More than 500 students to present at Undergraduate Symposium

With a larger sampling from the humanities combined with the traditional caliber of scientific research, the 400 or so projects at the 12th annual Undergraduate Symposium have little in common but the gifted students behind them.

The symposium is free and open to the public, and will take place Thursday, April 15 in the Memorial Union.

More than 500 students, a significant increase from previous years, will present class or independent projects in the form of a poster, display, oral presentation or performance.

“Presenting at the Undergraduate Symposium gives students a chance to practice how to talk about their work to a general audience, in addition to speaking in more technical terms to their professional peers and mentors,” says Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Aaron Brower. “Being able to talk to a range of audiences about your work is a crucial set of skills students need these days.”

The symposium hit on a largely untapped resource this year-the arts and humanities. Gallery space will be provided for 10 students in the Art Department to hang their framed drawings, paintings and photography.

Brower is pleased to see a number of other projects in the humanities as well.

Associate professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Adam Kern encouraged a few students from both his “Comic Imagination” and “Manga Studies” classes to submit their final papers from fall semester to the symposium.

“This kind of symposium is a really wonderful way of getting the students to share their papers with people outside of the class, so it gives them the good experience of trying to rethink their papers in terms of how would people who haven’t taken the course would find this material,” Kern says.

Rachel Wroblewski wrote her final paper for the “Comic Imagination” course on how the Japanese and Americans used humor and propaganda in World War II to dehumanize the enemy.

The most fascinating aspect of her research, she says, is how both countries used similar humor to create propaganda. In her oral presentation, she will also explain that many of the same depictions are used in propaganda and humor today.

“It’s history that helps to shape what we see today,” Wroblewski says. “The techniques that are used in the past aren’t forgotten. It’s stuff that keeps reappearing.

Though she’s a genetics major, Wroblewski’s excited for the opportunity to present a humanities based project in the symposium.

“[The humanities] is about human nature, our relationship with others and why we do the things we do,” she says. “I think that can be just as important as finding cures for diseases and that sort of thing.”

Design Studies professor Roberto Rengel, who required his entire Design Studies class to submit projects, is also excited to expand the humanities’ presence at the symposium.

“What’s really neat about the humanities is where in scientific research you take your magnifying glass and you really zoom in, for humanities, you tend to try to understand problems more holistically,” he says.

Rengel is an example of another emerging trend at the symposium.

“We’ve always encouraged faculty and instructors to bring the ‘real world’ into their classrooms-and vice versa,” says assistant vice provost Laurie Mayberry. “This is just what presenting at the Undergraduate Symposium does

The 34 juniors and seniors in Rengel’s upper level Interior Design course will present nine projects in small groups.

Throughout the course of the semester, Rengel’s students have been working on comprehensive design plans that simulate the work of real professionals in the field.

The groups will be presenting a research project they did as part of their larger projects at the symposium.

Design Studies majors Christine Pearson and Anna Gimmer worked with their group to study natural daylighting in office designs.

“Obviously, right now with the whole sustainability and environmental issues that are going on, a lot of people want to take advantage of daylight,” Gimmer says. “But a lot of people don’t understand there’re better orientations to take advantage of sunlight.”

On their poster, the group notes that the U.S. Department of Energy estimates the global lighting bill at around $230 billion a year.

“A lot of people kind of view design, especially interior design, as making things look pretty,” Pearson says. “[Our research] really shows how much our designs can make a difference.”

In addition to humanities projects, the symposium will welcome a surge of undergraduates doing research with faculty in the Medical School.

Pediatrics assistant professor Megan Moreno works with undergraduates in her lab on researching social media and health, specifically how students discuss health on Facebook. Several of them will present their research at the symposium.

“For those of us who do research as part of our career, part of how we get better and how we learn to be better researchers and ask better questions is to bring our results into the academic community and get feedback,” Moreno says. “I think the Undergraduate Symposium allows them that exact same experience.”

Katie Egan, a junior in the nursing program, works in the lab and will present at the symposium for the second time under Moreno’s guidance.

Last year, Egan presented the results from her independent study on how UW–Madison students express stress on Facebook.

At the 2010 symposium, she will present a poster and oral presentation on how UW–Madison students display drinking habits on Facebook.

She started her research on alcohol last summer when she was awarded a grant from the School of Medicine and Public Health to fund her research.

“Facebook is something that I’m interested in, and I think really impacts my life and all the lives of my peers,” Egan says. “There are so many things that are so applicable to us, like possible interventions using Facebook and how it can be used in health care.”