Graduate students face unique challenges when preparing for the job market — balancing research, coursework, and professional development, all while navigating an evolving employment landscape. Recent federal actions and policy changes may also impact job prospects for graduate students across fields, adding another layer of uncertainty to the search process.

Join us for this interactive virtual workshop designed specifically for graduate students seeking guidance on how to effectively approach their job search. We’ll cover tailored strategies for identifying opportunities, marketing your graduate-level skills, and managing the uncertainties posed by recent federal actions. No matter the career path you decide to take, this workshop will provide concrete steps and resources to help you move forward with confidence.

Topics will include:
✅ Proactive job search and networking strategies for graduate students
✅ Translating your academic experience into employer-friendly language
✅ Navigating the evolving job market and recent federal actions impacting graduate student careers
✅ Managing uncertainty and staying adaptable in your search

Register via Handshake.

Who Should Attend: Current graduate students and recent graduates from any discipline.

Sponsored by: UMBC Career Center, Graduate Student & Postdoctoral Development, PROMISE, and the Office of Graduate Student Life. 

Please complete this form to nominate an individual or organization for a GSA Award. Ensure all required fields are filled out and provide specific examples where possible. Supporting documents may be submitted separately if applicable. All awardees will receive a plaque & $250 honorarium. The deadline to submit is Friday April, 4th. 


GSA Award Descriptions & Eligibility Guidelines 
GSA Award Descriptions

The April release introduce several new features aimed at improving content management, grading flexibility, and student feedback tracking. 

Instructors and students can now print Ultra Documents or save them as PDFs. This feature facilitates offline content review, sharing with peers, or creating physical copies. Note that if knowledge checks are included and already completed, they will display selected answers and instructor feedback when printed.

Image 1: Example of new print Ultra Document feature

A major addition this month is the Learning Object Repository (LOR), designed to centralize resources across courses and organizations. Instructors can copy objects from the LOR while maintaining control over settings such as availability. Updates made to objects in the LOR are automatically reflected across associated courses, making it easier to manage institutional content like policy documents.

Content Creation & Management

• When performing a whole course copy, achievements are now automatically included, allowing instructors to maintain consistent recognition across course iterations. However, achievements are not included in granular content copies.
• Instructors can now access Achievements through the Student Preview.

Assessments & Grading

• Flexible Grading is introduced for group assignments and tests. Though some features (like per-question feedback on group tests) are not yet available, this update is part of ongoing improvements to group grading.
• A new feedback indicator on the student Overview page now shows whether students have reviewed their feedback. The indicator updates from “Not reviewed” to “Reviewed” with a timestamp, giving instructors greater insight into student engagement with their feedback.
• A new “Results” column in the Gradebook replaces the “Feedback” column, making it more intuitive for students to view their grades and feedback.

Faculty should see the latest updates in their Ultra courses around April 4-5 2025. The next update to our Ultra test environment will take place on April 8, 2025; release notes are posted to the What's New in Ultra that same week. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. Please watch the FAQs, including the What's New with Ultra page, and myUMBC for additional information about Ultra.

Curious about the all latest features in Ultra? Join our What's New in Ultra Courses for Teaching & Learning SU2025 webinar on May 12, 2025.

A multidisciplinary team of UMBC researchers was recently awarded $3.8 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop new computational methods for assessing the feasibility of scientific claims. The project is motivated by the speed and volume of new developments in science and the need for tools to help evaluate the soundness of new claims.

“Some scientific claims are peer reviewed by independent experts, but others, such as from company press releases, or papers posted to pre-prints sites, are not,” says Frank Ferraro, an associate professor of computer science and lead researcher on the award. And even when science is peer-reviewed, there can still be errors, Ferraro notes. For example, recent research highlighting the danger of flame retardant chemicals leaching from black plastic into food was widely reported on, before it was discovered that an error in the paper led to a significant overstating of the exposure risk. 

An AI science assistant 

The idea of an AI assistant specifically designed to tackle complex research questions has been catching on recently. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, recently debuted their “DeepResearch” tool, which the company says can use reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks.

Ferraro says the tool he and his colleagues hope to develop should stand-out from other approaches by employing a strongly iterative process, necessary to really take apart and analyze claims. The tool will break down a scientific claim into constituent sub-claims, and apply a wide range of evidence and reasoning approaches to assess the feasibility of each one. 

The team, which includes UMBC faculty Tejas Gokhale, computer science and electrical engineering, and Tyler Josephson, chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, as well as colleagues from Stony Brook University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Cambridge, will develop and test the tool on three leading areas of scientific research: materials science, AI, and quantum computing.

“It’s a little meta that the AI will be analyzing AI,” Ferraro says. More than 20 UMBC undergrads, grad students, and post-docs will take part in the project. “They’ll get opportunities to network with peers on a highly relevant topic,” Ferraro says. “They’ll be helping guide the national conversation on these issues.”