Prove What?

Happy November!

Now that we're through everybody's favorite part of October, it's time to look ahead to what's going to be happening this month.

• We established a record of 10 posts last month - I'm pretty sure we're going to top that this month.
• The Black and Gold Commission is hosting their second tailgate
• Student Organization Advocates are hosting a dinner for Student Org leaders
• The Senate puts the Idea Development Tool into practice and strives to become a more effective group
• Budget Deliberations finishing up
• Prove IT!

Wait, what was that last one? Prove what? Prove IT is an exciting new initiative sponsored by the SGA to help tap the creativity and enthusiasm of our campus community to make change at UMBC. It's a bold challenge - if you are walking around UMBC and think, "I wish this was different" we are inviting you to prove it by taking steps to turn that thought into a reality.

Here's how it works: We are going to be accepting applications from any loose association of students (i.e. you and a few friends) detailing their plan for doing something to positively impact the campus. No restrictions, just pure outside-the-box thinking. Applications can be submitted starting Monday through the end of December, so there is plenty of time to put some good effort into the idea.

However, the application process is just the beginning. The three best submissions, chosen by a committee comprised of students and administrators, will be presented to the campus community in a vote. The final winning group will receive $50,000 and backing of both the SGA and the campus administration to make their idea a reality before the end of Spring semester. That's $50,000 backing something that you and your friends dreamed up!

It doesn't stop there. As an incentive for doing all that work, the SGA is giving the winning group $5,000 to use however they wish. This is a payment of real money, folks - not a scholarship, not gift cards, but $5,000 in cash given directly to your group.

You will be seeing all kinds of advertisements for this initiative over the coming months, beginning with the official kick-off beneath the breezeway this Monday. This is the chance to prove to the rest of the campus that you have what it takes to change UMBC for the better. UMBC is packed with amazing students so I'm really looking forward to seeing all of the submissions. Start thinking, everybody.

Prove it!

An Afternoon in Annapolis

I missed Spanish class today as part of a delegation of UMBC students that went to a rally outside the joint legislation building in Annapolis. Along with students from a diverse sampling of Maryland's higher education institutions, we were there in support of the creation of a dedicated funding source for higher education.

There were eight UMBC students there, along with our president, Freeman Hrabowski and some members of his staff. I got to meet him for the first time which was pretty cool. I was worried eight people Josh was able to muster for this event would pale in comparison to the two buses of students College Park was bragging they were bringing, but as it turns out they barely filled one - ha! Josh also did a nice job dropping in the fact that we had a better voter turnout than they did in a conversation with their SGA President. Go UMBC!

Governor O'Malley and Dr. Hrabowski gave speeches along with a host of others, including some of the dignitaries that were at the governor's visit (a link to the story on my personal blog, as I realized I never put anything about that on this space). Anne got a bunch of excellent pictures so we might be seeing a few of those in the next Retriever Weekly. There are also some pictures available on the governor's website, but they can be a bit of a pain to browse as you have to go through an agreement to see the larger versions.

In between the rally and the start of the actual testimonies before the joint committee, various news crews were circulating to get material. Steve made out pretty well, scoring an interview for a College Park-based station as well as a radio spot on WBAL. Way to go Steve! There's also a picture of our group featured as part of an article in the Baltimore Sun. I know it's a lot of bragging but I'm really proud of UMBC for getting ourselves out there and trying to make a difference in our state.

All kinds of lobbyists were there to speak to the join committee so a lot of things had to be cut short to fit it all in, but I think Josh Michael did an excellent job in his testimony in the time that he had. He even got in a bit about how much students have to pay for textbooks, which makes me happy as that is an issue I had raised during the governor's visit. During the College Park SGA President's testimony the Chairman asked the students in the audience to stand, and all of us from UMBC were right smack in the middle with UMBC plastered over our shirts - once again, go UMBC!

There's something I find quite thrilling about taking a risk and putting yourself out there in the hopes of making a difference in something that is much bigger than yourself. A lot of people will tell you that you can't really change anything but it is deeper than that. It's not about one person lost in the middle of the world trying to do something all by him or herself. It's about connecting with others who share your vision, building bridges between yourself and others, and using the resources you do have at your disposal as best you can.

Another good website...

I've been following Overheard in New York for years now, so when I found out some people were trying to do the same thing for UMBC I was thrilled. Like UMBC Underground, this is another excellent effort by our fellow students to do something good for the community - they deserve our support.

Overheard at UMBC

UMBC Underground

I was just told about another awesome UMBC-related blog, UMBC Underground. I hope linking to it from here doesn't bring them "above ground" but I really liked what I saw at first glance. Hey, it's a blog, and blogs always want more readers, right?

