Senior Integrated Project

Journalist to Deliver Hilberry Symposium Keynote

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The Kalamazoo College English Department will conduct its annual Hilberry Symposium, which honors English majors and their Senior Individualized Projects, this Friday and Saturday.

Hilberry Symposium Keynote Speaker Lauren Trager
Lauren Trager ’07, an investigative journalist for KMOV-TV in St. Louis, will kick off the annual Hilberry Symposium with a keynote at 6:30 p.m. Friday in the Olmsted Room.

Lauren Trager ’07, an investigative journalist for KMOV-TV in St. Louis, will kick off the event with a keynote at 6:30 p.m. Friday in the Olmsted Room. Trager has spent most of her career as a reporter and anchor through the newspaper, radio and television industries, and has also worked in government. She worked as an anchor and reporter at KARK-TV in Little Rock, Arkansas, before arriving in St. Louis in 2013.

SIP presentation panels will run concurrently from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. Saturday after an opening session at 1 p.m. at 103 Dewing Hall. A reception at the Arcus Center will follow.

The Hilberry Symposium was named for late Professor Emeritus Conrad Hilberry, who was the founder of the creative writing program at K. The event resembles a professional conference, where scholars and writers share their work and acknowledge each other’s achievements. Alumni, nominated through English Department faculty, have served as keynote speakers for the event since 2001.

Since the first Hilberry Symposium in 2000, the event has been an important collective experience for the graduating class as a ritual of remembrance and celebration. With English Department faculty members, family and friends also attending, English majors have developed a community through the symposium that has evolved over time, with the love of language as its enduring center.

Visit its website for more information on the English Department and the Hilberry Symposium.

Events Offer Students Opportunities in the Sciences

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Two Kalamazoo College events coming soon will give students new experiences and learning opportunities in the sciences.

First, Brendan Bohannan – a professor of environmental studies and biology at the University of Oregon – will present a keynote address titled “Host-Microbe Systems: a Rediscovered Frontier in the Life Sciences” in the annual Diebold Symposium from 4 to 5 p.m. Thursday at 226 Dow Science Center.

Sciences JA Scott Kelso
J.A. Scott Kelso will provide the Tourtellotte Lecture at 5:30 p.m. May 7 in 103 Dewing Hall.

The Diebold Symposium offers senior biology majors a chance to present their Senior Individualized Projects (SIP), regardless of their SIP discipline. The event is dedicated to the memory of Frances “Dieb” Diebold, who was a member of the Kalamazoo College Biology Department for 44 years.

Bohannon focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of microbial biodiversity.  He began his research career studying microbes in non-host environments such as soil, water, air and built environments. However, over the past 12 years, his group has focused more on the microbiomes of humans and other animals including fish, birds and primates.

Then, the Kalamazoo College Physics Department will welcome J.A. Scott Kelso, of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University and the Intelligent Systems Research Centre at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, for the Tourtellotte Lecture at 5:30 p.m. May 7 in 103 Dewing Hall.

The lecture will explain some fundamental governing laws behind the behavior of complex physical, biological and social systems.

For most of his scientific career, Kelso has studied human beings and human brains, individually and together, and how they coordinate their behavior from cells to cognition to social settings.

Since the late 1970s, his approach has been grounded in the concepts, methods and tools of self-organizing dynamical systems tailored to living things, a theoretical and empirical framework called Coordination Dynamics.

From 1978 to 1985 Kelso was the senior research scientist at Yale University’s Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. Since then, he has held the Glenwood and Martha Creech Eminent Scholar Chair in Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida, where he founded The Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences.

Kelso has held visiting appointments in Moscow, Stuttgart, Lyons and Marseille, and is an emeritus professor of computational neuroscience at Ulster University in Northern Ireland.

Astronomers Honor K Student for Her Research

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An organization of professional astronomers is honoring Kalamazoo College senior Hayley Beltz for her Senior Individualized Project and summer research, which Beltz presented to the group’s members.

Hayley Beltz astronomers
Hayley Beltz was one of five undergraduates from across the country to earn a Chambliss medal from the American Astronomical Society, a group of professional astronomers.
Hayley Beltz Presents at Astronomers Meeting
The American Astronomical Society, a professional astronomers group, is honoring Kalamazoo College senior Hayley Beltz for her research in quasar spectroscopy.

The Astronomy Achievement Student Awards, which were bestowed in January through the American Astronomical Society (AAS), recognize exemplary student presentations offered at its organizational meetings. Beltz’s research involved quasar spectroscopy, meaning she analyzed light that is billions of years old to find and measure the large concentrations of hydrogen that develop as stars form.

The highest AAS honorees, including Beltz – a double major in physics and math from St. Joseph, Michigan – are given a Chambliss medal. Beltz was one of five undergraduate medal winners, who included students from the University of Colorado, the University of Louisville, California State Polytechnic University and Rollins College.

