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Students in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences will present research and other academic works at an undergraduate symposium Thursday night.
The CLASS Center for Undergraduate Research and Intellectual Opportunities is sponsoring the event, which is in its second year and will take place at 7 p.m. in the Foy Building.
Twenty-one students will showcase a total of 15 presentations that range from traditional research in the social sciences to original musical compositions.
Ellen Hendrix, an assistant professor in the department of writing and linguistics, has spearheaded the symposium since its inception last year.
Hendrix said that this year’s symposium will feature projects that vary in depth from those that are at the beginning stages to those that have undergone semesters of work.
According to Hendrix, the symposium will open and close with featured performances. A student wrote a piece of music that a string quartet will perform at the beginning of the event. At the closing, a group of communications arts students will present a short performance based on research concerning the Hispanic community in Statesboro.
“They’re not just presenting the paper or the findings that they gathered from these interviews,” Hendrix said. “They’ve actually turned those interviews into a performance piece. They will be speaking as if they are the voices of the immigrants themselves.”
Ashley Akins, president of the CLASS Dean’s Student Advisory Board said that the board has helped with the symposium by gathering student support and helping get students involved.
Akins, who is a senior English major, also participated in the first symposium last year and said that it was a very beneficial experience for her.
She said, “I really enjoyed it because it was an opportunity to present outside of the classroom. I get to present something I’m working on and obviously that I’m genuinely interested in. It was fun to present that to a range of students and professors.”
Akins said that there is a misconception when people think about research in the fields of social sciences and liberal arts.
“It’s a whole different ballgame when you talk about the liberal arts and social sciences,” Akins said. “Of course, you can’t actually sit in a laboratory and get definite answers to questions. One of the cool things about liberal arts is that you don’t have to have definite answers to questions.”
Hendrix shared the same sentiments about research in CLASS and said that the symposium is a chance for people to learn about the research in the college.
“It just lets people know that in our music, in our plays, in our short stories, in any kind of performance piece that there is real research involved,” Hendrix said, “in addition to the more traditional research that we get from our political scientists and psychologists. Sometimes research is not readily apparent in the traditional sense.”
According to Hendrix, student presenters at last year’s event were invited to do so by CLASS. This year, she said, projects were judged by a committee to determine which ones would be presented at the symposium.
“These students were chosen based on the quality of what they proposed, and we hope that is going to make it more competitive, and I’m hoping that competition will actually play out in the presentations,” she said.
Hendrix added that the committee judged the entries “blindly,” meaning that proposals had no names or department affiliations attached to them during the judging period.
Hendrix said that some of the questions the committee looked to answer when selecting proposals were “Did the students actually show us something that’s new, that’s beyond what we would expect from a research paper in any class? Was there some authentic component of the research that they did?”
According to Hendrix, information concerning proposals for next year’s symposium will be available at the event Thursday night. For more information about CURIO, contact Hendrix at
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