Category: Students

Conference, Faculty Catalyze Chemistry Students

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The opportunity to present to and learn from pharmaceutical professionals is normally reserved for graduate students, professional scientists and postdoctoral fellows. For Kalamazoo College chemistry students in Dorothy H. Heyl Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge’s lab, attending the Great Lakes Drug Metabolism and Disposition Discussion Group annual meeting as undergrads is a tradition that opens doors and underscores their passion for science.

Chemistry Students Attend Drug Metabolism Conference
Three chemistry students attended the Great Lakes Drug Metabolism and Disposition Discussion Group on May 9 and 10 in Ann Arbor with Dorothy H. Heyl Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge (second from right). The students are Kevin McCarty ’20 (left), Cydney Martell ’19 (second from left) and Michael Orwin ’20 (right).

Three students attended the spring meeting on May 9 and 10 in Ann Arbor. Furge’s students, known for their research excellence, have had several opportunities in recent years to show off their work regarding the P450 enzyme, which catalyzes drug-metabolism reactions, with implications toward drug discovery.

This year’s K representatives included Cydney Martell ’19 of Gull Lake, Michigan; Kevin McCarty ’20 of Clarkston, Michigan; and Michael Orwin ’20 of Portage, Michigan.

“I feel I was really fortunate to get into (Furge’s) lab,” said Martell, whose connection with Furge also helped her secure an internship last year with Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Indianapolis and committed to discovering medicines for people around the world. “The most rewarding thing about the conference is our ability to network with individuals and build important relationships. It’s nice to be able to have that connection and be on equal ground. It’s a love of science that facilitates our ability to work across experience levels.”

Martell will seek a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Northwestern University beginning this fall.

The poster presentation McCarty made from his research in Furge’s lab will evolve into his Senior Individualized Project this summer, he said, which is a testament to Furge’s guidance.

“Instead of telling you how to do things, she’ll ask you questions, engaging you in the work,” McCarty said. “She gives you the freedom to do every part of the research you can by yourself, which helps you understand and take away what’s important.”

In fact, McCarty has been so happy with his experiences in the chemistry program at K, the drug-metabolism conference and in Furge’s lab, he’d tell prospective students considering K to also major in chemistry.

“I would tell them, ‘you’d be surprised by all the opportunities you’ll have,’” McCarty said. “When I first considered K, I heard all about our small class sizes and the faculty. What they didn’t tell me is how many opportunities there would be to work with faculty members like Dr. Furge or in a lab like hers.”

Orwin echoed his peers’ excitement for attending the conference and appreciation of Furge’s leadership in their lab at K.

“I really loved attending the conference and it was a great undergraduate experience being able to present my work to industry professionals,” Orwin said. “Overall, I find the most exciting part of research is the ability to contribute to our collective knowledge alongside being able to share one’s passion with others. I find myself very fortunate for being able to have this experience.”

Kalamazoo Promise Fulfills its First Class at K

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Kalamazoo Promise Student Druanna Darling with a dog
Druanna Darling ’19 said she had not considered attending Kalamazoo College until the Kalamazoo Promise was extended to Michigan Colleges Alliance schools in 2015. Photo by Catalina Gonzalez.

When students in the Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS) receive their diplomas, 92 percent of them are eligible for an outstanding graduation gift: a tuition-free post-secondary education thanks to the Kalamazoo Promise.

KPS graduates who have lived in the district and have been students for at least four years can have as much as 100 percent of their in-state tuition and fees paid for thanks to the Promise, a program funded by anonymous donors. The program is applicable to community colleges, public universities, and since 2015, to 15 private institutions in the Michigan Colleges Alliance, including Kalamazoo College.

Fortunately for Druanna Darling ’19, this promise was made at just the right time.

“I remember there being a press conference during the summer before my senior year (in high school) and my mom was the one who showed me the Promise was being extended” to private schools, said Darling, whose family moved to Arizona when she was 6, only to return because of what the Promise offered her. “We had heard a lot of great things about Kalamazoo College and it was a part of our community, but it never seemed accessible to me. K wasn’t even on my radar.”