I haven't done much exploring (but I'm sure I will later tonight) so I don't really know who's behind their operation, but it seems like it's just a bunch of concerned students trying to help out the rest of the community. That's the kind of thing that really gets me excited - we need more people like that taking action around our campus. Notice I say "taking action", because I think a whole lot of people here are interested in helping others, they just haven't taken the plunge yet. Or possibly worse, they have but yet others haven't recognized them.

Anyway, check out UMBC Underground, add their feed to your RSS reader, all that good stuff.

Homecoming!

One thing I realized people might not have checked out yet - the titles of these entries are links, so you can either click on them to read the entry on its own page, or, as I often do, be directed to something related to the post. Check it out and see what kinds of stuff we've been looking at!

Anyway, UMBC's Homecoming celebration was amazing. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to attend the bonfire, as I had a test to study for that was Friday morning (which I ended up doing rather well on, if you'll forgive me tooting my own horn a bit). I spent a good part of Friday looking forward to the free ice cream and talent show, which also impressed. I am proud to say that Daniel Roberts, maser guitarist, is a fellow graduate of my high school. This man is probably going to be the greatest musician to graduate from UMBC. If you missed him at the talent show, you can see a few of last year's videos on his YouTube page - hopefully he'll put up some videos from this year soon.

Saturday night was Jim Gaffigan, which was also a great use of $10. I took the risk and invited my mom and brother to the show and he didn't disappoint. Both of them laughed heartily throughout the show which makes me happy. Maybe now my brother will show up for the Festivus Accappellius in November.

Today began yet another busy week as I attended a meeting discussing the changing environment of UMBC's Food Services. I'm confident we'll be seeing a lot of positive efforts come out of this. We also spent a good amount of time both before and after the Senate meeting planning the advertising campaign for the upcoming Prove It! initiative. Since many of us involved don't have the time to put into designing a good logo, we put out a request to some groups replete with such "artsy folk" to see what kind of a design they can cook up. Of course, we need it by Friday, so we're throwing in $75 for the winning designer to sweeten the pot a little. This is kind of a little test of the ideas behind the Prove It! initiative itself, so I'm excited to see how it works out. The folks across the hall in SEB sure seemed excited when we told them about it, so I'm hopeful for a good response with some excellent designs to choose from.

That's it for now, but be sure we'll be keeping you updated as these things continue to develop. Believe me, before you know it you won't be able to get away from the Prove It! initiative...

The Switch to Blogspot

I've gotten asked a few times since announcing this location of the SGA-Students blog why we are here, and not at the UMBC location ( http://www.umbc.edu/blogs/sga-students ). We switched hosts mainly because it was easier for us to add authors to the site, and it will hopefully be a bit easier to skin in the future, when Erin gets some more time to work on it. Thanks especially to Jay who has helped us set all this up and got us the umbc.edu location - ideally that will be the "official" location of the blog but it will redirect here.

Who, What, Why, When, How, and Welcome!

I’m not really sure how to start out something like this. Its a new endeavor for myself and the SGA - I’ll start it out with the old stand-by questions:

Who?

I’m Erin and I’ll be writing in this blog to entertain you and inform you of things around campus that are also entertaining. The first thing I’d like to say is that I’m no English major but this isn’t about verbal eloquence or perfect grammar, though I will spell check, this is about you, UMBC, and all things related.

You’re not stuck with only me - there will be other ‘bloggers’ and I’m sure they will introduce themselves in their first post.

What?

What am I going to talk about? Anything around campus that I feel you should know about or find personally interesting.

I’m not going to advertise an event just to advertise an event. This is supposed to act as a place for people to talk about things in a casual environment.

Why?

I understand there are already many places for you to find what’s going on, but this one will be different. I know its a big promise to make but I promise to make this informative yet engaging.

The most important thing is that I hope this won’t be a chore to read.

When?

We don’t really have a set schedule for posting entries. We’ll update this as often as needed.

How?

How can you be involved? If you have any event you’d like to bring to our attention we’d love to hear about it. You can email us at SGAblog@gmail.com . Also, if you’re interested in joining our blogging team or have any questions you’d like to ask about any of the bloggers or the blog itself - feel free to send us an email.



Welcome the the SGA-Students blog!

Meetings

I have been having a load of meetings lately!

Today was my first time attending the IT Steering Committee, where I learned a lot about future plans for campus technology implementation. Interestingly, my boss's boss at AV Services was there presenting a rather lengthly bit on future strategy. Apparently we'll also be upgrading to a newer version of Blackboard this January that will hopefully solve some of the unreliability issues.

