BY THE NUMBERS
- Faculty and graduate student podium presentations | 19
- Faculty and graduate student poster presentations | 6
- Undergraduate podium presentations | 37
- Undergraduate poster presentations | 33
COS17
FROM PARTICIPANTS
Kenneth Shanks, senior photography and presenter | “I choose to participate because of EURECA and also the monetary benefits. I’m showing this presentation in my senior show so its good practice for me and plus I like to get students’ reactions.”
Jose Martinez, senior mechanical engineering and presenter | “Technically we were made to do it for our senior design project, but when it came down to it it gives us an insight of what the real world is going to be, it’s an experience for sure.”
Hyungmo Yeon, mechanical engineering senior | “We got a lot of support from our two sponsors, basically they helped with a lot of designing for us. I enjoyed the teamwork but mostly the designing of new stuff and making it more simple. It was fun and difficult figuring the biggest problem of listening to what our sponsors were saying and the conflicts from having our minds be different.”
Moiz Tatla, mechanical engineering senior | “I was happy with the outcome of our presentation. We’ve presented it about four times now. We started our project last fall.”
Simon Ospina, economics sophomore | “I decided to participate because I’m really passionate about economics, and I thought this would be very advantageous to my knowledge on this subject. I learned how to do economic research and also new theorems founded in the literature.”
Kalli Root, English junior | “From an acting perspective, the character analysis stuff was (a) really interesting thing to do because the characters change and their behavior changes with each universe.”
Luke Allen, political science and Spanish junior | “I was surprised with how many people came compared to last semester. It’s really nice to see students be more interested and engaging in these activities.”
Jared Sharp, mechanical engineering senior | “This was a course requirement but it gave me experience for my future career when presenting data and doing research. I learned valuable experience from faculty, who taught me how to design projects. Presenting was great, but I wish the evaluators would have been more knowledgeable on the subjects they were covering. I wish they had a vague knowledge on each presentation, because the questions they asked had nothing to do with our subject.”
Reuben Denwe, mechanical engineering senior | “Nigeria is an oil producing country, so a project on how to maximize crude oil production is knowledgeable to the employment sector”
Chiedza Tokonyai, mechanical engineering junior | “This topic was outside of my major, so doing this research has definitely boosted my self-confidence. It was like a practice run for senior design and taught me how to do research.”
Ciera Wolinski, biology senior | “My project is over the resting metabolic rates of squamates. So, those are lizards and snakes. What I did was compile a whole bunch of different data points on their metabolic rates. We are using that not only as a source for other scientist to then compare their results to but we are also looking at developing a new phylogenetic tree based on their metabolic rates. This should be a highly cited paper because so many other biologists can reference their work to the data we’ve collected over all these different reptiles. We have over 700 data points so it encompasses many species.”
FROM JUDGES, ORGANIZERS
Jeff Stambaugh, management professor | “I don’t think there’s one most important thing, but I’ll tell you one of the things that jumps out is the communication ability of the poster. Some of the posters are much easier to understand than others, and some of them are more visually pleasing than others. One of the areas where you quickly pick of the differences is how well they’re communicating the message.”
Kathy Zuckweiler, graduate school dean | ”A lot of the poster presentations are very interesting. All six colleges are participating, so there is a huge breadth of topics, which is really neat. It’s good to see what the students are doing for their research topics. The event is absolutely worth attending, I learn something new every time I read posters.”
Charles Watson, biology professor | “I expect them to show some level of being inquisitive, and I just want my students to love what I love which is biology. I try to find students that are excited. I don’t worry about if the students are A students, B students or C students. If they come in with a genuine inquisitive nature I’m going to try to make sure they have the opportunity to do research. I expect my students to be invested and enjoy what they do.”
FROM ATTENDEES
Michael Bravenec, sophomore business | “I attended due to extra credit but ended up learning new information about research so it was definitely worth it.”
Krishun Jackson, senior business management | “Our professor said we can have extra credit while we learn about other things like EURECA if we attended these sessions. I could possibly see myself doing something like this if I have a good group because it would be hard alone.”
Johanna Jaimes, sophomore management information systems | “I came for extra credit. I didn’t know much about the celebration of scholarship event, so I get two for one, extra credit, and seeing the poster presentations. I found the poster on intelligent robotics pretty cool.”
Alaska Carrillo Bell, pre-med biology sophomore | “It’s interesting to see how my peers can do these presentations. It was worth attending because it shows me how I can do that too, I can conduct an experiment and do a poster like them.”
Joshua Munoz, mechanical engineering junior | “I thought the presentation was really good. It will be fun to see what I will be doing next year with my peers.”
Clayton Meyers, marketing sophomore | “I came to support a friend and to get a further understanding for remittances [topic of the project he attended]. It was absolutely worth attending. The EURECA presentations are something that a class won’t teach you.”
Christelle Billan, physics sophomore | “It intrigued me in the sense that she was able to bring Theater and Physics (together), something as deep and complex as the multiverse theory. That’s really interesting. And I just wanted to see how they would combine both subjects ,that you believe to be completely different from each other, but are similar in so many ways.”
