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. 

Alongside Professor Pearlman and Professor Cynthia Bansak (of St. Lawrence University), I spent the summer researching US immigration policy and its economic effects. The Secure Communities program, the focus of our study, ran from 2008-2014 and contributed to a significant rise in deportations by sharing fingerprint data taken upon an individual’s arrest with U.S.’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As most of the deportations were men, we were interested in the rippling effects of the policy on immigrant networks that remain in the US—namely, the labor market patterns of foreign-born women. 

In order to fully understand the scope of the topic, I conducted a literature review of the policy, learning about its history, roll out, and economic and social implications. In the process, I became aware of other immigration policies, such as 287(g) Agreements, that preceded the Secure Communities program. I analyzed a range of literature, from legal documents to ethnographic surveys, to understand these programs’ similarities, differences, and potential correlation. To visualize the extent of these policies, I created maps that documented the geographic dispersions of the policies at the US county level. 

Counties with Active 287g Agreements at any point from 2005-2014. Data retrieved from Madeline Zavodny’s research.

Aggregate Number of Removals under Secure Communities. Data retrieved from TRAC Syracuse.

In addition, we analyzed data on the labor market patterns of foreign-born women from 2005-2016, aiming to understand if there were any observable changes before estimating how much of this change could be attributed to the Secure Communities program. 

Working with Professor Pearlman has given me a greater sense of and appreciation for the research process. We closely observed the disproportionate ways immigration policies affect individuals from different countries of origin, as well as residing in different US locations. The combination of qualitative and quantitative research involved in this process provided a multifaceted understanding of our topic, as immigration policy plays out on social, economic, and personal dimensions. 

Dhriti Swarup ’23 and Professor Gisella Kagy

This summer I worked with Professor Kagy to better understand gender profit gaps with a focus on low income countries by synthesizing existing research in entrepreneurship and enterprise performance. We wanted to understand the factors affecting differences in firm outcomes (profits, sales etc.) by gender of the firm owner. The goal of this 3 year long project is to explore the gender profitability gap in all countries, improve understanding of the global business and policy environment for women-owned enterprises, and increase knowledge of facts, trends, and predictors of gender profit gap at the country and global level.

I was working with a team of Research Assistants and Postdocs to conduct country level analysis in Stata using publicly available datasets such as the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES), the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). I began by looking at the WBES for India across 2002, 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2014. The process involved finding the datasets and questionnaires used by the World Bank, keeping and dropping variables as per requirement in the cleaned datasets, and finally creating new variables to prepare the dataset, making it ready for analysis. The same was done for Vietnam across 2009 and 2015. The prepared datasets gave information about characteristics such as firm size, industry sector, legal status, firm ownership, and obstacles faced by the firms.

Vietnam WBES Questionnaire 2009

Professor Kagy and Professor Hardy (from NYU) will use this data along with that of other countries to draw conclusions and present a hypothesis. The end goal is to direct new enquiries productively towards key potential barriers for Women Owned Enterprises and find ways to close the information gap along with the gender profit gaps.

In 2018, Professor Means received a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences program to collect data on political representation in state courts. A substantial body of literature has examined the importance of racial, gender, and class diversity among legislators, police officers, attorneys, doctors, and even jurors. Yet very little scholarship has focused on the level and importance of diversity among state court judges. Our study aims to advance our understanding of the lives and identities of state court judges, as well as their views on topics related to judging, justice, and court administration (more information can be found on our website). We expect our findings to yield a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding of representation in state courts that will enable a clearer articulation of the pathways judges take to the bench, as well as the extent to which the courts are being transformed by efforts to diversify. Our project strives to highlight the diversity already found on state courts, and suggest how and why that diversity is critical to fulfilling the democratic project. While most studies of the judicial system focus on the federal court, we wanted to specifically focus on the state courts as they have a tremendous impact in our society. For a majority of people, if they go to court they will be appearing before one of our nation’s approximately 30,000 state court judges.

We began this summer by continuing our effort to survey judges by sending out approximately 2,000 letters inviting judges to answer our survey. So far, 313 White judges have responded to the survey. We also have roughly 300 Black judges who have completed our survey. We hope to utilize this unique survey data in our analysis of state court judges and present them to classes in the spring.  

