In anticipation of the Olmsted bicentennial celebration in spring 2022, Professor Yvonne Elet and I are tracing the contributions of the preeminent Olmsted firm to the formation and development of the Vassar campus landscape. While Frederick Law Olmsted himself visited campus in 1868, the college periodically called upon the Olmsted firm for the next 65 years for their professional guidance in the ever expanding campus plan. As part of a larger project determining the collective Olmsted contributions to the Vassar Landscape over the years, this summer I embarked on a focused study of the work of Percival Gallagher, an Olmsted Brothers partner, who acted as consulting landscape architect from 1929-33.

Based on some 60 drawings from the Frederick Law Olmsted archive in Brookline MA, and extensive written materials collected from the Library of Congress and Vassar Special Collections, our study of Gallagher’s projects has required the collection, cataloguing, dating, cross referencing, and analyzing of this voluminous material. This research has not only indicated the effect Gallagher’s plans had on the rapidly developing terrain, but also has revealed the ways in which the still emerging professionalized field of landscape architecture related to a small somewhat insular institution such as Vassar. We are considering both where soil was moved, as well as how the bulldozer was directed.

As the inherent mutability of landscape makes it susceptible to perennial reimagination, a historical understanding of the campus situates our experience of present day landscape within a succession of visions. With this awareness, sites, paths, and topography all have greater meaning. Our work this summer, generously supported by the Ford Scholars program, will result in an exhibition on the Olmsted firm at Vassar, where much of Percy Gallagher’s work will be showcased. Caleb Mitchell.

I worked with Professor Frye and Aaron Mahr this summer to digitize census data from the 1950s and 60s tracking areas of employment in each county in the United States. When accessible this data will be valuable in understanding the development of America post WWII and Great depression. The data will allow us to track the geographic concentration of jobs across America, as well as a shift in the types of jobs. However, as of now this data is only in the form of scanned PDF pages from the physical books they were typewritten in. Hand entering this data is beyond time consuming and costly, so we worked on solutions to automate this process to be as hands off and accurate as possible.

An example of a page we were working to scan.

Using Optical Character Recognition software (OCR), we set out to scan about 4 or 5 years of data, with about 2500 pages per a year. We split the process into developing two different scans of each year, in order to compare later and create one master table. Aaron worked with the Tesseract package in R, while I worked on a process using ABBYY FineReader. Both of these steps posed their own challenges with some overlapping issues. For the ABBYY scan cleaning up places where the scan read poorly or the pages were faded was quite challenging and required some flexibility to design a process to fix or rescan those pages. Additionally we designed a process to use probabilistic matching link the scanned in SIC codes to a master list, making analysis and future table combining much easier.

Working on the project exposed me to the exciting push of research, data cleaning, and development. The process is always improving: working out automated or more linear approaches to previously laborious or confusing steps was very rewarding. Additionally, having the organization needed to plan a multi step process with many pieces was quite eye opening. While we only completed a scan of one year, the steps and processes in place will clear the way to the future scanning of later years.

Over the summer, I worked with Prof. Wayne Soon from the History Department to trace the history of medical care and insurance in the first decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Existing research on medical and workers’ histories of the PRC has generally downplayed the significance of labor insurance; our project, on the other hand, shows that labor insurance deeply affected both the lives of workers and their relationship with the state during this period in China. After its takeover in 1949, the new Communist government sought to provide universal healthcare for its citizens; however, the system it created to accomplish this goal faced numerous financial, political, and societal challenges over time. The goal of this project is to examine these challenges from the ground up.

Because I participated in this project remotely from China, I was able to access various Chinese libraries and archives in Beijing and Guangdong. During the first week of my research, I visited the National Library of China (NLC) and the Capital Library of China (CLC), where I found published volumes by government agencies and individual work units from the 1950s to 1970s on labor insurance. These include general policies that aimed to guide labor insurance work and reports on how labor insurance was implemented in certain work units.