A chance to attend K with smaller class sizes and one-on-one opportunities to work with professors was extraordinarily appealing. The opportunity to have her tuition covered convinced her to visit campus. Two campus tours and an overnight stay later, Darling was sure she had found her second home.

“It felt like the students were more of a priority at K,” she said. “Elsewhere, the colleges accepted a huge group of students and the students paid their tuition. At K, faculty and staff were more personal and invested in students. I felt accepted immediately.”

Darling, a psychology major and Loy Norrix alumna, applied to the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Western Michigan University. Ultimately, she decided K was the only place she wanted to experience college. That college experience will culminate Sunday, June 16, when she will be one of eight KPS graduates to graduate from K, representing the College’s first class of Promise-eligible students.

Promise-eligible students have added a perspective of their own to K’s student body, Director of Admission Suzanne Lepley said. They are smart, well-prepared for college and know the community well, although most just start to learn of K’s distinctive offerings—including the K-Plan, the College’s approach to the liberal arts and sciences—shortly before applying.

“They have been educated in the richly diverse KPS system and that learning perspective transfers to the community at K,” Lepley said. “Despite being raised in the city, many spend little, if any time on our campus before attending. They tend to experience the College in a special way as they explore a part of the community they might not have known.”

Darling said she will graduate with a very limited amount of debt that she feels won’t be a burden thanks to the Kalamazoo Promise. And four years after first falling in love with K, her passion for K hasn’t changed.

“I keep thinking I might want to declare a second major and stay for a fifth year,” she joked. “I don’t think my view of it has changed at all. As an entering student, I was overjoyed. The environment is so warming. I have felt supported every day.”

Much of that support has come directly from the faculty. Darling worked with Assistant Professor of Psychology Brittany Liu in Liu’s research lab, and she has received assistance from professors in applying for jobs and graduate school as she hopes to one day work with autistic children.

“Personally, I know a lot of individuals who went to big universities,” Darling said. “There are a lot of things their education has lacked such as an opportunity to learn about social justice issues. At other universities, you might learn about physics or writing a good paper. But at K you learn about how to be a better citizen.”

10 Earn Heyl Scholarships; 7 Will Attend K

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Ten students from Kalamazoo County high schools will receive Heyl scholarships to attend institutions of higher education in the 2019-20 school year, majoring in STEM-related fields. The group includes seven who will attend Kalamazoo College.

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A dinner May 31 at Kalamazoo College honored 10 recipients of Heyl Scholarships.

The prestigious scholarships — available to accomplished Kalamazoo-area math and science students who meet certain requirements — cover tuition, room and board, and book fees. The scholarships were established in 1971 through the will of F.W. and Elsie L. Heyl. F.W. Heyl was the first director of research at the Upjohn Co. and taught at Kalamazoo College.

Heyl Scholarship Fund Executive Director Karika Ann Parker is pictured at the far left. Honored at a dinner at the College, the scholarship winners include Rachel Kramer (from left), Gull Lake High School/Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center (KAMSC), attending Kalamazoo College; Samuel Ankley, Kalamazoo Central High School, Kalamazoo College; Suja Thakali, Kalamazoo Central/KAMSC, Kalamazoo College; Macy Hoppe, Loy Norrix High School, attending Western Michigan University School of Nursing; Emma Knutson, Loy Norrix High School, WMU School of Nursing; Sierra Knight, Loy Norrix High School, WMU School of Nursing; Carter Eisenbach, Loy Norrix High School, Kalamazoo College; Alexis Nesbitt, Parchment High School/KAMSC, Kalamazoo College; Rachel Lanting, Kalamazoo Central High School/KAMSC, Kalamazoo College. Elizabeth Wang (not pictured), of Portage Northern/KAMSC, will attend Kalamazoo College.

Virtual Reality Demonstration Wows Students

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Buildings developed through virtual reality
Fourteen students in Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ digital art course were transported into a world filled with structures developed from their imaginations through virtual reality.

