Nadim Majumder ’21, Economics & Computer Science

Professor Esteban Argudo, Economics Department

This summer, I worked with Professor Argudo and Sarra Yekta ‘21 on the topic of using peer-to-peer lending data to study monetary policy transmission. The main questions we sought to answer were:

• What effect does monetary policy surprises have on loans?
• How are interest rates decided? What are the most relevant factors in its calculation?
• Is it possible to gain an estimation for both the marginal propensity to lend (MPL) and borrow (MPB)?

The dataset we used was sourced from Lending Club, a peer-to-peer lending platform for small loans (<$40,000). Lending Club is atypical among loan-issuing institutions in that it does not directly fund the loans, instead it posts the requests on its site, where investors (individuals, not corporations) can decide to either partially or fully fund the loan. The dataset we collected was very rich, containing over 2.2 million observations (loans) with 147 variables (FICO scores, annual income, debt-to-income ratio) listed for each. However, crucially they were missing the origination dates for each of these loans. 

I began the project by scraping the individual loan listings on the Lending Club website to retrieve the origination dates which would be crucial in answering our first question. From that point forward however, I focused primarily on the second and third questions, allowing my co-worker Sarra to tackle the first. In exploring the data, I discovered that, in 66% of cases, the interest rates for the loans mapped one-to-one to a unique combination of the loan issuance date (MM-YYYY format) and loan grade (ranging from A to G, in increasing order of default likelihood). I then made use of a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to further explore this relationship. In essence, the RDD attempts to identify two groups, one with a treatment effect applied after a certain cutoff point, the other without. By examining the individuals around the cutoff point, it would be possible to determine how similar they are to one another, and so identify reasons for the discontinuity in the interest rates e.g. if two such individuals are the same across all variables except their annual incomes, and they have differing interest rates, then that points to the annual income being the determining factor. I managed to identify 122 such discontinuities through visual inspection, a few pictured below. 

Unfortunately, we then realized that due to the nature of the loan grades (in that they are discrete values), all of the points above technically qualified as discontinuities. As a result, we decided to pivot, instead grouping individuals based on their interest rates, and then making comparisons between these groups. Remarkably, we found that they were similar in most respects – annual income, debt-to-income ratio, revolving utilization when the loan amounts were similar. We were also able to calculate values for the marginal propensity to lend for some of these groups (the change in loan amount given a change in the interest rate). However, about 42.7% of these were negative meaning that they are likely a grouping of both the marginal propensity to lend and borrow.

Further work on this project would possibly involve isolating the MPL and MPB and further investigating the interest rate groupings.

I am very excited to be working with Professor Christine Howlett on this project! Here is a link to the proposed project. https://ford.vassar.edu/projects/2019/musi-howlett.html Here is the link to the summer choral festival that we will be working with. http://www.cappellafestiva.org/dbpage.php?pg=summer_festival

Ford Scholar report summer 2019 

This summer I had the honor of working under the Ford Scholar program with professor Christine Howlett. Our original project was Choral music–research, program planning, and teaching. However, over the course of the summer, my work and research expanded to a variety of topics. At the beginning of our program, we focused on planning the Cappella Festiva Summer Choral Festival. Unfortunately, due to a lack of enrolment, the festival had to be canceled. Howlett and I then began to search for the reason that very few people registered their children for the summer festival. We also worked to develop a new format for the program which hopefully will appeal to parents, teachers, and children for summer 2020. While it was very disappointing to have to cancel the summer festival, I believe I learned a lot from the experience and I am excited about the future of the festival.

In addition to working on the Summer Choral Festival project, I helped Howlett and music department faculty Eduardo Navega begin planning a summer program for both choral and orchestral conducting to be hosted at Vassar College. This program will hopefully take place in the summer of 2020. We hope to attract undergraduate, graduate, and budding professional students from all over the country to come and learn from our faculty and distinguished guests. I am very thankful for this opportunity and I look forward to the success of the programs. 

Alexandria Shaw, Film and Africana Studies, Class of 2021

Professor Mia Mask, Professor of Film on the Mary Riepma Ross ’32 Chair

This summer, I worked with Professor Mia Mask on analyzing changes in African American representations in popular culture from the 1830s-present day. Our primary focus was on the evolution of Black representation in television from its inception until today. Together we studied and discussed the works of Robin Means Coleman, Bambi Haggins, Yuval Taylor, Christine Acham, Donald Bogle, Tommy Lott, and numerous other scholars who have studied the range of Black performances and stereotypes in American culture (i.e., comedy sketch shows, sitcoms, and dramas). 

