Today is the first day of classes and we’re so excited that you’re here! There’s going to be a lot going on your first week at GW, but don’t miss the Honors Community Welcome dinner, exclusively for incoming Honors first-year students, on Tuesday, August 28th from 5-7 PM in the Marvin Center Continental Ballroom on the third floor of the Marvin Center. Can’t make for the whole event? No problem! Come late, leave early, just swing by when you can!
This is going to be a super fun, no-pressure way to get to know your new peers, meet some staff and faculty, and grub on some free dinner! We can’t wait to assimilate – I mean welcome – you to the Honors Program!
After dinner, join the peer advisors and Alex and Natalie (the West Hall Honors RAs) as they head to the National Mall for a monument walk! How’s that for an #onlyatGW moment?
Author: GW Honors
LASERS [SURE Stories]
The following blog post was written by UHPer and SURE Award winner Jackie Dyer.
This summer I was able to travel to San Diego, California to present my research at the national 66th American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) Conference. With funding from the UHP Sigelman Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Award, I presented a poster titled “Complementary Features of Laser Desorption Ionization from Silicon Nanopost Arrays and MALDI for Mass Spectrometry Imaging.” This poster represented the culmination of a year of research in the Vertes Research Group, during which Jarod Fincher, a graduate student, and I focused on assessing laser desorption ionization (LDI) from silicon nanopost arrays (NAPA) as an emerging mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) technique capable of enhanced imaging of particular lipid classes. Our work looks to improve the field of MSI, and has potential impact in clinical research and the pharmaceutical industry.
Being able to present this work at a national conference was a fantastic experience. Presenting at ASMS was an opportunity to share our impactful findings with people throughout the mass spectrometry community, and to gain valuable new perspectives and feedback on our experiments. Though ASMS is most essentially a means of communicating our findings to the scientific community, I also had the chance to establish potential future collaborations. Ultimately, the SURE Award’s contribution to my travel funding made it possible for me to spend a full week in San Diego exchanging ideas, presenting my work, and networking (and going to the beach).
If you’re interested in research, make sure to reach out to professors, or even graduate students, about potential projects. Undergraduate research is a great opportunity to bridge the gap between classroom learning and the “real world,” and there are all kinds of scholarships, like the SURE Award, to help support your research. Using the SURE Award to present research from my senior thesis, and to actually make a difference in the scientific community, was definitely a great way to finish my GW career—thanks UHP!
Political Campaigns Meet Fantasy Sports [SURE Stories]
The following blog post was written by UHPer and SURE Award winner Benji Englander.
One of the best things about pursuing individual research is the ability to create your own project focused on the things you find most interesting. As a political communication major moonlighting as a self-proclaimed fantasy sports expert, my thesis allowed me to combine my loves of sports and politics into one academic research project.
By conducting an A/B test that compares two versions of a candidate’s speech – one with local sports team references and one without – in three states known for the loyalty of their sports fans, my research ascertained the political usefulness of sports rhetoric. While not conclusive, the results show that under the right circumstances with the right audience, references to local sports teams can play an important role in political rhetoric and offer unique insights into voter behavior. This project was a substantial undertaking that would not have been possible without the SURE award and support from the UHP. The funding allowed me to gather a representative sample size for my experiment leading to statistically significant results.
If given the opportunity, I would highly recommend that students participate in individual research. Academic research combines all the skills taught throughout college and focuses them on something guaranteed to be interesting because you are in control. The ability to pick the subject matter is rare as an undergraduate and an opportunity one shouldn’t pass up.
Enosinian Scholars – NEW DEADLINE
The Enosinian Scholars Program is accepting applications for the 2018-2019 school year!
Each year, this program welcomes a select group of rising seniors to conduct student-driven research in a variety of academic areas. Students apply at the end of their junior year to begin the program their senior year. If you’re interested, please check out the program description as well as the application form.
If you have additional questions, please contact Professor William Winstead at stimmung@gwu.edu. The application deadline has been extended to July 1, 2018.
Summer 2018 Recommended Reading List
Finals are over and three long months of downtime loom ahead. You know what that means, right? The return of reading for fun! A UHPer recently asked the faculty for some recommended summer reading, and they were eager to oblige. So if you’re looking for a book to keep you company as you come down from finals, take a look at these suggestions:
Maria Frawley. “I’d like to recommend George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the novel Virginia Woolf famously declared to be ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.’ It’s a door-stopper of a novel (800 some pages!) that needs to be enjoyed over several months, and it’s the best study I’ve ever encountered of the hows and whys we fail to live up to our ideals.”
Bethany Cobb Kung: “Oops, I can’t pick just a single book! I’d recommend Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz. Many parts of this book frustrated or infuriated me — many other parts I wholeheartedly agreed with. AND/OR Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger A little history, a little science, and a little human interest, too!”