Beltz said she is very excited about the award and it feels validating to win it considering she wants to attend graduate school in astronomy after graduating from K.

The AAS, established in 1899 and based in Washington, D.C., has about 7,000 members including physicists, mathematicians, geologists, engineers and other researchers from the broad spectrum of astronomy-related fields. Its mission is to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe.

 

Grant Will Boost Student Research Experience

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Kalamazoo College’s efforts to get science majors experience in student research, one of the most important factors in providing them an exceptional start in their post-college careers, just got a big boost.

Student research
A $247,500 grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation will boost the availability of summer student research experiences for K biology, chemistry and physics majors.

The Sherman Fairchild Foundation will provide $247,500 to fund stipends of $4,000 apiece for students in biology, chemistry and physics to conduct research in summer. The three-year grant will also provide up to $1,500 apiece for students to attend scientific conferences to present their findings and to offset the cost of supplies, said Associate Professor of Physics Arthur Cole, who will serve as director of the project.

The student research beneficiaries, 15 each summer, will include both rising seniors working on their Senior Individualized Projects (SIPs) and younger students, allowing them to get early exposure to life in the lab before deciding whether to pursue science as a career, Cole said. He worked with Assistant Professor of Biology Santiago Salinas, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Dwight Williams and Anne Dueweke, director of grants, fellowships and research, to conceptualize and develop the grant proposal.

“It gives students an earlier chance to seek out research experiences,” Cole said. “A lot of times you think you want to go into the sciences and you don’t know what research is like until you get to try it.”

He said the grant also will make it possible for those who support themselves while attending the College to concentrate on student research, rather than having to seek summer jobs, and could open doors for members of groups who are underrepresented in the sciences.

Salinas said summer research as an undergraduate played a major role in his own decision to become a scientist and professor.

“It’s more than what’s in the textbook,” he said. “They start to see the bigger picture. And they get to try things. It’s how they learn. And it’s fun.”

For those who do decide to pursue scientific careers, Williams said, the opportunity to get early research experience can give them a “leg up” on getting further grants and research opportunities.

“It’s a great way for us to get more students involved in research, particularly with an emphasis on first- and second-year students, instead of waiting until they’re seniors working on their SIPs” he said.

Though most of the research that the grant funds will involve students working with professors on the College’s campus, it will also provide support for up to three K students a year to participate in research at other institutions, Cole said.

College Awarded $800,000 Grant to Strengthen Experiential Learning

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Continuing a record of generous support for Kalamazoo College, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $800,000 to fund a project aimed at updating and strengthening the College’s experiential learning program, a cornerstone of the K-Plan.

Experiential Learning
Putting experiential learning into action, second-year student Madison Butler addresses the Kalamazoo County Commission about a report her class assembled on the county’s local identification card initiative. An $800,000 grant will help the College explore ways to weave such opportunities more tightly into the Kalamazoo College experience.

The grant is the largest yet to K from the foundation, one of the nation’s prime philanthropic supporters of liberal arts education. It brings to more than $4 million the total in grants the New York-based foundation has given the College since the mid-1970s.

The grant recognizes the value of K’s unique approach to liberal arts education, as embodied in the K-Plan: rigorous academics, study abroad, individual scholarship and, of course, experiential education — which provides students opportunities for hands-on, immersive learning in real-life situations.

The four-year award will cover the cost of bringing together students, faculty and staff in various settings and through a variety of means to explore and experiment with:

  • reducing barriers to participation in experiential learning;
  • strengthening faculty engagement with experiential learning; and
  • evolving the K-Plan and expanding its utility and educational impact.

Assistant Professor of English Marin Heinritz ’99, a former chair of the College’s Experiential Education Committee, along with a steering committee for the project, will work with a “design thinking” consultant to facilitate a collaboration between faculty, staff and students around these goals.

Heinritz recalled that as the College altered the K-Plan in the late 1990s, her graduating class was the last to have the second-year spring quarter dedicated to off-campus career development activities such as internships followed by summer classes before the junior year abroad. That revision of the College’s schedule along with factors both economic and societal, she said, may have contributed to decreased participation in some experiential learning programs among K students.

She said the design thinking process focuses on the needs and expectations of those being served—in this case, students—and is intended to inspire innovative strategies for making experiential learning a more organic part of the curriculum.

“The idea is to help elicit thinking from us so we can begin to problem-solve,” Heinritz said. “We’ve gotten this amazing grant so we have these great resources and time to see how it’s going to evolve. There are all kinds of possibilities.”

She said one proposal might be to devise classes that take advantage of K’s long winter break by using part of it for a capstone experience directly related to the material covered in the classroom.

“So for example, I teach a food and travel writing sophomore seminar, and it would be really fun to take the students somewhere connected with that and give them lots of writing and reflection assignments,” she said. “That would change the way I teach that class fundamentally to give them a direct experience.”