Exclamations such as “Wow!” and “Cool!” were emanating from Light Fine Arts last week. That’s because students were witnessing the dazzling results of a partnership between the Art Department and the College’s Center for New Media Design (CNMD): a virtual reality demonstration depicting projects from Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ digital art course.

The 14 students in the course were transported into a world filled with structures developed from their imaginations including domed mazes, star-shaped-shadow-casting trellises and cleverly arranged hexagonal pillars, allowing them to climb, observe and interact with everyone’s creations.

Virtual Reality Demonstration Buildings 2
Fourteen students in Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ digital art course were transported into a world filled with structures developed from their imaginations through virtual reality.

Virtual Reality Demonstration 5
Fourteen students in Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ digital art course were transported into a world filled with structures developed from their imaginations through virtual reality.

Their project, which Collazo-Llorens titled Architectural Aura, required students to design complex, three-dimensional structures capturing fantastical facades rather than traditional buildings. Students considered their structures from multiple viewpoints, including the interiors, and added perspectives based on volume and mass, proportions and balance.

Maren Prophit
Maren Prophit was among 14 students in Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ digital art course who received a demonstration of her work in virtual reality.

Students then used computer-aided design tools such as TinkerCAD — an app for 3D design, electronics and coding — to develop them, and turn them into tangible models through three MakerBot 3D printers including one in the CNMD. Educational Technology Specialist Josh Moon and Peer Design Consultant Faith Barnett ’21 later spent about two weeks transforming the 3D models into virtual reality.

The experience was a hit for the class’s students including Gaby Cordova, an English major from Los Angeles, and Maren Prophit, a biology and art double major from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who were impressed to see how small objects could be enlarged into a world where students could interact with them.

The project was especially practical for Prophit, who interned last summer with Mackinac State Historic Park, a family of living history museums and nature parks in northern Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac. There, she saw sketch art re-created and exhibits designed with help from virtual reality, reflecting her own need to learn digital processes.

Barnett also received hands-on work in developing virtual reality for a public presentation for the first time.

“There was a lot of fine tuning to solve some minor issues because some of the graphics were jittery,” Barnett said. “But the best part of VR is you can do things with it that are impossible in the real world.”

A Different Diagnosis for Akhenaten? Ask Your Mummy

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Even with modern-day royals generating headlines, Chelsea Miller ’19 would rather focus her attention on a royal who lived thousands of years ago. Miller’s research, first conducted through her junior-year seminar, is applying new theories to the legacy of Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt from about 1353 to 1336 B.C.

Chelsea Miller Researches Akhenaten
When Chelsea Miller ’19, of Flint, Michigan, began her studies at Kalamazoo College, she thought she would pursue the pre-med program. Instead, she fell in love with the Classics Department, where she studies historical figures such as Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt thousands of years ago.

Traditional belief says Akhenaten suffered from awkward physical conditions such as Fröhlich’s syndrome, a rare childhood metabolic disorder, or Marfan’s syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the body’s connective tissue. Yet Miller’s research leads to a different diagnosis, even thousands of years after Akhenaten’s death.

“I believe the cause of his behavior was a combination of propaganda and a mental tendency of taking things too far,” said Miller, a classical civilizations major with a concentration in neuroscience. “I believe he had characteristics such as an elevated mood, inflated grandiosity and overactivity. I believe he had egomania.”

That theory, in fact, seems to be supported by those symptoms as found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which mental-health experts in the U.S. use to identify mental illnesses.

“I think the average person would find it a little surprising that we can do such a retrospective diagnosis,” Miller said. “He was such a famous person and he probably had a mental illness, yet there are still stigmas regarding people who have mental illness. I think other people can be drawn to his eccentric lifestyle like I was, and what might’ve been going on inside of his mind.”

Miller presented her research this winter at the University of Tennessee Undergraduate Classics Conference, also attended by representatives of institutions such as Duke University, Bryn Mawr College and the University of Wisconsin.