Mark Ralkowski: “This is the book I’d like to recommend: At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, by Sarah Bakewell.It’s a great mix of philosophy and biography, and it provides a lot of the backstory to the rise of phenomenology and existentialism in the 20th century.“
In
grid Creppell: “I recommend Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones. This 2011 National Book Award Winner tells the story of a poor family living in southern Mississippi waiting and preparing for Hurricane Katrina. I found the writing mythic and at the same time of the most intimate concreteness – showing how dreams and passions of real individuals tangle with the inescapable hardness of the past, and yet they achieve a measure of salvation in this forgotten rural landscape.”
Joseph Trullinger: “I would recommend an essay by Mary Midgley, “Trying Out One’s New Sword.” Midgley explores the purported ancient Japanese custom of allowing samurais to kill peasants to “try out” the sharpness of a new sword. In particular, it’s a great essay about whether and how we can judge the practices of other cultures, and by implication, our own. It’s one of the most insightful pieces I’ve ever read about cultural relativism, and the presuppositions that go into it.”
William Winstead: “I recommend Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (Norton, 2018). The best account yet of the origins of the global outrage directed at the neoliberal juggernaut undermining the future prospects of young and old alike—essential for anyone who wants to make sense of the current scene.”
Eyal Aviv: “I recommend A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel by Ruth Ozeki. Ozeki, an author and a Zen priest, tells a gripping story about three women: a Canadian-Japanese writer, a troubled Japanese teenage girl and her grandmother, an elderly Zen nun.The story moves between the three characters and connects them with a network shrouded with mystery that is rooted in the Zen philosophy of Eihei Dōgen. This is a remarkable story that will both touch you and invite you into a meditation about time, space and the intricacies of human relationship. “
Theo Christov: “I recommend No Name in the Street, by James Baldwin. This book weaves in and out of the Algerian war of independence, the tyranny of Francisco Franco, the 1963 March on Washington, and the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr, revealing the legacy of the past in the US and how to cope with such a legacy in the present.”
New Honors Course Added!
The UHP is excited to be adding a new Self & Society offering for this fall, “Human Rights: Here, There, and Everywhere” with Prof. Maria Restrepo. See details below!
Human Rights: Here, There, and Everywhere
Professor Maria Restrepo
HONR 2047:10 – 3 Credits
CRN: 27984
T 10:00-12:30 PM
Fulfills: CCAS Social Science; GWSB: Non-Business Elective/Unrestricted Elective; SEAS: Social Science
Course Description: The subject of Human Rights (HR) arguably lays bare the entire premise of liberal education itself. The issue of HR exposes us to the world outside our own circle of experience; and also requires us to make judgments, assessments, and interpretations of uncertain situations, often in settings where there are no clear penalties for wrong decisions or rewards for right ones. Certainly the claim of an expert that “Most students of Western developed countries have the luxury of forgetting about Human Rights” does not hold so true in today’s internet-enabled and interconnected society. This class grapples with these issues. It will teach you fresh skills to think critically about this important topic — whether it concerns ongoing situations ‘here, there or everywhere’.
2018 Research Showcase Recap
This year’s Honors Research Showcase featured presentations from eleven intellectually omnivorous UHPers. Check out their project titles below.
Benjamin Englander: Rooting for the Home Team: Sports, Politics, and the Rhetoric of Identification
Eliza Goren: The Undergraduate Female Experience: It’s a Man’s World
Elizabeth Hasier: The Streets We Share: A Photographic Study in Transience and Defining Community
Hannah Corn: An Analysis of Chinese Internal Migration to Beijing
Jacqueline Dyer: Mass Spectrometry Imaging of Netrual Lipid Species by Laser Desorption Ionization from Silicon Nanopost Arrays and MALDI
Jacquelyn Veatch: Understanding the City’s Role in Climate Action
Kara Zielinski: Amylin Aggregation Kinetics
Margaret Steiner: HIV-1 Transmission Clusters and Drug Resistance in Washington, D.C.
Quinn Divens: Through Her Eyes: Baya Mahieddine and the Female Form in French Algeria
Rohan Patil: A Multimodal Solution to Workplace Violence in the Hospital
Youmna Sirgi: Understanding Outbound Student Mobility in Lebanon’s Sectarian Environment
Thanks to all who came to show your support! And to our presenters, who did a fantastic job.
Questions or ideas for future UHP research-related events? Please email benfaulkner@gwu.edu.
Apply to Be an Enosinian Scholar
The Enosinian Scholars Program is accepting applications for the 2018-2019 school year!
Each year, this program welcomes a select group of rising seniors to conduct student-driven research in a variety of academic areas. Students apply at the end of their junior year to begin the program their senior year. If you’re interested, please check out the program description as well as the application form.
If you have additional questions, please contact Professor William Winstead at stimmung@gwu.edu. Applications are due Friday, 6/1.