College Provost Mickey McDonald also pointed to existing models, such as a project led by Anthropology and Sociology Assistant Professor Francisco Villegas that involved students in Kalamazoo County’s initiative to establish a local ID card for those unable to obtain other forms of government identification. He said that through the process led by Heinritz, students, faculty and staff will seek to make the connections between experiential learning and other parts of the K-Plan “much more explicit for our students.”

“I think there’s a really different landscape now than there was even 10 years ago, before the Great Recession, and so students and their families are thinking about how to hit the ground running as soon as they graduate,” McDonald said. Amid concerns about finishing a degree in the minimum possible time, they can see experiential learning as a luxury or disconnected from their long-term goals.

“One of the ideal outcomes would be that almost no student would see any kind of barrier to experiential learning,” McDonald said. “If we think this kind of education is the best way to prepare them to be great citizens of the world, then we need to take as many of these barriers away as possible.”

McDonald said the focus on such issues, while certain to be greatly enhanced by the grant, is not new, and that students could begin benefiting from the innovative programs it produces as early as the 2018-19 academic year – in line with the launch of the College’s new strategic plan this spring.

“The commitment to the K-Plan, to experiential education, is going to be a central priority of the strategic plan,” he said. “I think this grant and the work that we’ve been doing are going to resonate very well with it.”

International Chemistry Magazine Publishes K Grad’s Research

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A 2017 Kalamazoo College graduate has been published in Angewandte Chemie, a German international chemistry magazine, for his senior individualized project (SIP) involving how prescription medications interact with the human body.

John Bailey presents his research published in an international chemistry magazine
John Bailey ’17 presents research related to his senior individualized project.

John Bailey, who was a chemistry major and math minor from Midland, Mich., performed research through a group at Michigan State University focusing on aromaticity. The term describes a ring-shaped molecule that exhibits more stability than other connective arrangements with the same atoms.

The research and resulting chemistry magazine article highlights how stability involving aromaticity could allow a greater range of choices in a pharmaceutical’s design, maximizing the drug’s effect in a targeted human system without harming other systems in a patient’s body.

The article, titled “High-Field NMR Spectroscopy Reveals Aromaticity-Modulated Hydrogen Bonding (AMHB) in Heterocycle,” has no immediate effect on how drugs are formulated or prescribed. Still, the results could one day have strong clinical implications for treatment courses such as chemotherapy. As a result, the research doesn’t stand to make Bailey famous, but a positive advancement in medicine one day will have been the result of many people like Bailey collaborating and building on each other’s work.

“It feels good to have work I’ve done out there that could be helpful to other humans,” he said.

Bailey is in Kalamazoo for at least an additional year, but would eventually like to attend graduate school and end up professionally as a leader in a research lab. He credits Chemistry Professor Jeffrey Bartz and Math Professor Eric Barth for giving him the guidance and encouragement he needed to succeed with his SIP.

“Hopefully, I will have enough knowledge I can be an effective member of my community professionally and nonprofessionally,” Bailey said. “I think K did a good job letting me understand how big a place the world is and how much I need to be humble. I want to keep working hard because no one is ever done growing.”

 

Kalamazoo College Included in ‘Fiske Guide to Colleges’ for 2018

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The publisher Sourcebooks announced Tuesday that Kalamazoo College again is included in the annual “Fiske Guide to Colleges,” a useful resource for high school students and their families when they research prospective colleges.

Fiske Guide to Colleges logo
Kalamazoo College again will be one of more than 300 schools featured in the 2018 version in the “Fiske Guide to Colleges”

The 2018 publication, compiled by former New York Times Education Editor Edward B. Fiske, is a selective, subjective and systematic look at more than 300 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada and the UK.

The “Fiske Guide to Colleges” is available as a paperback book, as an iPad app on iTunes, and as a Web program on CollegeCountdown.com. The guide’s readers discover the personality of a college based on a broad range of subjects throughout the text including the student body, academics, social life, financial aid, campus setting, housing, food and extracurricular activities.

Kalamazoo College “aims to prepare students for real life by helping them synthesize the liberal arts education they receive on campus with their experiences abroad,” the publication says, adding that K students are passionate and determined to make a difference. The guide also discusses the K-Plan, Kalamazoo College’s four-part, integrated approach to an excellent education in the liberal arts and sciences. K-Plan tenets include:

  • rigorous academics. The flexibility and rigor of K’s curriculum provides students with a customized academic experience;
  • experiential education. Students connect classroom learning with real-world experience by completing career development internships or externships, participating in civic engagement and service-learning projects, and getting involved in social justice leadership work;
  • international and intercultural experience. Students choose from 42 study abroad programs in 24 countries across six continents; and
  • independent scholarship. As the culmination of their learning, students explore a subject of their choice, resulting in an in-depth, graduate-level research thesis, performance or creative work known as a Senior Individualized Project.