Symposium offers grad students chance to present research
For the first time, graduate students from various disciplines were able to display their research together for students at Friday's Graduate Research Symposium in Whig Hall.The winning presentation, as judged by her peers, was EEB graduate student Maria Ramos's study of the conflict between reproductive success and the ability to outrun predators in male spiders.Other entrants included Christine Percheski's "Does Mothers' Money Matter?," Nancy Khalek's "Continuity and Change in Byzantine and Early Islamic Damascus" and Nicole Avena's "Sugar-dependence in rats: similarities to drug abuse."These presenters, from the sociology, history and psychology departments, respectively, represented the diversity of the academic work sought by the symposium's organizers."There's an interdisciplinary aspect to it," said committee member Shin-Yi Lin.Karla Evans, also a committee member, agreed that an important goal was "to give an opportunity to graduate students to develop skills in presenting their work to people who are not specialists in their field . . . and to think about the significance of the work."Organizers also wanted community members to participate, and several were present, talking with students about their projects."For a lot of [graduate students], we're being funded by the public and there's really no way the public gets anything out of it, so this was a good opportunity to address that," Lin said.Avena said she appreciated the symposium because "in the psychology department we're only exposed to research in our own department . . . It's been interesting to see what other people are doing and meet people."The organizing committee began setting up the symposium over the summer, which involved fundraising and calling for students to submit abstracts, or 250-word summaries of their research, in preparation for a more thorough poster presentation.