says McCann, “so for it to highlight CoLab as an innovative program is a big deal.” 

After participating in the 2021 CoLab focused on BLM and Civil Rights Oral Histories, Deysi Chitic-Amaya ’23, media and communication studies, said, “I want to be able to approach future projects with a more open-minded perspective that may help to produce something new and innovative.”

Read more about students’ CoLab experiences and the application process.

New name for UMBC’s emergency health services department reflects broadened scope of disaster health systems

The increasing impact of global disasters on health systems has created a growing need for experts to help manage disaster risks and reduce their impact. In keeping with that demand, UMBC’s emergency health services (EHS) department has changed its name to the Department of Emergency and Disaster Health Systems (EDHS) to reflect the scope of research, teaching, and learning of emergency and disaster health systems covered in its programs. The new name also acknowledges the scholarship happening at the graduate level.

headshot of a woman with greenery behind her. She's the department chair of Department of Emergency and Disaster Health Systems
Lauren Clay, EDHS associate professor and department chair

“Our new department name signifies our commitment to emergency and disaster health education,” says Lauren Clay, associate professor of emergency and disaster health systems and department chair, who has received several grants from the National Science Foundation in recent years to specifically address the understanding and monitoring of food availability, acceptability, and accessibility during disasters. “We prepare leaders that are ready to tackle the complex and evolving hazards facing communities across the United States and the world,” explains Clay. 

UMBC’s EDHS department is rising to the challenge by equipping students with the skills needed to pursue careers as emergency preparedness coordinators, community engagement specialists, emergency communications supervisors, or analysts. Undergraduate students can now enroll in classes that focus on disaster management in healthcare, public health, and emergency management organizations, in addition to emergency health services classes.

UMBC’s EHS department has a long history of preparing students to enter careers where they are ready to respond to local disasters like Ellicott City’s most recent floods and international disasters, like the Philippines’s Typhoon Haiyan. The EHS baccalaureate program began in 1980 with the goal of producing the most comprehensively educated individuals capable of performing tasks within the broad scope of the emergency healthcare field as leaders, managers, and providers.

The graduate program for emergency health services, the first in the nation, began a year later. It remains the largest program of its type available in the United States. Next year, the department is planning to offer several new graduate and undergraduate classes on a range of disaster health systems topics.

“The department has offered emergency health services and disaster management programs for decades. The former name did not fully capture the breadth of those offerings,” explains Clay. “We wanted to make sure that students and our colleagues know about our programs that prepare students to work in various professions addressing emergency and disaster health.”

Learn more about what EDHS has to offer.

Noor Zaidi, history, receives prestigious NEH faculty fellowship to complete book project

Noor Zaidi, assistant professor of history, received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship to research and write Translations of Zaynab: Gender, Sectarianism, and Citizenship in Shi’a Islam. The book will analyze how the seventh-century figure, Zaynab bint Ali, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammed, has been used in 20th-century political contexts.

“It is my great pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 260 exemplary humanities projects undertaken by scholars, higher education institutions, and organizations of every size,” stated NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) in the NEH press release. “This funding will help preserve and expand access to community histories, strengthen the ability of small museums and archives to serve the public, and provide resources and educational opportunities for students to engage with history, literature, languages, and cultures.”

Zaidi, a 2017 UMBC postdoctoral fellow, is a scholar of the Middle East and South Asia. She specializes in the history of gender, sectarianism, and Shi’a Islam in national and transnational spaces. Her research explores “sites of sectarianization” through the 20th century, tracing the development and evolution of pilgrimage to two female shrines in Syria and Pakistan and prisons in Iraq as sites of memory and identity construction. Based on oral interviews, fieldwork, and archival research in Syria, Pakistan, and Iraq, Zaidi’s work explores the physical and imaginative spaces in which identity is made and contested and shows how transnational narratives become embedded in local contexts.

You can read Zaidi’s articles about “green” Ramadan, the hajj pilgrimage, and the Shiite Muslim holiday, Ashura, in The Conversation.

