Around Tappan Square
SCIENCE
Helping FirstYear Students Stay STRONG
TOTS AND POPS For sophomore Olivia Fink, like many Oberlin students, brunch at the Feve is a special occasion. But a morning meal with her mom during Parents and Family Weekend in November took on even more meaning with a surprise appearance from her father, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves stationed in Stuttgart, Germany— whom Olivia hadn’t seen in nearly a year. LTC David Fink says he took advantage of a four-day leave to travel for more than 10 hours to enjoy a 48-hour visit with his family. He’ll be stationed at European Command headquarters in Stuttgart through December 2019, serving as a battle watch officer. Olivia says her mother, Martha May Fink, loves coming-home surprises such as these: “She's done some pretty good ones in the past, but this I wasn't expecting at all!” A German major from New Hampshire, Olivia says that after brunch she took her family to her co-op (Tank); the Carlyle flower shop to pet the shop’s dogs; a fall festival at Johnson House; a visit with her German professor, Steve Huff; and the student opera production celebrating the music of Leonard Bernstein. “It really was a great day,” Olivia says. 6
science and technology Research Opportunities for a New Generation (STRONG) returned to Oberlin during the summer of 2018 with a cohort of eight incoming first-year students participating in research ranging from conducting interviews for the citywide environmental dashboard to searching for dark matter. Since its inception in 2015, STRONG has paired first-year students with Oberlin College professors in STEM fields to conduct summer research together. Eligible participants include women, Pell-eligible students, students of color, or students who are the first in their families to attend college. STRONG intentionally introduces college-level research to students who are typically underrepresented in STEM fields, allowing them to delve into their fields of interest even before taking their first college class. Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences and Director of Undergraduate Research Afia Ofori-Mensa designed the program in 2014 and has since served as its director. She says that STRONG’s approach to issues of belonging, identity, and care are relevant not just to STEM fields, but to institutions of higher learning as a whole. “The idea with STRONG is that if underrepresented students want to remain in STEM, they should be able to remain in STEM,” OforiMensa says. “It is not skills or even resilience that those students are often lacking. It is things like confidence—their own confidence in themselves and the confidence of others in their capabilities—and a sense that they belong here, in
this place that may feel so different from everything they’re used to.” But STRONG is about more than introducing scientifically gifted new students to the often intimidating space of a college lab. STRONG scholars get a head start adjusting to college life—meeting twice a week for summer workshops such as Math for Science and Study Skills and Time Management designed to prepare them for undergraduate courses. And true to the program’s mission to make research accessible, STRONG scholars earn a $2,000 living stipend for five weeks of summer research work, plus funding to cover travel expenses to and from Oberlin and help paying for textbooks their first year on campus. Housing and dining for the summer weeks are covered by the program. “Before STRONG, I thought ‘research’ and ‘science’ were inclusive of nothing but lab coats and beakers,” says Ifunanya Ezimora ’19. “I didn’t realize you could conduct research in a library
doing literature reviews, or outside in the midst of fieldwork, or without even seeing your participants through online surveys.” Ezimora credits STRONG for inspiring her to add environmental studies to the psychology major she was already pursuing, and to helping to choose her academic and post-college path. “There’s no way I would have engaged in research all four years of college, and I really doubt going into my senior year that I would already have a plan to take a gap year working at a wilderness therapy camp on the West Coast before going to graduate school to pursue a clinical psychology doctorate, with a focus in nature therapy,” she says. “If not for the STRONG program, if not for the psychology and environmental justice research I’ve done, and if not for the insight from summer opportunities I’ve been connected to through my majors, I wouldn’t know what kind of person I wanted to be when I left Oberlin.”
PRE V I O US PAGE S: JENNIFER M A NN A , Y E V HEN GULENKO ; T HIS PAGE : CO UR T E S Y OF OLI V I A FINK , JENNIFER M A NN A
BY ERIN ULRICH ’18