Reading outside in my hometown of San Miguel, Mexico

In a project that combined research and production, Professor Hacthoun and I worked over the summer on preparing class material focusing on literary self-portraits. Literary self-portraits are a tradition going back hundreds of years in Hispanic literature; authors introduce themselves to the readers, describing their physical, mental, or emotional qualities, often times a combination of the three. Perhaps the most iconic literary self-portrait is Miguel de Cervantes, who in his collection Novelas ejemplares described in words a portrait of himself.

An example of the informational sheets that accompany the self-portraits

It doesn’t start or stop with Cervantes. Following the same tradition, many authors throughout the ages and throughout the world wrote self-portraits of themselves. In the first part of the project, I collected as many self-portraits as I could, anything from poems about facial features to essays meditating on personality. After collecting a large number of them, Professor Hacthoun and I came together to discuss and select those that students could take advantage of the most.

We then wrote small commentaries for each, pointing out different author’s methods of self-representation and other such notes. I collected the self-portraits and commentaries into a document with information about the author, the context of the self-portraits, and a glossary to be published online for students to access.

At my work desk

Throughout the project I learned about a lot about human’s need to explain themselves to each other and to themselves, as well as various research skills. Literary self-portraits are a way of exploring one’s own identity and even, in a way, fashioning it. The research we conducted opened an avenue for teaching that not only includes tools like vocabulary, history, and syntax, but also a way for students to explore and fashion their own identities.

–Laila Bárcenas Meade, July 2020

Professor Nancy Bisaha (History Department), Professor Christopher Smart (Chemistry Department), and John Mahoney ‘22

This summer I worked with Professor Bisaha and Professor Smart to collect and review sources for their course Medieval Science and Technology. The interdisciplinary course explores how technologies and the intellectual antecedents of modern science developed in the period from 500 to 1500 CE, with a concentration on how those technologies and epistemologies influenced, and were influenced by, their socio-historical contexts. While the course focuses on Europe, my mentors asked me to expand the geographic scope of the course material to illuminate the cross-cultural origins of certain technologies and provide comparative examples of technological development in non-European societies. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the course, these sources had to be both accessible to students of disparate academic backgrounds and representative of various intellectual disciplines.

My primary task was researching and compiling an annotated bibliography. I expanded the source material on subjects, including gunpowder technology and medicine, which were already represented in the course, and collected sources on new subjects, like metallurgy. I also proposed combinations of readings for class modules as well as a lab module on the usage of astrolabes.  

While I thoroughly enjoyed the research, I struggled with two problems: an unfamiliarity with digital research and difficulty focusing my research. Both were eventually solved through consultations with my mentors and Vassar College librarians, who introduced me to new online resources and helped me concentrate my research. By the end of the program, I emerged with a new appreciation for the powers of online research, as well as a newfound excitement for interdisciplinary research. As a final cap to my Ford Scholarship, I am preparing a subject and readings for a class module that I will lead when the course is taught this spring.  

While I spent most of my time working sitting at this desk, my real workplace was online

I placed the sources that seemed most appropriate as class readings on a shared Moodle page

Other, more arcane sources were put into annotated bibliographies organized by subject

Professor Qi Ge and Alex Eisert ’22, Economics Department

This summer, I was privileged to work on a project examining competitive balance and vertical integration in sports with Professor Ge. Specifically, we looked into the relationship between major (MLB) and minor (MiLB) league baseball. Hailing from New York, I am a lifelong Yankees (MLB) fan, and growing up, I also frequented Hudson Valley Renegades’ (MiLB) games during my summers in Dutchess County.

Professor Ge and I hard at work over Zoom.

I donned a Renegades’ hat while holding up a picture of logos of the minor league teams with my favorite names.

A feeder or minor league is a lower-level, but still professional-grade entity that athletes usually participate in before moving to the highest level (or major league). The more that a sport’s minor leagues are tied to its major league, the more that major league can be said to have engaged in vertical integration; the minor leagues operate as a part of the supply chain for the majors. No such system is as expansive and complex, and perhaps as tightly integrated, like that of Organized Baseball.

My first task was to explore the relationship between MLB and MiLB throughout the years with a comprehensive literature review. 1921 marked the first year that MLB teams could have ownership stakes in minor league teams, and they immediately began buying up minor league teams as a place to put young ballplayers, signed for cheap, stashing them until they were ready for the major leagues.