Handle with care—students help digitize and rehouse thousands of historical photos

A nine-year-old stands at the mouth of a coal mine covered in coal dust, wearing a small headlamp. A woman holds her baby on her lap as she packs boxes in a warehouse along with her 5-, 8-, and 12-year-olds. These are just two of thousands of evocative black-and white historical photographs handled by Special Collections interns Meredith Power ’21, history, a public history graduate student, and Gabe Morrison ’23, anthropology. Along with library staff members, these two worked diligently to ensure that the images of the families and children who lived through these harrowing work conditions are accessible to the public for research and learning.

Fine motor skills

“Photos from the early 1900s were developed on fine photographic paper that is prone to crinkling around the edges, ripping, and fading,” Power says. Wearing blue nitrile medical gloves, they rehouse photos from their cellophane sleeves to museum-grade mylar sleeves, keeping them from further discoloration, tears, wrinkles, and sticking to the sleeves.

“They’re very delicate,” Power says. “You need good eye-hand coordination to pick up the photos from the corners, remove them from whatever packaging they are in, and slide them into the mylar sleeve.”

an intern puts historical photos into a mylar sleeve
Power puts the historical photos into a mylar sleeve. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

This process is second nature for Morrison, who has been working at Special Collections for over a year. He has worked with securing the Lewis Hine photos as part of his public humanities minor, as well as the Maryland Folklife Program Collection, the Coslet-Sapienza Fantasy and Science Fiction Fanzine Collection, and the George Cruikshank illustrations and papers.

“I had to learn how to properly handle photographs and manuscripts and how to catalog them according to the Library of Congress classification system,” Morrison says. For both Power and Morrison, developing greater patience and manual dexterity and embracing working through hundreds of documents alone in a quiet space surrounded by stacks of materials was well worth the effort to broaden access to these historic documents.

“The value of this project is ensuring people understand that this resource exists,” says Power, “to help these photos live beyond a heavily controlled and restricted space on campus into a digital space where more people are able to access the information.”

Digital accessibility

Protecting delicate, historic documents includes digitizing them. The digitizing process is another lesson in precision and patience. Power begins the process by taking a photo out of the mylar sleeve—making sure to only touch the corners—along with a small rectangular white piece of paper describing the photo. They gently place the photo underneath a camera, delicately straightening the image before the camera snaps the picture and sends it to a computer where Power edits it using Adobe Lightroom.

a collection of six historical photos laid out on the table together
A small collection of the 5,400 photographs that were digitized and rehoused in more protective plastic sleeves. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

“It’s an elaborate setup with lights at 45-degree angles, and the camera pointed straight down at a small white stand where I place the image,” explains Power, who would work on digitizing for six to eight hours at a time. “Once I take the image, I edit the size and angle of the photo. The metadata is then added into an Excel spreadsheet, which includes noting if there was a corner missing or if the photo had adhesive stuck to it.”

Digitizing rare books, something Morrison has spent months working on, requires using a special book scanning machine with raised sides, like hands cradling the book open, and small snakelike bean bag weights to keep the pages flat without using his fingers. “I make sure I’m not blocking any text or any important image. And then I press a button, flip a page, press a button, flip a page for hours on end until I finish digitizing that book,” Morrison says, smiling. “So, it’s not the most exciting work, but I find digitization specifically important because it’s a process that helps preserve documents too fragile to be in public circulation. Digitally, you can share it with a broader audience.”

Workforce skills

Both Power and Morrison brought many special collections skills to their public humanities internships. Archaeology camp inspired Morrison to learn about how to study and take care of important and fragile objects. He worked at the Montgomery Parks Archeology Program throughout high school, where he met a friend who introduced him to UMBC’s Special Collections. “I’ve always had an interest in historic things, in the preservation of artifacts,” Morrison says, who plans to apply to a master’s program in library and museum studies after graduation. “I think Special Collections has helped me realize I want to do archival work.”

Power found their footing working full time in the conservation rooms at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. “I was the administrative assistant in the Conservation Division and was around a lot of conversations on handling art objects and special collections materials, but I did not work with the materials directly,” says Power. “Working with the Hine Collection was a great opportunity for hands-on experience working with physical items and digitization.” These skills have also come in handy for Power, whose master’s degree focuses on 14th-century religious women hermits in Yorkshire, England. In 2022, Power had the opportunity to visit parish archives in Yorkshire to read through medieval-primary source documents. 

