Jacquelyn Khadijah-Hajdu

Almost a year after graduating,Â Jacquelyn Khadijah-Hajdu ’16 (ENG)Â found herself in Storrs for the annual spring semester Career Fair ”” except this time she was collecting resumés rather than handing hers out.

She says she felt an unfamiliar sense of disconnect from the students approaching her table, despite having walked in their shoes less than a year ago. “It’s hard to use words to describe how different it is,” says Khadijah-Hajdu, who is from South Windsor, Connecticut.

After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, she spent her first year out in the “real world” working for Applied Physical Sciences Corporation (APS), even though working wasn’t originally part of her post-grad plan. Khadijah-Hajdu says she had planned to focus solely on pursuing a master’s degree, but when she received the job offer from APS, it was too good to pass up. And the best part? Her employer is paying for her to pursue her master’s in electrical engineering at UConn.

Khadijah-Hajdu says she owes at lot of her ease in finding a job to UConn’s research opportunities. She worked with her professors on research projects and participated in a senior design project where her group created a product that measured the strength of a military dog’s bite. “It helped a lot,” she says. “That was what attracted [my employers] to me. They were like, ”˜You’re doing a lot of research as an undergraduate. We think you’d be good here.’”

Adjusting to work life wasn’t entirely easy for Khadijah-Hajdu. On top of adapting to 40-hour weeks, she was thrown into an in-progress project without a clue about what was expected of her. “Sometimes they’d be like, ”˜Oh you need to make sure the compass works.’ And I think, ”˜Okay, what is the compass? Where is the compass? What do I need to make sure works about it?’” she explains. “I talked to a couple of people and they told me, ”˜You have to get used to that. That’s how it is here.’” Now she says she is much more confident in her abilities to take initiative in a project.

Looking back, Khadijah-Hajdu says she probably put more pressure on herself than her employers put on her. “You wonder if you are meeting the expectations people had when they hired you, catching on fast enough, et cetera,” she says. “But there is a period of training and catch-up time, and even though I’ve been working for about a year, I still have some catching up to do.”Â ””EMMA CASAGRANDE ’18 (CLAS)

Ryan Glista

Khadijah-Hajdu takes a break at Dog Lane Cafe in Storrs Center in between working the campus job fair for her new employer and attending a graduate class in electrical engineering.

August 29, 2017

UConn Foundation thanks you for your generosity in 2016.

By the Numbers

UConn Foundation thanks you for your generosity in 2016.

A total of 24,701 donors gave $78.3 million in 2016. 29.8 million dollars to Program Support. 161 million dollars to Scholarships and Fellowships. 5.3 million dollars to Faculty Support. 1.7 million dollars to Capital Improvement Projects. 55 new endowed funds created. Research Support increased 164% - from 9.6 million dollars in 2015 to 25.4 million dollars in 2016.

Source: The UConn Foundation/www.foundation.uconn.edu

August 29, 2017

Rebecca Lobo

Kudos
Former women’s basketball star and current ESPN analystÂ Rebecca Lobo ’95 (CLAS)Â talks with ESPN’s Jay Bilas about being named to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The first UConn player to win the honor, she joins UConn coaches Geno Auriemma and Jim Calhoun. Lobo helped bring UConn its first national championship during the undefeated 1994-95 season.

August 29, 2017

Are Charter Schools the Second Coming of Enron?

Story from UConn Today

The Whole Truth

Are Charter Schools the Second Coming of Enron?

In a research paper that’s spurring a national conversation, Preston Green III and co-authors outline the many parallels they see between today’s charter school systems and the early days of the subprime mortgage crisis, when aggressive business practices and unchecked growth created a national housing bubble that threw the country into deep recession.

Green, professor of educational leadership and law in the Neag School of Education, is concerned that, as with the subprime crisis, insufficient regulation could result in the formation of charter school bubbles: a concentration of poorly performing schools in urban African-American communities. Despite his concerns, Green remains a believer in the charter school concept. He insists that the paper he authored is not meant to be an attack on charter schools but rather an exposé highlighting issues of concern.

“What we are saying is that there should be a deliberative and thoughtful process in overseeing charter schools to make sure that the choices of parents and children are honored and, in the end, meaningful,” he says. The flip side of that scenario is daunting. “If charter schools aren’t sufficiently regulated,” Green says, “we could see a proliferation of poorly monitored schools in these communities. The proliferation of these poorly regulated schools could gather such momentum that it could be a while before people start to realize there are problems, and by then, it will take some time to dismantle all that.”Â ””LORETTA WALDMAN

August 29, 2017

Micki McElya a Pulitzer Finalist

Kudos

Micki McElya a Pulitzer Finalist

The Politics of Mourning, Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery ”“ by Micki McElya

Associate History Professor Micki McElya’s book,Â The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National CemeteryÂ (Harvard University Press), was named a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction. In its citation, the Pulitzer Prize committee called her work “a luminous investigation of how policies and practices at Arlington National Cemetery have mirrored the nation’s fierce battles over race, politics, honor, and loyalty.”

In the book’s introduction McElya writes, “Approaching Arlington National Cemetery as a site that is inclusive of all the nation’s stories, the wonderful, the messy, and the terrible, the awe-inspiring and shameful, the achingly beautiful and the devastatingly sad, is an opportunity to expand the contours of the honorable and brave, not diminish them.”