I also got a chance to meet Nancy Young, the Interim Vice President of Student Affairs (I think that's her title). She's quite passionate about what she does and the meeting was interesting. I think my (and, I daresay, the SGA's) goal for the year about building community is right in line with the kinds of things she was saying, but I'm not quite sure if I was able to get that across to her or not. Her view is that you can change the campus culture by focusing on the good things and correcting the erroneous "conventional wisdom" that often floats around, like the oh-so-popular "There's nothing to do on campus!" While I think she has a point, there is also something to be said for harnessing that negative energy and trying to redirect it to something positive, as we are trying to do with the upcoming imPROVEit campaign (provided everything goes through). That idea is saying, "You have a problem with UMBC? Fine. Let us provide you with the tools you need to do something about it."

I think we need to be encouraging each other to take a real ownership in the UMBC community. We have a very unique culture here and our university is something I think we all have a right to be proud of. In the same vein, why sit around and accept things as being okay the way they are? A college community is a dynamic thing and it should always be kept moving forward, and who better to influence that process than the students who are immersed in it?

There's going to be some interesting developments in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully we'll be seeing the new SGA Newsletter circulate both internally and externally, giving everybody a clearer picture of what exactly we are doing on a day to day basis. So much of the work involves meeting with people and information gathering, looking for the right time to inject a particular student concern. Often a lot of the larger changes are in progress but will be a long time in coming, so you are working for the students of 2009.

At the Senate meeting tonight we got a chance to talk to Dr. Baron, the Director of Academic Advising. Now there's an issue I'll bet a lot of us have something to say about! He had some interesting survey results that he had taken over the summer about how the faculty members view advising. I was surprised to see how few of them actually get recognized for what they do to advise students, when that is such an important part of having a good experience at the university. He'll be presenting a whitepaper on these findings, along with the results of a later student survey, sometime this year.

Along the lines of future improvements, my meetings began to converge when Dr. Baron started talking about the new Student Administration system that is going to be put in place, that they also happened to be discussing at IT Steering. Basically it's going to make the whole Undergraduate Progress Report (try finding that, it's buried in myUMBC) thing something actually usable. You'll be able to see exactly how you're measuring up with your GEPs (since by the time it rolls out, GFRs will have been phased out), so the whole advising experience will be a lot less, "help me make sure I take the right classes" and more, "help me prepare for graduate school or a post-graduate career". I think that's the real direction advising should be moving as well, and it will help take a lot of the frustration out of the course selection process.

For the short term, he's looking at doing things like extending the period during which you can register for classes, so there can be more time for advising and planning, and also getting people's UPRs actually updated before the last minute, so we don't have seniors realizing they've missed the boat on one class and can't graduate for another semester.

On a more personal note, I forgot to update my Oracle calendar with my latest work times for AV services, so it still has me getting off at 7 PM. So, I got scheduled for a meeting tomorrow at seven to prepare for meeting Governor O'Malley on Wednesday. That's kind of a big deal, so I'm just going to have to see if I can leave work and come back later. Hopefully they'll be cool with that!

Welcome to SGA-Students!

Hey,

If you're reading this, you've somehow found out about this little echelon of the SGA Student Body, so some form of our advertising has worked. At any rate, this is a place where a few crazy individuals get to give you an opportunity to peer inside the oh-so-secretive world of the UMBC Student Government Association. Try as we might, people still walk around campus scratching their heads, wondering what it is we do all day. Others hear the word "government" and immediately assume we are responsible for all ills both on and off campus, or that we are somehow out to "get the best" of the students.

Let me take this opportunity to dispel a few of the myths right now, and hopefully, these answers will become increasingly clear in the coming weeks and months. First off, we spend quite a bit of our time doing the same stuff you do. I think it's fair to assume that we're all here to get an education, and many times that does end up being the highest priority task in a day for us. Life is always a delicate balance, and I apologize for the times when the precarious leveling operation we attempt makes it difficult to find somebody or get a question answered.

Second, the purpose of the SGA is not to "govern" the student body so much as it is to support them. We are elected by and exist for you in all the various incarnations and responsibilities. I know it can be difficult to see at times exactly how that works to your favor, but this space is one of the many ways we are attempting to close that information gap in this and future semesters.

I encourage you to keep reading as we work out the kinks, possibly change locations, software, add contributors, tweak the look, etc. If you want to leave any feedback, feel free to email sgablog@gmail.com, or if you'd like to contact me personally, com2@umbc.edu.

Thank you for your support!

Contacting Zwybak

We at Zwybak welcome comments and submissions from our readers. Commenting on a post is a great way to provide more public feedback and receive responses both from the authors and other readers. If you wish to contact a post author personally, every post is tagged with a link to the author's Blogger profile, which has an email address where they can be contacted. For general questions or to submit a story, contact the Blog administrator, Michael SteelWolf, at com2@umbc.edu.