For Power, history isn’t just books, dates, and lists of events. They say that there are a lot of living materials out there, whether that’s parish churches or photographs from the early 20th century, like the Hine collection. There is a connection between public history work and the people who lived before us. “It’s important to continue to help students remember that history is not dead and dusty. It’s alive,” says Power. They feel that the connection element is essential, and sometimes it gets lost. “Special Collections prove that these events really happened. They can inspire students to visit those places. To stand in that space where it happened and say, ‘Yeah, I was here too.’ I love that.”

Finding one’s face and building financially resilient spaces through ‘susus’

Sonya Squires-Caesar, a doctoral candidate in UMBC’s language, literacy, and culture program, has been interviewing communities who use susus to save money for big-ticket items like homes, farms, or everyday needs like transportation and bills. Susu, a word thought to come linguistically from West African languages, is an informal structure of communal savings where individuals agree to give an equal amount of money to one pool. Members then decide the frequency of when someone receives the entire amount.

headshot of a woman with dark curly hair
Headshot courtesy of Sonya Squires-Caesar.

“I remember my mother planning her spending around when she would get her payment,” says Squires-Caesar, whose family is from Barbados. Squires-Caesar explains that susus—or rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs)—can be a way for people to access larger sums of money without the barriers formal banks and finance systems pose to people without high levels of disposable income.

“While there is a significant body of ROSCA research, it tends to focus on groups living in poverty or with minimal or no access to formal financial instruments,” says Squires-Caesar. “My study differs by focusing on middle-class and upper-middle-class immigrants who opt to use this informal, unregulated financial tool in the U.S. alongside mainstream financial services such as banks, credit cards, investments, etc.”

Squires-Caesar, the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ graduate student research fellow for fall 2023, is interested in studying the evolution of susus from the transatlantic slave trade to today. She explains that for centuries people have pooled their resources for individual and communal needs. 

Honoring African indigenous knowledge

Susus are a cultural practice rooted in African indigenous knowledge, a term for how various African cultures orally passed a range of information, customs, and beliefs from generation to generation. “In African indigenous knowledge, the act of learning is thought to be a fully engaged journey to ‘find one’s face,’” says Squires-Caesar, “which is considered the path to discovering your roots, revealing your spirit, and determining the ‘fire in your belly’ or core elements that matter most to you.”

Squires-Caesar “found her face” when she aligned her research path with her authentic identity. “Western research methods couldn’t guide mine. I felt I was trying to fit a square peg into a circle,” explains Squires-Caesar. “I found my face when I realized the methodology that my project needed had to model the community I was looking to understand.”

Researching what’s below the surface

Squires-Caesar’s approach to understanding financial literacy is less about the stock market and credit and more about what is intangible. She calls it the iceberg effect.

three woman smile for a selfie outside in the dusk
Squires-Caesar, in orange, with students. Some students she interviewed for her dissertation have formed a new intergenerational ROSCA savings club.

“On top of the iceberg are tangible things like bank accounts and credit cards,” explains Squires-Caesar. “You can see, touch, feel, and measure them, but beneath the iceberg are the processes that may not have official rules and regulations and where the general public may not know they are happening, like susus.” 

During the four years she managed a community college financial literacy program, Squires-Caesar met many students surviving from month to month. Through ethnographic research, she found students were using non-traditional ways to make ends meet, like getting cash advances from bingo halls to pay for bills and groceries. The data also showed that some students were overwhelmed by the idea of saving.

To shift that thinking, she created a microsavings project for her students to take them through the process of saving—a few cents here, a few dollars there, which grows over time. 

These stories about the complexities of susu communities have inspired Squires- Caesar, as part of her Dresher Fellowship, to decorate physical masks as three-dimensional representations of financial identity, of “finding face.”

The Academic Minute: Caring for kinless older adults

Social, cultural, and scientific advancements have helped people live longer. Not only are people living longer, but they also have fewer children than at any previous time in human history. This shift will present a unique situation where there will be more older adults outnumbering infants and teenagers in about four decades. How will the world take care of this burgeoning population?

Christine A. Mair, associate professor of sociology and gerontology and director of UMBC’s Center for Health, Equity, and Aging in the department of sociology, anthropology, and public health, examines the presence or absence of family and non-family ties. Mair seeks to document how social integration and support (or lack thereof; e.g., “kinlessness”) shape mental health, physical health, end-of-life experiences, and other aspects of well-being especially cross-nationally.