“It was an amazing experience,” Miller said. “So many people from very well-respected and well-known schools made me feel proud to be representing K because it shows the kind of work we do here. I think more students at K should know they have opportunities like this. It was very rewarding to present my work and experience other people’s work.”

Miller said Akhenaten was married to Queen Nefertiti and was believed to be the father of Tutankhamun, also known as King Tut. Egypt at the time was a conservative civilization that valued stability and continuity, although Akhenaten rejected many Egyptian traditions that rulers were expected to uphold. He introduced monotheism, for example, to a culture that had worshiped hundreds of gods for many centuries.

Akhenaten also spent great resources founding a new royal capital city, and he adopted a bizarre, androgynous image for himself and his family that violated idealistic Egyptian artistic canon. That image included a grotesquely elongated face that surmounted a tall and thin neck, weak and sloping shoulders, a distended belly and spindly calves.

His decisions, in fact, presumably caused Akhenaten’s subjects to hate him because they posthumously condemned his memory and attempted to remove all mentions of him from historical records. When researchers rediscovered proof of Akhenaten in the 19th and 20th centuries, archaeologists and medical professionals attempted to explain his unusual appearance and radical behaviors in art and history with retrospective diagnoses of physical conditions.

Miller, though, said Akhenaten’s mummy was discovered without any sign of the physical conditions portrayed in images of him, aiding her conclusion of mental illness. She added she hopes her research will lead her to more fascinating ideas about historical influencers.

“I’m interested in looking at other misunderstood figures in history and what they did mentally,” Miller said. “I don’t want to say the Akhenaten story is over for me, but other people have already investigated rulers such as Alexander the Great, and I’d like to go further into that history.”

K Student Selected for National Theatre Event

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A top-honors finish in a recent theatre regional event led Rebecca Chan ’22 to an even bigger stage in April.

Rebecca Chan and Three Other Students at National Theatre Event
Rebecca Chan ’22 (second from right) was one of two first-year students and four students overall selected to attend the Kennedy Center American College Theatre event in Washington, D.C.

Chan, a theatre major from Howell, Michigan, has returned from the week-long Kennedy Center American College Theatre National Festival in Washington, D.C., where she was one of only four students from around the country to participate in its Institute for Theatre Journalism Advocacy (ITJA) events. There, Chan engaged in a series of seminars with well-known journalists from publications such as the Washington Post, American Theatre and National Public Radio, focusing on theatre criticism and how it’s changing with technology.

The opportunity meant extending the experience she received at the regional festival in Madison, Wisconsin, where she wrote deadline-oriented critiques and responses about shows she watched each night. The event, which included students from across Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, was where Chan received her first experiences in theatre journalism and became one of just eight students from around the country to earn top honors. From those eight students, four were chosen to attend nationals.

“I was taken aback by the opportunity,” Chan said. Before this year, “I didn’t have a background in journalism. This validated my experience from regionals on a second level. I felt really blessed to have the opportunity. The fact that the seminars sparked so much conversation was something I enjoyed. I loved to see people sorting through my ideas.”

Chan credited her theatre classes in her first year at K for helping her develop the skills that enabled her to write so successfully.

“I took three theatre courses involving fundamentals of acting, playwriting and stagecraft,” she said. “Those three prepared me to evaluate a lot of different things, including the technical aspects and structures of a play. They really bolstered what I was able to do.”

From there, Chan ensured she maintained her skills independently from the end of regionals until nationals.

“I made sure that I practiced writing every so often,” she said. “I wasn’t sure how to practice specifically for theater journalism, but I made sure I had a good foundation going.”

The ITJA aims to develop arts journalists who can advocate for excellence in the arts through a variety of media—web, print and broadcast. Chan was one of two first-year students selected to attend the national event among the four participating. The other two were seniors, including one from California who soon will pursue a Ph.D., and one from Missouri who majors in journalism.