An exhibit at the Schomburg Center in July 2019.

We traveled to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem to study one of the most under-acknowledged and under-analyzed sections of media, Black documentary television. Here, at the Schomburg’s Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division, we viewed programs such as Black Journal, SOUL!, and Another Voice.  All of these programs were Black produced and hosted shows narrating the social and political issues facing Black America in the late 1960s and 70s. 

Alexandria taking notes on William Greaves’ Still a Brother in the Moving Image and Recording Sound Division. 

Following our readings and visits to the Schomburg, we compiled our notes of Black television into eight eras: 

→ The Minstrel Era (1830-Mid 1900s)

→ The Era of the Servile and Inept (1950s)

→ The Era of White Normalcy (Mid 1950s – Late 1960s)

→ Uplift: The Black Documentary Television Era (Mid 1960s-1970s)

→ The Assimilationist Era (Mid 1960s-1970s)

→ Family Values (Early 1970s-Late 1990s)

→ The Double-Voiced Era (1990s -2010s)

→ Elliptical Blackness (2000s – Present Day) 

Each of these eras is significant in understanding how Blackness, femininity, and sexuality are explored on screens at home. Through every decade, more image-makers working for production studios are diversifying and telling stories that relate to a larger range of the Black experience. We have just begun to evaluate the harmful and demeaning stereotypes embedded within television and have noted how these images have permeated modern day entertainment. With much room for improvement in the entertainment industry, the steps being taken by producers, directors, and screenwriters of color suggests a more promising future for television.

Alexandria looking at an album display in the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division.

This summer, I worked with Professor Zachary Cofran on a virtual reality anthropology learning environment using Unity, a cross-platform game engine. Working on the first version of the lab created by Kamile Lukosiute, Adam Van Arsdale, and Jordan Tynes at Wellesey College in 2017, I was given the task of improving upon the Bio-Anthropology lab aimed to help students learn more about bones, fossils, and their features. By creating a virtual space to observe and interact with these fossils, students will look at fossils without worry of damaging them and professors will not have to wait the hours (and sometimes days) it takes to print viable 3D models of said fossils.

User examining a fossil for placement in the timeline.

In the original lab, users could enlarge fossils to note their characteristics with ease, teleport throughout the main room, pick up and move bones, and select some bones and fossils from a selection menu. With our additions, users have a larger array of fossils to choose from, such as Australopithecus and Neandertal specimens. They can also find information about the bone by toggling an information box, which appears next to the selected bone and displays the bone ID, element, geological age, site of discovery location, and similar specimens. The pedagogical centerpiece of the VR lab is a timeline activity, in which students will have to use reference fossils to identify and determine where other fossils belong in a timeline.

Student testing the virtual reality timeline activity.

This activity encourages students to learn more about the anatomy of certain species and how these evolutionary trends led to modern humans. Ideally, the bone lab will serve as a supplementary tool for students taking the Human Origins course or for those who wish to study fossils but have no direct access to them. With projects like this, the capabilities of VR are shown, and with it new ways to educate students.

This summer, I worked with Professor Brigham on a project that will ultimately address Bill Clinton’s foreign policy and the forces that shaped his ideologies and political persona. For my research, this first meant understanding the demographic changes affecting the country as the baby boomer generation came of age. I poured over U.S. Vital Statistics and Census Reports, tracking population demographics, educational levels, unemployment rates, and ethnic breakdowns between 1944 and 1962. I compared national figures to Little Rock, Arkansas, North Adams, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut, and had remarkable and helpful exchanges with other scholars across the country.

I then moved on to Clinton himself, and looked into his early life in Hot Springs, AK, and into how child welfare and foster care programs operated in the 1950s. 

The Vietnam War escalated as Clinton was in college. When he lost his student deferment in 1968, Clinton was heavily at risk of induction, an experience that deeply influenced the rest of his political outlook. I collected everything Clinton wrote about his father, his childhood, and the Vietnam draft in his 2004 memoir, and compared it to the same information turned up by biographer David Maraniss in 1994. To track the complicated and slippery ways that Clinton escaped the draft by the skin of his teeth, I made a detailed timeline of his draft experiences and a chart to keep track of the sources available to back up what Clinton claims happened and what Maraniss discovered. 