“Many of these older adults will also be unpartnered due to never marrying, divorce, or their eventual widowhood. These three intersecting trends of high longevity, low fertility, and low partnership will culminate to produce a growing population of people who are both unpartnered and childless. This group is sometimes referred to as ‘kinless,’” Mair explains to Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and host of The Academic Minute, a daily show featuring faculty from colleges and universities worldwide speaking about their cutting-edge research.

UMBC’s Academic Minute series

Mair joined six other UMBC scholars this fall in UMBC’s first Academic Minute series, featuring the latest research in media and communication studies; modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication; language, literacy, and culture; philosophy; gender, women’s, and sexuality studies; and history. This series is republished on NPR podcasts and Inside Higher Ed.

Learn more about Christine Mair’s research:

Learn more about UMBC’s program in sociology, anthropology, and public health.

The Academic Minute: Challenging misconceptions about queer sexualities in Arab cultures

For centuries, media has portrayed Arab culture as misogynistic and homophobic, leaving little room for the possibility that queer Arab communities exist and thrive. Adding to this sense of erasure is the belief some Arab communities have in thinking that homosexuality is not inherently Arab but something the Western world brought to the Arab world. However, the reality queer Arabs and those in the diaspora live is much more positive and complex. 

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, a queer Palestinian poet and associate professor in the department of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies, wrote the first study of desire that addresses the contemporary cultures and lives of queer Arab women in her book, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press, 2023). 

“My research looks at how Arab people experience and narrate their queerness in unexpected ways. For example, Arabs may be in same-sex relationships but might not claim gay or lesbian identities,” Shomali explains to Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and host of The Academic Minute, a daily show featuring faculty from colleges and universities worldwide speaking about their cutting-edge research. “Many queer Arabs might not check off Western benchmarks of LGBT identity, like being ‘out.’ Some of the existing Arabic terms for queer people have negative connotations and are also not popular.” 

UMBC’s Academic Minute series

Shomali joined seven other UMBC scholars this fall in UMBC’s first Academic Minute series, featuring the latest research in media and communication studies; modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication; language, literacy, and culture; philosophy; gender, women’s, and sexuality studies; sociology, anthropology, and public health; and history. This series is republished on NPR podcasts and Inside Higher Ed.

Learn more about Mejdulene Bernard Shomali’s research:

Learn more about UMBC’s gender, women’s, and sexuality studies.

The Academic Minute: Democratizing access to digital tools in the documentation of the Innu language

For centuries, books have been the primary method of documenting spoken and written languages. This method has given us insights into the formal and informal uses of language within communities and those outside the community. However, books and even tape recordings haven’t always captured the intricacies and uniqueness of a language. Advances in technology have broadened the scope and quality of language documentation and preservation, but these digital tools have also created a skills gap between researchers and communities.

UMBC’s Renée Lambert-Brétière, associate professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, is working on bridging this gap through a collaborative and community-engaged research project with Innu-speaking communities in Quebec, Canada, that seeks to democratize access to digital tools involved in the documentation of their language. 

“Mobilizing methodologies of linguistics, digital and public humanities, this research makes an important contribution to current developments in language documentation research and constitutes a major step in broadening the tools for language preservation within the Innu speech communities,” Lambert-Brétière explains to Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and host of The Academic Minute, a daily show featuring faculty from colleges and universities worldwide speaking about their cutting-edge research. 

UMBC’s Academic Minute takeover week

Lambert-Brétière joined five UMBC scholars this fall in UMBC’s first Academic Minute Takeover Week, featuring the latest research in media and communication studies; philosophy; language, literacy, and culture; and history. This series is republished on NPR podcasts and Inside Higher Ed.https://academicminute.org/2023/09/renee-lambert-bretiere-democratizing-access-to-digital-tools-in-the-documentation-of-the-innu-language/

Learn more about Renee Lambert-Brétière’s research

Lambert-Brétière’s book, À la recherche d’un signe perdu: Jean-Baptiste de La Brosse, S.J., Éléments de langue montagnaise (1768) (Chemins de tr@verse, 2018), is the first edition of the grammar of the Innu language written in Latin in 1768 by the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste de La Brosse. It offers a unique testimony on the state of this nomadic language in the middle of the eighteenth century. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed outlets that include the Journal of Language Diversity, Anthropological Linguistics, Journal de la société des océanistes, and Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics.