“I liked having (the journalism major) in the room because she had that student perspective and she’s in the process of finding a job,” Chan said. “It was neat to be on an equal playing field with someone with so much experience in the field.”

Chan said she would like to pursue another opportunity with the Kennedy Center events in the future. As a first-year, she’s not certain which area of theatre will be her focus, but “journalism is another form of writing for me to play with and explore,” she said. “I like to stay open to possibilities.”

International Jazz Day Gives K Reason to Toot its Own Horn

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International Jazz Day Tom Evans cMcGUIRE 2018 lo 0007
Music Professor Tom Evans rehearses his trombone with Rushik Patel ’22 at Light Fine Arts. Evans directs K’s noteworthy Jazz Band, making the College a great place to mark International Jazz Day.

There are days during the year when it makes sense for Kalamazoo College to toot its own horn. International Jazz Day is one of them, as the College’s Jazz Band is known for its well-attended, quality performances popular with the musicians themselves and audiences alike.

According to its website, International Jazz Day — celebrated each April 30 — unites communities, schools, artists, historians, academics and enthusiasts to celebrate jazz and its roots. It helps the world learn of jazz’s future and its impact, while encouraging intercultural dialogue and international cooperation.

That desire to celebrate jazz could cause anyone, from jazz novices to experts, to gravitate to K’s Jazz Band.

“We tell our audiences, ‘if the music affects you, get up and dance,’” said Music Professor Tom Evans, the band’s director, who ensures his group is deserving of recognition around K and around the Kalamazoo community. “By the end, we usually have many who are dancing in the aisles. It’s always great to play in front of such an appreciative audience.”

The enthusiasm of the musicians is part of what makes the band special. “I have one rule with the Jazz Band: It’s OK to make mistakes, but it’s not OK to play without passion,” Evans said. “I believe (the band) can make you a better person. It makes you more disciplined and it engages your mind. It’s a chance to explore history from the earliest jazz continuing through many contemporary artists.”

For those who need a primer in jazz as they mark International Jazz Day, Evans said the music is exciting because “jazz reinvents itself every night. If you go to a concert and see the same group two nights in a row, the beginning and the end might sound familiar, but the middle would be different.”

That middle represents the jazz process of improvisation, defined as the spontaneous creation of fresh, original melodies beyond the notes on a page. Improvisation is inspired by the musicians performing and how they feel at a given moment. Plus, they can never be identically repeated.

K’s Jazz Band typically follows standard big band instrumentation with five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones and a rhythm section consisting of a pianist, a bass player, a guitarist and drummers. This year’s rhythm section features two guitarists and adds a vibraphone player. A vibraphone has metallic bars instead of the wooden ones seen on the garden-variety xylophone.

“A xylophone has a distinctive wooden ‘dong’ sound, but a vibraphone has metal with sustained pitches that sound like ‘ting,’” Evans said. Those pitches are controlled through fans underneath the instrument that spin and rotate.

For students interested in Jazz Band, there are music ensemble scholarship opportunities for incoming students, and while auditions are sometimes required for the band, there are more opportunities to participate and take a leadership role than you might find at a larger school.

“If you attend somewhere like the University of Michigan, good luck. You’re probably waiting until at least your junior year to play in the Jazz Band, and even then, there might be a waiting list,” Evans said. “K is a place where students have immediate leadership opportunities from the moment they get to campus.” Jazz Band is no exception. “With the Jazz Band, every voice is critical. If one person doesn’t show up, it affects everyone.”

Evans came to K in 1995, inheriting the College’s Jazz and Symphonic bands, after teaching at Alfred University, another liberal arts institution, in Alfred, New York. His jazz bands have toured Chicago, Washington, D.C., Cincinnati and Detroit in the U.S., and Russia, Estonia, Japan, Finland and Tunisia around the world.

The group’s next concert is scheduled for 8 p.m. Saturday, May 11, in the Dalton Theater at Light Fine Arts. Evans said the band’s play list will include some early jazz, swing, bop, fusion, funk and Latin varieties.