My main task was to gather data on which MiLB teams have been MLB-owned, and on the performance of minor league teams throughout the years. We will ultimately use these datasets to look into the effects that MLB ownership has on league-wide competitive balance for the two highest levels of the minor leagues, AA and AAA.

We learned that, as of today, every AA and AAA team has at least some ties to a major league team, hence the one-to-one ratio.

Professor Maria Höhn, Huda Rahman ‘23, and Professor Christopher Bjork, Ilia Mahns ‘23

The purpose of our project was to introduce methods of research and modes of collaboration in preparation for our trip to Malaysia through the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education. Given the pandemic, we were unable to do the groundwork we had hoped to accomplish. Instead, with the guidance of Professor Maria Höhn and post-baccalaureate fellow Matthew Brill-Carlat, we explored refugee models of education alongside various community-engaged partnerships. Our research seeks to advance the Consortium’s development. 

Aside from the Ford Scholar framework, our project is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which also funds Vassar’s New Americans summer program, designed to support refugee high school students in pursuing higher-ed. During the summer, we researched how this might be expanded to include winter and spring break programming focused on the college application process. 

We researched mutual enrollment programs between different higher education institutions. Oftentimes immigrant and refugee students pursue an education at community colleges due to interlocking hardships including, financial and linguistic challenges. We are working towards developing community-engaged learning opportunities that foster cross-campus relations between Vassar and DCC.

Throughout our research, we attended several Zoom workshops concerning refugee education, hosted by both government and local organizations. There was a lot to learn from grassroots organizations, especially concerning forms of creative expression related to mental health. We have seen the importance of incorporating art and therapeutic practices in ensuring feelings of well-being and belonging within vulnerable communities.

Our research allowed us to observe patterns in online platforms and digital scholarship while gathering resources for education models and mental health intervention in Malaysia. This has informed us in further developing community-outreach and summer initiatives that hopefully can become applicable to our college.

New Americans Program- Summer of 2019 | Taken by Professor Höhn

Valley Scholars Initiative by Julián Aguilar, Vassar ‘23

World Refugee Day 2020 slide shared over zoom| Taken by ilia Mahns

Common Threads Art Exhibit of Story Cloths 

Professor Debra Zeifman and Yiqing (Alice) Fan ’22, Psychological Science Department

This June, I worked with Professor Zeifman on designing a new course called The Psychologist’s Toolkit for Success and Wellbeing in College. This course aims to use scientifically tested strategies to assist students in succeeding academically, socially, physically, and mentally in college.

At the beginning of the project, recalling the problems that students encountered after entering college, we came up with a list of potential topics. The topics are divided into four categories:

1. Physical health and wellbeing (e.g. sleep hygiene and habits)
2. Studying habits (e.g. avoiding procrastination)
3. Social interactions (e.g. conflict resolution)
4. Others (e.g. academic integrity & mental health education).

For each topic, Professor Zeifman helped me come up with questions and search terms. Then, I used PsycINFO and Google Scholar to look for research papers that addressed these ideas. We tended to search for more recent studies that examined college students. After putting together titles, abstracts, and citations of the most relevant studies, I started reading them. I highlighted the articles that are suitable to be used as readings assignments for our course and wrote a short general impression and important takeaways for each paper. In the end, I compiled valuable information that was proven by surveys or experiments and produced a summary for each topic that could serve as the literature foundation for our course.

We did not finish all topics in a month and will continue working on this project this summer and next term. Our next steps include producing a working syllabus with potential reading assignments, carrying out a survey study that examines Vassar students’ academic integrity, and serving as a teaching/research assistant for the future course.

Professor Dara Greenwood, Daria Lochoshvili ’22, Psychological Science Department

Professor Dara Greenwood is planning to write the textbook Social Psychology of Mass Media that will draw upon the disciplines of both psychology and media studies in order to explore the widespread psychological impact of mass media. This summer, Alice Aldoukhov and I researched the most recent literature about some of the topics that will be covered in the textbook.

