Students tackle pressing issues in academic showcase

Interested in learning about allergen accommodations in school lunch menus? Swing by Palamountain Hall. How about the impact of hurricanes on recent elections? Plan a stop in Bolton. Then, enjoy a reading of an original work of fiction, nonfiction or poetry in Davis Auditorium, or drop by Williamson Sports Center to find out how nighttime eating affects exercise performance. 

Skidmore’s annual Academic Festival showcases the best in student research and artistic achievement while simultaneously informing and enlightening the community. On May 1, students and faculty from the College’s many departments and programs, from mathematics to dance, came together to host this day-long, campus-wide celebration of learning.

During the morning sessions, students from Associate Professor Karen Kellogg and Teaching Professor Andrew Schneller’s environmental studies and sciences classes presented their Capstone research in Filene Recital Hall.  

In their presentation “Be-Forrest Too Late,” seniors Greta Binzen, Colin Cameron and Sam Vogel spoke about options for managing high-impact recreational use of the Adirondack Park’s High Peaks Wilderness Area. Their findings were the culmination of a year’s worth of research.  

“We were primarily interested in the feasibility of a permit system, but our research ended up expanding to include a whole host of management options for dealing with the issue,” Binzen said. “We conducted our research through an online public survey, which got over 1,200 responses from members of the hiking community, as well as 10 interviews with representatives of various NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and state stakeholders operating within the park.”

Binzen was personally invested in the research. She wants to find ways to protect the environment while ensuring that people are able to enjoy and benefit from public resources. Plus, she loves hiking in the Adirondacks. 

“I learned more than I ever thought I would about recreational management and the history of the High Peaks, but I also learned a lot about how to conduct research and work well in a team,” she said. “It was exciting to feel like our work was relevant and hopefully useful for the state to make some management decisions in the coming years.” 

Schneller said he was impressed at the diversity of topics and collaboration he saw in his department as a whole. 

“We had students driven to solve pressing environmental and social problems from a variety of topics and perspectives related to sustainability, food justice, climate change, public and private lands management, civic engagement and politics,” he said. “I find that I always come away from the final presentations with an air of optimism directly related to the hard work of our students … that real solutions are viable for protecting communities and our environment.” 
 
Around noon, sociology students gathered in Tisch Learning Center to fill the lunch hour with conversations about their Capstone research. 

Through her project “Searching for Silver Linings in Foreign Grounds,” Ashley Mejia ’19 strove to determine whether a parent’s birthplace is a large factor in their children’s attainment of a higher education. 

“My project consisted of 1,899 respondents from the General Social Survey,” she said. “After running a regression model, I realized that a parent's birthplace did not necessarily matter. What actually mattered is the level of education parents have attained themselves.” 

She was joined by peers who researched such topics as the effect of social media usage on adolescent social relationships, the connection between community size and environmental views, and the culture of mental health treatment around the world.  

Nearby, the second floor of the Dana Atrium was bustling with activity as students enthusiastically described their research, outlined on posters, to passersby. Those students included three teams from Professor Mary Odekon’s Principles of Astronomy class.

The teams relied on one another in a collaborative project to map the distribution of dark matter in the universe, an undertaking funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation that also involves a number of other institutions. Over the past 80 years, astronomers have accumulated evidence that either our understanding of gravity on large scales is wrong, or most of the matter in the universe is invisible “dark matter” that we can only detect indirectly through its effect on normal matter.  

Jesse Kelley-Derzon ’21, Eva Rothenberg ’20 and Veronica Mierzejewski ’19 took turns explaining components of their research, which used data from one of the largest telescopes in the world, the 305-meter Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, to compare simulations based on gravity to measurements from groups of galaxies, known as filaments, near the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster.  

“We can’t see dark matter, we just know it has to be there based on the behavior of the filament,” Rothenberg explained. 

Odekon praised her students’ initiative and teamwork. 

“I especially appreciated the enthusiasm and generosity the students showed in working with each other in research teams,” she said. “Our research group meetings on Friday afternoons during the semester were always a highlight of my week.” 

Academic Fest is a Skidmore tradition where departments identify standout student scholars to share their work with the community. To learn more about Academic Fest, check out this story about its recent anniversary. For more information on the scholarly work of Skidmore students and faculty, explore our Academics site.