Last Friday and Saturday, hundreds of graduate students from the College of William and Mary and 15 visiting institutions gathered at the Sadler Center for the Tenth Annual Graduate Research Symposium. The event was designed to be an interdisciplinary exchange between the sciences and the humanities, giving graduate students the opportunity to share experiences and to network with their peers.
This year’s event, with the theme “Preparing Scholars, Presenting Excellence,” featured 51 speakers from institutions such as Georgetown University, Hampton University, George Mason University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The symposium has developed into a highly successful student-organized event focusing on graduate students’ innovative and top-notch research,” Dean of Graduate Studies and Research Laurie Sanderson said in a press release.
The Graduate Research Symposium, first held in Jan. 2002 has come to encompass the research of College graduate students from all programs, including American studies, anthropology, computer science, biology, history, physics and public policy.
“Our students contribute seriously to human understanding on their way to advanced degrees. Then they keep doing so as teachers and scholars,” College President Taylor Reveley wrote in a letter to the William and Mary community. “The Symposium provides an opportunity for our graduate students and their peers from other schools to present their work.”
The symposium’s presentations covered a wide range of topics from the personal hygiene of Victorian prostitutes to a prototype system for cardiac telemetry and from research on the effects of cannabinoids on adolescents to race relations in Chappelle’s Show.
The two-day event also featured an awards luncheon Saturday, which presented several College students with awards recognizing excellence in scholarship or undergraduate mentoring. Erik Seidow of the department of anthropology and Wei Wei of the department of computer science both received awards for their scholarly contributions to the fields of social and natural sciences, respectively.
The Graduate Studies Advisory Board presented Adam Stackhouse, American Studies, ’04 M.A. ’10, Zachary Elmore, Biology and Fengyuan Xu, Computer Science, Ph.D. with awards for excellence in undergraduate mentoring.