The survey letters we sent out and the survey itself

After we finished sending out surveys we began recruiting judges to interview. This proved challenging as it was difficult to find contact information for judges. We had some contact information from judge’s who had previously expressed interest in being interviewed from our survey but we needed to find more. We then searched through court websites across the country to find more judges to contact. In the end we scheduled over 100 interviews with judges from 33 different states. 

Joseph Kelly interviewing a judge from Missouri

Once we had interviews scheduled we had to write the interview questionnaire. We have previously interviewed judges so we just had to update our previous questionnaire. We asked judges questions about their upbringings, childhood and young adult life experiences, pre-bench lives, identities, judgeships, judicial behavior, perspectives, and opinions.

The first page of our interview questionnaire

Our experience with this study has highlighted the importance of diversity in the state court system. A lot of the judges we spoke to talked about how important it is for the demographics of the judiciary to reflect the demographics of the community it is in; people should feel they are represented in the court system. While diversity is important to the court system, it cannot be wholly relied upon to solve all of the problems of the criminal justice system. Judges expressed frustrations with the nature of our prison system, which focuses more on punitive measures rather than rehabilitation, judicial selection methods that are too partisan, and lack of funding to establish diversionary programs. However, a diverse judiciary with diverse experiences will be more able to understand people’s experiences and treat them fairly across the board. These interviews have given us a deeper understanding and a more nuanced view of the state court system. 

Next year we plan on doing a deeper analysis of all the data we’ve collected from our surveys and interviews. We also plan on co authoring several papers drawing upon that data. We will present our data in Professor Means’s “Race and Gender in Judicial Politics” and “Introduction to American Politics” classes and we are planning to attend a political science conference to present on our work as well.

Ananya Chaudhuri ’23 and Prof. Gisella Kagy

Over this summer I worked with Prof. Gisella Kagy in the Economics department, studying Gender Profit Gaps- trying to understand the reasons why women-owned firms have smaller outcomes. While the Ford project is part of a larger, global effort to understand and synthesize existing information about the gender profit gap, my work was about global data analysis.  

An essential part of the project is understanding what the global business and policy environment is for women-owned enterprises (WOE) to contextualize individual country-level data. I started this process by analyzing and manipulating large global datasets like the World Bank Business and Law (WBL) survey and UCLA Gender Data. The datasets ask questions that assess the constraints that working women face in different countries like if they get maternity leave, if they can breastfeed at work, if they can travel outside the country, and so on. Using the program Stata, I changed the datasets to the desired form- reshaping and merging the datasets, creating and dropping variables, etc. Since the datasets were originally in different formats, having them in a form where they could be combined and analyzed was important.

I then converted the data into binaries and did calculations to create indices- numbers that quantified the barriers in a country. Using these values, I was able to create Chloropleth maps through Python. They are color-coded maps (the darker the color the higher the barriers) that show the global policy environment for specific years. The slider map can also show how barriers have changed from 1971 to 2020 if you slide the scale down. This allows us to represent our findings visually and check how trends have changed over time.

I also edited the project website which will, hopefully, become a resource for anyone researching gender profit gaps!

This summer I worked with Professor Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Michael Aronna on the Oviedo Project. Professor Paravisini-Gebert and Aronna founded the project with the goal of translating the complete text of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia General de las Indias. It is an enormous task and has never been done before! The work consists of four volumes each of which has multiple books which in can have upwards of forty chapters each of varying lengths.

One of my favorite images found at the JCB Library.

My role in the project was to work with another research assistant, Kendal Simmons a senior at Vassar and last years’ Ford Scholar for the Oviedo Project, on posting chapters to the official Oviedo Project website. Posting chapters consisted of multiple steps, of which my favorite was finding images to post along with the chapters. The John Carter Brown Online Luna Library was foreign to me at the beginning of the project but sure enough became my best friend. In order to find the perfect picture for each chapter I would read it through and then go on a hunt through the JCB library for the fitting image. The best part wasn’t finding the right image but rather all of the images I would come by before finding the one I deemed appropriate.

Other than posting chapters I also worked on assuring the uniformity of the manuscript in reference to certain words in Spanish. This was high on the task list because as new exciting opportunities arise for the project the cleanliness and professionalism of the work is increasingly important.

One of my posts.

Overall, I had a wonderful summer working on this project. The entire editing team was a joy to work with. Our meetings were never short on ingenuity, creativity, and laughter.