Natalie McLaurin, exercise physiology sophomore | “The presentations showed a lot of hard work and dedication by the presenters. I learned that not every state has assisted suicide as legal and that was really interesting to learn.”
Lashanda Turenne, nursing junior | “The presentations on sexual attitudes and the impact of pornography interested me the most. It was interesting because I don’t think sex is taken seriously, so I was happy to see the presenters were going to be speaking on the topic to college students that would and could have questions. It’s my second time coming to see the presentations, and they’re always on great topics.”
Samantha Burns, chemistry sophomore | “I attended for extra credit and guess what I’m glad I came because it has opened my mind to different ideas and I might want to try this next time.”
Afolabi Adereti, mechanical engineering sophomore | “I came to get extra credit for a class, I wanted to finesse my way through it but I got caught up in one of the presentations and I stayed, I am exceptionally glad I came.”
Kenneth Shanks, photography senior | “This is all me. Some of [the pictures] are staged, but most are candid. Obviously the bottles in the corner are staged; the photo of them across the way is candid, from my room. This is how I live.”
Ben Robertson, geology senior | “I didn’t realize it was an art show. I kind just thought it was a pile of trash. But when I actually went and checked it out, it makes a lot of sense. I really like what he was going for.”
Tharusha Wanigasekera, mechanical engineering senior | “My team mate and I are both going into the automobile industry. We both wanted to research that field and we both found a non-Newtonian fluid that can be used in hydraulic systems, damping automobile shock absorbers, and as an actuating system.”
Janith Ambewela, mechanical engineering senior | “It [non-newtonian fluid] works better because its viscosity can be changed according to the magnetic field supplied to it, but regular shock absorbers in use today only have one viscosity. In off road environments, it can work better because we can control the amount of shock absorbed by the fluid by changing the viscosity of the fluid inside the cylinder.”
Samantha Acuna, sports and leisure studies senior | “I’m taking an organizational behavior class and we talked a little about how cultures affect the character within the workspace and our professor said if you’re really interested in the cultural level and people doing research, go to the celebration of scholarship.”
Gabrielle Browning, special education sophomore | “My best friend is one of the presenters, so it’s interesting because I know the background behind the research, like all of the hard work that went into it. It’s cool to see it here today.”
Nicholas Jaramillo, mechanical engineering junior | “I am here for extra credit for all of my engineering classes. I’m in the physics section and I’m looking at what other people in my class are doing. My friend did a project and that’s what I’m looking at right now. It’s about electron scattering so it’s really cool.”
AWARD RECIPIENTS
Best Graduate Student Poster Awards
- Champion: Clayton Reece Burgoon for “Supraspinatous and Infraspinatous Tendon Tears with MRI Arthrography of the Shoulder: A Case Study” | Faculty Mentor: Victoria Sanders
- Runner-Up: Gabriel Jacobs for “A Study in Trilobite Growth and Development: Morphometric Ontogeny of Calyptaulax strasburgensis” | Faculty Mentor: Jesse Carlucci
- Honorable Mention: William Bryan for “Nail-Patella Syndrome (Fong Disease)” | Faculty Mentor: Victoria Sanders
Best Graduate Student Podium Awards
- Champion: Melissa Jean Laussman for “How Deans of Women Changed Academia” | Faculty Mentor: Melissa Nivens
- Runner-Up: Scott Gordon and Steven Kundert for “Collatz Conjecture Verification: A Many-Core Approach” | Faculty Mentor: Eduardo Colmenares-Diaz
- Honorable Mention: Jeanel Georges for “Anolis oculatus and Anolis cristatellus in Dominica: investigating the distribution and impacts of an invasive species on an island endemic” | Faculty Mentor: Charles M. Watson
Best Undergraduate Student Poster Awards
- Champion: Careisha Whyte for “Evaluating the Ethical Awareness of Accounting Students in the Dillard College of Business Administration” | Faculty Mentor: Ronald Young
- Runner-Up: Tamra Woods and Jocelyn Brown for “The Effect of STEAM Units on Pre-service Teachers’ Self-Efficacy” | Faculty Mentor: Dittika Gupta
- Runner-Up: Careisha Whyte and Shirley Hazel for “Acceptance of Legalized Assisted Suicide: Does Terminology Matter?” | Faculty Mentors: Beverly Stiles and Newman Wong
Best Undergraduate Student Podium Award
- Champion: Bethany Russell for “The Effect of Subinhibitory Concentrations of Tetracycline on Non-Plasid-Based Erythromycin Resistance in Escherichia coli” | Faculty Mentors: James Masuoka and Jon Scales
- Runner-Up: Romeo Botelua, Charles Trevor Criddle, Xin Hu, Chase Meyer, and Michael A. Olaya for “Development of Muon Tomography Imaging System” | Faculty Mentor: Yu Guo
- Honorable Mention: Laura Sorge and Francine Baron for “Exploring Students’ Perceived Benefits of Learning Communities…Going Deeper.” | Faculty Mentor: Kym Acuna