Alice and I meeting over Zoom to discuss our findings and exchange some research tips

The first area I researched was advertising and persuasion. I explored the power of personalized advertising that targets consumers by using their personal information from their online profiles and browsing histories. Some studies showed that personalized ads are more effective than general ads because they enhance the personal relevance of the message for consumers, while other studies demonstrated that personalized ads may increase privacy concerns, thus leading to less persuasion. I also explored the importance of the source in persuasion and how different characteristics, such as expertise, trustworthiness, etc., affect the persuasiveness of the message. I researched social media influencers who are frequently hired by different brands to promote their products.

PsycInfo and Communication & Mass Media Complete were the two databases that I used most of the time for my research

Another topic that I delved into was the influence of celebrities on people’s body image. I found that Instagram is one of the most relevant platforms to this literature because many celebrities actively use Instagram to depict their private and professional lives. Moreover, Instagram is based solely on photo-sharing, so appearance plays a primary role on this platform. I also investigated the impact of fashion shows, specifically Victoria’s Secret, on women’s mental health and body image. At last, I found some factors, such as parasocial relationships with celebrities and parodies of thin-ideal images, that may alleviate the immense negative influence of the slender body ideal on people.

Adam Abadi ’22 and Professor Gisella Kagy (Economics)

This summer, I worked with Professor Kagy to examine the impact of the Bangladeshi garment industry on women’s empowerment. The goal was to determine whether proximity to job opportunities at garment factories can empower married Bangladeshi women. To measure empowerment, we used survey responses about household decision-making power, presence of domestic violence, and investments in children’s education.

My work primarily focused on constructing a geographic dataset of Bangladeshi garment factories and synthesizing factory locations with survey data. Throughout the project, I used a combination of Python, Stata, and QGIS for webscraping, data analysis, and geolocating.

After doing a brief literature review, I wrote a Python script that webscraped data from an online directory of over 4,000 Bangladeshi garment factories. I then used Stata to clean the data and visualize its key characteristics.

Next, I used the Google Maps Geocoding API to identify a likely pair of latitude/longitude coordinates for each factory, using factory addresses as inputs, and cleaned the resulting dataset in Stata. I repeated this process with the Google Maps Places API, which instead takes the factory names as inputs. To evaluate the precision and probable accuracy of coordinates derived from these two geolocation methods, I analyzed metadata from each set of coordinates. After that, I synthesized the coordinates from each method that were most likely to be accurate. 

Finally, I used QGIS to create another dataset that counted the number of employees and factories over time within a certain radius of each cluster of survey respondents. This will allow us to explore whether proximity to employment opportunities at garment factories affected respondents’ empowerment-related outcomes.

Dr. Pinar Batur, Martin Burstein ‘23, Robin Bleicher ‘23, Departments of Sociology and Environmental Studies

Our Ford Scholars Project consisted of three facets: designing a curriculum to teach high school students about the climate crisis, teaching our curriculum in a two-week intensive course, and conducting individual research projects to be incorporated into Dr. Batur’s syllabus for fall classes.

We spent the month of June designing a curriculum for high school students that integrated social science into a comprehensive understanding of the climate crisis. Our lecture-based classes laid the groundwork for theoretical concepts such as earth systems, ecosystem resilience, and environmental racism. These complex concepts were further developed by our six distinguished guest speakers, all of whom were Vassar professors or alumnae/i, who generously joined our class to add their valuable insights.

After taking part in our morning classes, the students engaged in corresponding afternoon activities led either by Vassar’s Exploring College program or the Environmental Cooperative. Each day concluded in a homework session during which we met with individual students to answer questions, give supplementary materials, or proof-read assignments. We also mentored three students each and made ourselves constantly available to them throughout the two-week intensive. The course culminated in two final projects for the students: a reflective narrative about their personal experience with the climate crisis, and a letter written to their city council members focused on climate mitigation and adaptation.

Meanwhile, throughout June and July, we have each researched individual projects for Dr. Batur’s materials for her fall class. Robin’s research focuses on First Nations Peoples and their response to the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter Movement that is sweeping the globe. Martin’s research focuses on the Navajo Nation and their fight against environmental racism and COVID-19. We are excited to share our research in Dr. Batur’s fall classes.

A photo taken during our curriculum planning sessions in June.

A student’s journal entry after using iNaturalist to identify a plant in their area.

A student’s Padlet entry, used as the slide for her digital narrative. She compiled resources that explain the problems with the retail industry and climate change.