Oh, wow. The end of the semester is near. Another year of college under my belt. Yet, when I arrived at the Student Works Symposium paper session, I felt like I had accomplished absolutely nothing.
I was expecting to see the Capstone and thesis presentations of seniors packed into a 15-minute time limit, but seniors made up only a slight majority of the participants in the Symposium, if even that. There were underclass-wo/men (from here on referred to by its patriarchal name), dressed in suits and running around carrying laptops and notes and standing next to their research posters. This left me wondering if my degree plan was hiding some strange, necessary class involving underclassmen research that I had not yet taken. After ruling out this option by looking at my degree plan, which I keep in my planner, I moved on to the next option: that all of these underclassmen had some required research class inside their majors. While this was true for some of the presenters (coughResearchMethodscough), I found that the majority of underclassmen who participated in the event were just presenting research projects for the purpose of getting their hard work out there. And then, after both of my options for explaining the proliferation of underclassmen were proven incorrect, I felt like a lazy bum who will never get accepted to graduate school, work at a fast-food restaurant to pay off my student loan debt (not that there is anything wrong with working at a fast-food restaurant) and never realize my full potential as a human being. Yay!
What the symposium made me realize is how incredibly lazy I must look in contrast to all of my peers' overt display of a semester's worth of hard work. Since then (haha, last week), I made a promise to myself that I would: 1) watch less television and reduce my time spent mindlessly-surfing the Internet; 2) be more productive during the day so that my awake hours didn't steal from my sleeping hours and cause me to not only walk around in a zombified state, but also cause my body to prematurely age; and 3) get on a diet to jump start my "getting into shape" hope, also giving me more energy and a healthier immune system to prevent sickness.
Okay, enough of that bitching and moaning. Let's move on to the rest of the Symposium. I saw a paper session first, then went and mingled with the poster presenters in the Bishop's Lounge. Most of the posters presented a graphical representation of some aspect of the student's research, which led me to believe that a large majority of these presenters were from science majors. Yet again, I had misread the situation. These students came from a wide-range of majors and represented many different departments. However, what was most puzzling to me about the Symposium was the lack of communications majors presenting their research. Not a one communications major presented at the Symposium or, at least, they did not list their communications major next to their names in the schedule. After realizing this, I think that I finally came to the correct explanation: that all communications majors are either lazy or find this event too passé to be worthy of their attention (or a combination of both). Obviously, this is not the correct explanation. I think that the correct explanation probably has to do with a communications departmental lack of encouragement to participate, because I honestly didn't know what this Symposium was until I attended.
I also attended the gallery exhibit, in which the art of SU students Casey Grier, Sarah Reesor and Bernardo Schirmer. Of the three, I thought Grier's, "Shades of Inequity," exhibit was the most compelling. Her art display drew its inspiration from a research study she conducted about inequalities observed in the classroom setting. Her piece, Least Restrictive Environment, is constructed from wood slats painted to represent the cornucopia of differences shown in the makeup of a classroom, accomplished by using pink, blue and varying shades of skin tone colors to create a unique identity for each slat in terms of gender, race, sexual identity and, on some of them, disability. It was a beautiful ode to the hope of a non-discriminative future for our children and subsequently, society.
Whew...long-winded,
Brady
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