My work culminated with the question “How did the Vietnam draft really work?” I read every book about it in the Vassar Library, plus a few more ordered through ILL. Fascinated and appalled, I produced a thesis-length report on the inconsistent and sometimes shocking ways that the draft operated for men navigating Selective Service and induction both before and after the 1969 draft lottery reforms.

Megan Wang ’20, Professor Kirsten Wesselhoeft

This summer, I had the opportunity of working with Professor Wesselhoeft on her project called Muslims of the Present. While mainstream scholarship on Islam in France often is framed in terms of secularism, French identity, and logics of integration, Professor Wesselhoeft’s research innovatively focuses on the robust cultures of social critique and discord within the French Muslim community.

My research consisted of exploring the wide range of French social discourse on Islam. I analyzed a range of primary source materials like speeches from prominent leaders within the Muslim community in France, organizational mission statements, news articles about controversies surrounding women’s covering, as well as scholarly work from both American and French academics. I also transcribed French from audio recordings and important conferences that touched upon relevant issues.

In addition to researching Muslim communities in France, I helped Professor Wesselhoeft with educational materials for two of her courses next fall. For an Introductory Religion course, I developed a syllabus unit on Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism. Together, we interrogated pedagogical questions like why ideologies of bias should be studied in the first place. Similarly, for an Introductory Women’s Studies course, I created a website to showcase my French to English translations of Maya-Ines Touam’s photography series surrounding Muslim women’s dress. It is my hope that from these translations, students grasp the nuance the debate surrounding muslim women’s dress beyond the concepts of choice and scrutiny.

Throughout this project, I was exposed to a wealth of new information about Islam in France as well as the nuance religion carries in relation to public and private life, assimilationist rhetoric, gender dynamics, and politics overall. I am grateful to have been able to work closely with Professor Wesselhoeft, hone my research and critical thinking abilities, as well as utilize my French language skills.

The purpose of this project was to develop a research background for a Poughkeepsie non-profit that is working on providing High-Quality Early Childhood Education (HQECE) to the children and families of the community.

In recent decades, policymakers have turned to early care and education to counter poverty’s negative impact on children ages 0-5. Nevertheless, families and early care centers struggle to find enough resources to access and provide HQECE. The Day One Early Learning Community was recently launched to tackle these challenges in the City of Poughkeepsie.

With this ambitious goal in mind, Professor Riess and I launched into an evaluation of the current state of early childhood education (ECE) in the United States, focusing on three main areas: practice, policy, and long-term results. Our starting point was the notion that there are three perspectives, each with specific concerns, involved in ECE: teachers, who rely on proper compensation and work environments; parents, who rely on options that are both, high-quality and affordable; and children, who rely on stimulating interactions.

Given ECE’s current set-up as a heavily privatized market with little public investment, it is challenging to meet the demands of these three perspectives, leading scholars to argue in favor of increasing public funding for HQECE. However, considering that accomplishing this shift will take a considerable amount of time, we continued to focus on the impact of current policies and practices on performance. With this, our research dealt with the topics of teacher compensation, public investment and scaled-up programs, model programs, and economic returns.

Our final products are a set of three databases focused on literature, visuals, and facts, and a series of executive summaries. Both attempt to synthesize the available knowledge on HQECE and hence serve as a resource for Day One’s community outreach.

Leah Cates, Women’s Studies Major, Creative Writing Minor, Class of 2020
Tom Ellman, Associate Professor of Computer Science

As a Caucasian student at a prestigious college entrusted to work with six children of color from an under-resourced part of Poughkeepsie, I approached this project wary of my potential to inadvertently cause harm. Although I genuinely enjoyed working with the bright children and dedicated staff, my research and reflection on community-engaged learning (CEL) deepened my understanding of its dangers.