Learn more about UMBC’s modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication program.

The Academic Minute: The Long History of Financial Fraud

Banks, large corporations, small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals alike lend and loan money to make more money, spur corporate growth, buy property, start a business, and help those in need. Funding prosperity and goodwill can be one outcome of financial investments. However, it’s not all good news. Today, we often hear about financial mismanagement, embezzlement, and money laundering, sometimes leading to bankruptcy and/or government bailouts—But financial fraud is not a modern story.

UMBC’s Amy Froide, professor of history, teaches courses in British history and European women’s history between 1500-1800 and researches social, economic, and gender history. During a research trip to the U.K., Froide found documents about the Charitable Corporation’s financial disaster of 1732, which she wrote about in The Conversation.

Listen here, or view on The Academic Minute site

“The Charitable Corporation was notable in having a high proportion of female investors—35 percent of the funders in the 1700s were women,” Froide explains to Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and host of The Academic Minute, a daily show featuring faculty from colleges and universities worldwide speaking about their cutting-edge research. “When the financial scandal came to light, it was these women who led activist shareholders to call for government compensation.”

UMBC’s Academic Minute takeover week

Froide joined five UMBC scholars this fall in UMBC’s first Academic Minute Takeover Week, featuring the latest research in media and communication studies; modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication; language, literacy, and culture; and history. This series is republished on NPR podcasts and Inside Higher Ed.

Learn more about Amy Froide’s research:

Learn more about UMBC’s history major and graduate programs.

Morgan Henderson of The Hilltop Institute at UMBC co-authors new research investigating the feasibility of price shopping for two common hospital services

New research published in September in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Internal Medicine reported pricing discrepancies at top hospitals almost two years after the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created the Price Transparency Requirements for Hospitals to Make Standard Charges Public rule. The rule requires all non-federal, non-tribal hospitals that are licensed in each state to list their standard charges for all items and services provided. 

The goal of the rule was to create greater transparency in the prices that hospitals charge to patients and payers. In theory, this data should help the public make the most informed decisions about where to receive their care, as reported by The New York Times with data support from Morgan Henderson, principal data scientist, and Morgane Mouslim, advanced policy analyst, at The Hilltop Institute at UMBC.

“Hospitals have been required to post this data for almost three years, and most hospitals are posting something,” says Henderson, a co-author of the paper along with colleagues from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, Rice University, and business entrepreneur Mark Cuban. “However, very little attention has been paid to the extent to which the prices appear to be accurate.”

Secret shoppers, different prices

The new cross-sectional study compares 60 U.S. hospitals’ online cash prices with their over-the-phone cash prices for vaginal childbirth and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The data was collected between August and October 2022 from “secret shopper” phone calls to 20 top-ranked hospitals as well as 20 safety-net hospitals (which accept patients who cannot pay) and 20 non-top-ranked, non-safety-net hospitals.

The study found that the online prices hospitals are required to post were missing for 47 percent  of hospitals for childbirth and 10 percent for MRIs, said Merina Thomas, a doctoral student at UTMB at Galveston, who was the lead author of the paper.

“Among those hospitals where prices were available online, the online price often did not match the prices provided over the phone,” Thomas said to utmb Health. “For example, a hospital might have an online price for an MRI of $2,000 but give a phone price of $5,000, or an online childbirth price of $20,000 but a phone price of $10,000.”

This research is among the first to attempt to investigate the validity of hospitals’ pricing transparency data relative to other pricing benchmarks. “While this study doesn’t explicitly assess the accuracy of these price transparency data files,” says Henderson, “by comparing them to telephone-based price estimates, we demonstrate that something (either the accuracy of the price transparency data, or the accuracy of telephone estimates, or both) isn’t working.”

The paper was authored by Thomas; Peter Cram, professor of internal medicine at UTMB; Cuban; James Flaherty, UTMB medical student; Jiefei Wang, assistant professor of biostatistics and data sciences at UTMB; Henderson; and Vivian Ho, professor of economics at The Baker Institute of Public Policy at Rice University.

Henderson and Mouslim have conducted several studies on price transparency. Learn more about this research at The Hilltop Institute.

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