August 29, 2017

Avery Point Lighthouse

On Campus

Avery Point Lighthouse

In early spring, Penny Vlahos, associate professor of marine sciences, replaces a seasonal cartridge on an air sampling device attached to the Avery Point Lighthouse. The samplers are changed every threeÂ months and analyzed for persistent organic and emerging pollutants. UConn Avery Point is celebrating itsÂ fiftieth anniversaryÂ this year.

Penny Vlahos replaces a seasonal cartridge on an air sampling device attached to the Avery Point Lighthouse

Peter Morenus

August 29, 2017

These Black Bears Choose Suburbia

Story from UConn Today

This Just In

These Black Bears Choose Suburbia

American Black Bear cub eating through a garbage bag

UConn wildlife biologists tracking Connecticut’s growing black bear population say housing density is the most significant factor influencing where the bears are choosing to live and roam. New data shows that the state’s black bear population is highest in the state’s outermost suburbs. These exurban areas are attractive to bears because they provide both the refuge of large hardwood forests and a scattering of homes just dense enough that a tasty snack from a garbage can or backyard bird feeder is only a short distance away. The highest concentrations of bears are in areas where housing density is between 2 and 20 homes per square mile, researchers found.

“With low-density housing, we are actually creating a habitat that bears are using,” says Tracy Rittenhouse, an assistant professor of wildlife ecology in UConn’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. As lead scientist on the study, Rittenhouse spent four years gathering and analyzing black bear data with Ph.D. student Mike Evans and wildlife biologists from Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

The results were a little surprising. Most existing research about American black bears indicates they prefer rural areas, and it’s the amount of forest in those regions that determines the bear population density. But that literature is generated largely in western states like Colorado and Wyoming. This new information shows that Connecticut bears ”” and likely bears throughout the more heavily populated Northeast ”” are different. They are adjusting to living in a habitat shared with humans.

Looking at the study results, the vast majority of the Nutmeg State is bear habitat, says Rittenhouse. “The bear population is expanding, essentially moving south and east from the north and west,” Rittenhouse says. “People generally think that there are enough people along the coast that the bear population won’t expand that far, but our models indicate there is enough forest for the bear population to extend all the way to the coast.”””COLIN POITRAS ’85 (CLAS)

See a town-by-town record of bear sightings in Connecticut on UConn’s Center for Land Use Education and Research’s interactive website

August 29, 2017

A UConn Engineer is Helping Nasa Get to Alpha Centauri ”” and Beyond

Story from UConn Today

In Development

A UConn Engineer is Helping Nasa Get to Alpha Centauri ”” and Beyond

Exploring beyond our solar system requires traveling enormous distances. The nearest star system to ours ”” Alpha Centauri ”” is 4.37 light years away, or 25 trillion miles; and distant star systems will take hundreds or thousands of years to reach, even in the best of circumstances. So scientists who want to send unmanned probes to another star system must create some innovative technologies that can outlive them.

UConn researcher in the School of Engineering Seok-Woo Lee, who recently received an Early Career Faculty grant from NASA, is working on one such technology. In collaboration with researchers at Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory and Colorado State University, he has developed a shape memory material (called ThCr2Si2-type intermetallic compounds) that can help in deep space travel by changing shape at low temperatures. Shape memory materials can be deformed, but return to their original shape when exposed to a specific temperature, usually at high heats. Lee’s material, a solution-grown crystal, works at colder temperatures.

Once a vessel leaves our solar system, the temperature drops below 50 kelvins, which will cause the shape memory material to deform and activate an actuator, which in turn will power down the vessel. With minimal gravity in deep space, the vessel will continue in a set direction for hundreds of years, slowly making its way to its target while depowered. If the vessel arrives at a new solar system, even the very distant heat at the edges of a star’s reach will activate the shape memory material, which would return to its original shape.

The shape change would push the actuator, which would power up the vessel and allow it to begin recording and transmitting data back to Earth ”” long after the scientists who launched the vessel are gone.Â ””JOSH GARVEY

August 29, 2017

A Pup-posal

Bliss

A Pup-posal

Daniel Bronko ’15 (ED) recruited Jonathan XIV to help with his marriage proposal to Holly Korona ’13 (ED) ’14 MA. He asked Jonathan’s handlers to “happen by” as the pair walked near Mirror Lake while (ostensibly) on campus to visit Bronko’s brother Jordan ’18 (CAHNR). When Korona kneeled to pet Jonathan she found a ring box attached to the husky’s collar. How could she say no?

THE SURPRISE

Holly Korona '13 (ED) '14 MA pets Jonathan XIV the husky

THE PROPOSAL

Daniel Bronko '15 (ED) recruited Jonathan XIV to help with his marriage proposal to Holly Korona '13 (ED) '14 MA.

ENGAGED!

The couple happily show off the engagement ring

August 29, 2017

Caps and Gowns Now in UConn Blue (Almost)

Remember This?

Caps and Gowns Now in UConn Blue (Almost)

The traditional black robes in use since the University started using caps and gowns, in 1907, have been replaced with robes of navy blue. The gowns also have a “green” aspect to them, as they are made from recycled water bottles ”” about 23 bottles per gown. They are lighter weight and wrinkle-resistant, but ironing, for obvious reasons, is not recommended. After graduation, the gowns can be recycled ”” a good thing considering that UConn conferred more than 9,000 degrees in 2017, the most in its 136-year history.