The project included three components:

–Barrett Kids Program (BKP) Volunteering: BKP is an art and homework club for 6-10-year-olds, held at the Barrett Art Center (BAC). At BKP, I built close relationships with the children, particularly six-year-old Emma, with whom I read, completed homework and played. I kept a journal of my time with Emma, and wrote analyses of Emma and her sister, Mia’s, behavior and development for their mother.*  

Reading a book with Emma at Adriance Library

–Video-Game: We used Scratch to create two original video games for the kids, whose artwork and collaboration were instrumental in game development. The project encouraged the kids to consider their lives and art in a unique light. On day 1, the kids first played The Barrett Kids Art Supply Quest, which features the kids’ houses, self-portraits and photos of BK staff. Next, they generated ideas and artwork for game 2. I wrote dialogue for and coded game 2, titled Anna & Frida Shop (Anna is the BKP director; Frida is her daughter), which the kids played the following week. The game showcases a narrative developed by the kids, with six levels, each featuring a different child’s work. 

Generating ideas for “Anna & Frida Shop” at BAC

Playing “The Barrett Kids Art Supply Quest” with Mia

–Research & Writing: Throughout the summer, I explored the inherently problematic nature of CEL. My research and reflection culminated in a 15-page essay combining literature with lived experience, as well as a 15-page annotated bibliography. The former discusses CEL’s flaws, including its inability to address structural oppression and tendency to promote the “savior-industrial complex.” Despite my attempts to contribute value to the community, my experience was fraught with CEL pitfalls, including exploitation (e.g., photographs for this write-up), and emotional harm, as Emma became upset when we separated at the program’s end. 

In the essay, I ask whether resources spent on non-profits can be put to greater use. Do programs like BK provide cover for government inaction? Do privileged learners/workers alienate populations “served”? Perhaps. Nevertheless, students cannot hide behind intellectual arguments. Of course we didn’t achieve structural change. But the Barrett kids’ creativity and confidence blossomed. 

*Emma and Mia are aliases to protect the children’s identities.

This summer, I worked with Professor Ben Ho in the economics department to revise his book, Trustonomics, which explains how trust has developed and contributed to economic growth over time. The book is an important contribution to the field because it calls on economists to consider the importance of centering relationships between individuals in economic analysis as opposed to focusing on the traditional rational actor.

We constructed a narrative grounded in the concept of Dunbar’s number, a metric discovered by anthropologist Robin Dunbar that measures the average size of a human network, which he estimates to be about 150 people. We then explain how a person’s “trust number,” or the size of their personal network, has grown over time as a result of the development of bodies like religion, governments, and financial institutions which help us determine who we can and can not trust and allow increasingly large numbers of people to work together. Toward the end of the book, we grapple with recent data that indicates an erosion of institutional trust over the past several decades. With the advent of the internet, we  gained access to a significant volume of information. Social media has encouraged the proliferation of fake news and false information and has changed the way we interact with each other, affecting who we form relationships with and who we decide to trust. Ultimately, we believe that current declining levels of trust are symptomatic of an adjustment to new technologies and methods of communication and that institutional structures that developed and evolved over thousands of years will support and help maintain important relationships as we adjust to new ways of communicating and interacting with each other.

This summer, I worked with Professor Dozier on recreating a new introductory Latin curriculum. Traditionally students learn Latin by rote memorization of noun charts and verb forms. The high focus on memorization makes Latin inaccessible to many different students, which is why this class is designed to focus on translation rather than memorization; this shift allows students to jumpstart on the actual purpose of learning Latin, which is translating Latin texts. 

We used Ritchie’s Fabulae Faciles with a commentary by Geoffrey Steadman as the main text for this class. This Latin textbook contains increasingly difficult stories about different mythological heroes. Since the book was designed for intermediate Latin students, we systematically reworked the first twelves stories about Perseus for introductory Latin students to begin translating on their first day of class. After the initial reworked version, we produced a version of medium difficulty, which would require more grammatical knowledge of students. Finally, the last version of the text would be the original version of the Fabulae. This focus on translation allows students to gain the skills necessary to translate Latin text rather than harnessing the skills to reproduce grammatical structures. 

Perseus saves Andromeda from a sea serpent.

We decided to enhance the class further by researching the Latin language itself. We read books concerning the history of the language such as Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler. Vox Latina gave us insight into how modern people know the pronunciation of the language. We also explored James Lang’s Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning in order to integrate innovative pedagogical methods into the class.

By stepping away from the traditional methods of teaching an introductory Latin class, the goal of this new curriculum is to not only enhance students’ knowledge of Latin in a more accessible and translation-based manner, but for them to also have a broader knowledge of the history of the language itself.