(Special Collections of the Capital Library)

From these sources and drawing from Aiqun Hu’s work China’s Social Insurance in the Twentieth Century: A Global Historical Perspective, Prof. Soon and I discovered that the labor unions were key in administering the labor insurance program, which included providing a variety of medical, disability, and retirement benefits for workers in China. Thus, once back in Guangzhou, I searched for relevant materials at the Guangdong Provincial Archives (GPA). Following Hu’s argument that a process of decentralization within the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) beginning at around 1958 led to a similar decentralization in the administration of labor insurance, I found documents that shed light on how this decentralization gradually happened. Documents from the GPA also provide vivid details of the challenges individual labor unions faced when endeavoring to implement labor insurance on the ground. For instance, some municipal- and factory-level labor unions found hospitals unwilling to cooperate with them and comply with labor insurance policies when workers needed medical care. Another major challenge was the lack of expertise, especially in accounting, on the part of labor union personnel in charge of labor insurance work.

(The Guangdong Provincial Archives)

In sum, our project augmented existing research by highlighting the importance of labor insurance in shaping the relationship between the state and the workers in post-1949 China.

I spent my summer as a Ford Scholar educating high school students from the Poughkeepsie area on the Climate Crisis. Working alongside Professor Pinar Batur and fellow Ford Scholar Sasha Allison, I assisted in designing and teaching a curriculum for the ESCI Exploring Climate Summer Intensive course, mentored three students and began work on an ongoing literary analysis project.

A student’s art project focused on the impact of plastics on the Earth.

Throughout the month of June, Professor Batur, Sasha and I worked together to create a syllabus for our portion of the intensive that covered the basics of climate change and its global implications. The intensive itself ran for three weeks and was made up multiple sessions each day, typically morning and afternoon lecture sessions followed by a college workshop put on by the Exploring College program. We taught the morning sessions of the first and third weeks and were accompanied by the Environmental Cooperative’s Jen Rubbo and Vassar’s Sustainability Director Micah Kenfield who taught the remainder of the sessions. Our lectures covered essential topics surrounding the Climate Crisis such as the foundations of climate science, a history of anthropogenic climate change, the effects of fossil fuels on people and the environment, environmental racism, and climate policy, among others. Along with nightly readings related to our lectures, students completed an art project and a final research project based on material learned in class and presented both over Zoom.

A slide from one student’s final project on ocean acidification and coral reefs.

A slide from another student’s final project on environmental racism.

Outside of designing and teaching the curriculum, I also had the opportunity to mentor three students throughout the intensive and begin analysis work on Buket Uzuner’s series The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kaman. Creating and teaching this course served as an excellent learning opportunity for me and illuminated the power of education in creating change.

The research for our “Resilience Stories” project began with an investigation into presenting psychological information with a focus on psychological resilience and positive emotions. Me and my partner, Formosa Huang, began listening to podcasts and watching webinars from noted psychologists, including and especially Dr. Laurie Santos, creator of Yale’s most popular undergraduate course: The Science of Wellbeing. 

After seeing and hearing different ways of presenting information, we decided an interview format was most effective in terms of being engaging and fun to listen to. And after conducting a few practice interviews, we also decided we wanted to include aspects of practical resilience, or little habits and tricks we all can do to boost positive emotions and increase our resilience. Our idea culminated in a podcast that was also recorded on video, and would primarily contain an interview, either with someone who had a specific “resilience story” or someone who did not. Our goal was to find the everyday stories of resilience that we all have, whether we know it or not, and peel back the curtain as to the psychology and positive emotions being knowingly or unknowingly utilized by the interviewee. 

The final format for the podcast being presented is a short interview followed by a brief but deep dive into some of the research that has been done regarding the psychological benefits of the emotions being discussed in the podcast. In our sample interview with Formosa’s friend Bridget, the primary positive emotion is social connection and we look at research from social psychologist Dr. Nicholas Epley.

