April 22, 2008
Honors research runs the gamut
Mark Meyer won a Capstone Conference Award for statistics research. (Photo by Jeff Watts)
Capstone Conference Awards
Honorable Mentions
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If Michael Mass had to pick one day that really shows what AU is all about, it would be the day of the Honors Capstone Conference.
The capstone is a scholarly project that is the culmination of a student’s work in the University Honors Program. “This is really a window on the teaching and learning coming from our students,” said Mass, director of the honors program.
That window opens on scenes of striking variety. The students who presented their work at the conference spoke about their research into child labor, cancer and malaria, Plato and Kant, and the rise and fall of Wonder Bread.
The research, for the most part, is still in process and will not be submitted until the end of the semester. Forty-one students were selected competitively to present their research to a panel of judges at the daylong conference.
There would, in the end, be six winners of Capstone Conference Awards, which will be presented at the Honors Convocation. But in fact, Mass said, “Everyone’s a winner.”
Stacia Yearwood was inspired by a book read in a literature seminar, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, to craft her own memoir about life and post-colonial identity in Trinidad and Tobago. “I identified with the main protagonist’s struggle to come up with an identity of his own,” she says.
Yearwood incorporated the stories of her relatives and researched traditional healing methods. “I always believe you’re little bits of everyone who has been and come before you,” she said.
Identity, too, was the focus of Nawal Mustafa’s capstone project, which evolved from a trip to Lebanon in 2007. When the native of Kansas City arrived in Lebanon, she got into a taxi and was asked a question that would come up repeatedly: “Are you Sunni or Shia?”
As it happens, she is Muslim, though she doesn’t consider herself either Sunni or Shia. But the question intrigued Mustafa, who plans to pursue an academic career in Mideast studies. It drew her to study religious nationalism in Lebanon. Her conclusion, in part, is that religious identity in the Middle East is too often painted in pan-Islamic terms, and that a national identity can, in fact, coexist with religious or ethnic identity.
Maggie Pangrazio crafted a one-woman musical show from a topic that strikes close to home for many students this spring: graduating from college and facing the future.
Pangrazio researched and linked together 13 show tunes from the last 100 years or so into a musical meditation on the next step in life. “In screenwriting class, they tell us the most important tool when writing a story is the three-act structure,” she said in the excerpt from her monologue that she delivered to the panel.
“Well, I think right now is the end of Act 1. The story has been established, and we’ve set up the main characters. I’ve set up the obstacle for Act 2—figuring out what to do with my life—but haven’t started the quest yet.”
It’s scary, she said. What happens after college? How can she choose from so many possibilities? Still, she said as she prepared to burst into song, she feels ready. “I can’t wait for the real world. Bring it on!”