“At the end of each concert, I want the kids to walk off the stage as heroes,” Evans said.

Hear some selections of prior Jazz Band performances and learn more about the group at its website.

Get Versed in National Poetry Month

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If your knowledge of poetry is limited, April is the perfect time to expand your horizons and practice your writing. That’s because it’s National Poetry Month, and Assistant English Professor Oliver Baez Bendorf has creatively developed ways for students to hone their skills and develop their interests in poetry to celebrate.

Kayla Park National Poetry Month
Kayla Park read at the Belladonna* Collaborative Reading last spring. She interned with Belladonna*, an independent feminist avant-garde poetry press, through the New York Arts Program during the winter 2018 term at K.

Among his classes, Baez Bendorf teaches an advanced poetry workshop, which is participating in a 21-day challenge to write every day. Students are assigned poetry-inspired aliases and write about their praxis, or practice, of writing. “Writing about writing” might sound redundant, but its purpose is to help students learn about themselves, their influences and their processes to discover what inspires them.

Audrey Honig ’21, for example, is an English and religion major with a concentration in Jewish studies from Elmhurst, Illinois. She is writing erasure poems under the alias Lyra based on what she sees through social media. Erasure poetry erases words from an existing text in prose or verse and frames the result as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand on their own or arranged into lines or stanzas.

“I thought it would be interesting to bring what normally is a distraction into my writing,” said Honig, of the social media she analyzes. “I thought I wrote a lot before this class started, but I really wasn’t creating much. I was working on my writing, but I was mostly working on the editing process. Now I’m doing something small every day.”

Her biggest takeaway from the course has been how to better give and receive feedback to classmates and other writers.

“As students, we’re used to getting feedback when a professor might say, ‘This is a B,’” she said. “In this class, we’re really thinking about the specifics of what we’re doing as writers, so we can give honest and helpful feedback without tearing anyone down.”

For her 21-day challenge, Kayla Park ’19 selects a book at random off her shelf every day and writes a poem inspired by the last sentence on page 21 in that book.

Audrey Honig Recites During National Poetry Month
Audrey Honig presents during a class at Kalamazoo College’s Humphrey House. Honig is is writing erasure poems under the alias Lyra based on what she sees through social media.

Park, who writes under the alias Pegasus, earned a Heyl Scholarship when she matriculated at K to study within a science major, and she double majors in English and physics. She said she can see how a writing genre such as poetry helps make her a better scientist.

“When you continue doing a lot of work in one field and you get used to a certain mode of thinking, that’s beneficial in making you an expert in your subject, although you can also restrict your thought patterns that way,” she said. “In poetry, I’m expressing knowledge under a set of conventions that is different, but no less valuable than in science. Engaging with different modes of thinking helps me to see connections across disciplines and approach all situations from a broader point of view.”

The creativity poetry stirs for Park complements what she does with two a cappella groups at K, Premium Orange and A Cappella People of Color (ACAPOC), as well as with Frelon, the campus’ student dance company. It also helps her deal with her own perfectionism.

“Sometimes when I sit down to write, regardless of the assignment, I get hung up on making it perfect,” she said. “Forcing myself to write every day is beneficial in letting a little of that perfectionism go. It helps me write more freely and produce something that I can always go back and edit later.”

Baez Bendorf also offers an intermediate poetry workshop. That class this month is memorizing poems such as Truth Serum and 300 Goats by Naomi Shihab Nye and To Myself by Franz Wright with the goal of reciting them in May.

“We approach it as a kind of ultimate close reading of the work, and then aim to know it by heart, hopefully for a lifetime,” Baez Bendorf said.

National Poetry Month was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. It since has become the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers and poets celebrating poetry, according to the American Academy of Poetry.

The organization drew inspiration for National Poetry Month from Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March, and it aims to highlight the legacies and ongoing achievements of American poets, encourage the public to read poems, and increase the number of poetry-themed stories in local and national media. Read more about National Poetry Month at the Academy of American Poets’ website.