Over the summer of 2021, I worked with Professor Ben Ho on a game designed to help people recycle better. The project was motivated by the fact that at Vassar, half of the items in the recycling bin are thrown away due to contamination. In collaboration with Micah Kenfield, the director of sustainability at Vassar, we laid out specific lessons we would like to teach through the game, which boiled down to two main categories — recycling knowledge and environmental consciousness. We then found inspiration in the platform game Doodle Jump, which offered us a template that ensured player engagement. Over the course of developing the game, we encountered a variety of challenges, from technical issues in programming to design barriers that prevented us to get our message across. Supported by Professor Ho’s multidisciplinary expertise, we were able to publish the game on a web host https://simmer.io/@DollarZhu/the-recycling-game. On the Economic research side, we did a literature review of prominent and relevant literature on video games and learning, and we made a series of hypothesis for the game to test. We will collect data during Freshmen Orientation in August and use them to complete the experiment.

My experience this summer was deeply rewarding. Thanks to the mentorship of Professor Ho, I learned an array of useful skills — programming, designing an experiment, making video games for learning. Looking ahead, the experience also set me on a track to do more research on games and behavior.

This summer, I worked with Professor Pinar Batur and fellow Ford Scholar Stella Schram on designing and teaching a class about climate change for high schoolers in the Poughkeepsie area. Our class was one part of the larger 3-week Exploring College Summer Intensive (ECSI) program, and we collaborated with the Vassar Environmental Cooperative, the Office of Sustainability, and the Exploring College program to assemble the course. Stella and I served in the role of both teacher and mentor, facilitating in conducting the class and advising the students on their work outside of class time.

Professor Batur, Stella and I began our course planning in early June, curating a syllabus primarily focused on the social systems that have enabled and expedited anthropogenic climate change. As the class progressed, we tailored our syllabus to account for specific areas of student interest and changes in the pacing of the course. We also  collaborated with the other teachers in the program to create a coherent course schedule that was conducive to the students’ learning. While Stella and I were only teaching a total of seven sessions throughout the program, we attended each session of the course as mentors to ensure that the students were adequately supported and that we all shared the same baseline knowledge.

In addition to teaching, each of the mentors (Stella, Alexandra, Elizabeth, Nehal, and myself) were responsible for helping the students prepare a final project on a topic related to climate change at the end of the three weeks. The students chose many different approaches and topics, and some of their work is attached below. Overall, we were highly impressed with all the work the students produced and the intellectual growth they demonstrated over the course of our short program.

An image from a student’s photography project on the abundance of plastic pollution in everyday life.

A student’s waste audit project in which they logged the amount and type of waste that was discarded in their home over a 24-hour period.

A slide from a student’s final project on ocean acidification and its impact on marine ecosystems.

This summer, I worked with Gretchen Lieb researching the lives of three female Vassar professors and their activism. These professors, Laura J. Wylie, Lucy M. Salmon, and Gertrude Buck, were jumping off points to learn more about female activism in the post-suffrage era. At the end of the project, we created an interactive timeline of selected primary sources that will be available for the entire Vassar community to read.

A screenshot of the front page of the timeline.

To achieve this goal, we looked through Vassar’s records for more leads. We explored the archives and pulled correspondence, newspaper clippings, and other documents related to our subjects.

I was impressed with how interconnected the lives of our subjects were. Vassar holds a lot of correspondence from and among these women. Reading these documents allowed us to discover what key events and terminologies would be helpful for students hoping to research post-suffrage women’s activism. Additionally, this research helped us add a fourth “life” to our research: Helen Lockwood, for whom the 1976 addition of the library is named.

I loved all of the research connections we made. In the spirit of our collaborative women, Gretchen and I engaged with researchers and librarians not only in and around the Hudson Valley, but also at other seven-sister colleges. We worked closely with librarians at the Adriance Public Library in Poughkeepsie, and scanned documents from their archives. 

From left to right: Shannon Butler (Adriance), Allie Verdesca (VC ’22), Kira Thompson (Adriance), and Gretchen Lieb (Vassar Library).

This project allowed me to take a deeper look at a subject that I am passionate about: women’s social movements. Researching these women gave me a newfound respect for the strengths and weaknesses of the women’s movement. Our database is a living document that can be expanded as more documents are digitized. I am glad I contributed to the fascinating scholarship written by Vassar women, and could make it more accessible.