James J. Clauss, director of the Honors Program, has accepted an expanded his role in Undergraduate Academic Affairs and is now associate dean. For Jim, the new role is “structurally logical” but is also recognition of the importance of Honors as an integral part of the University.
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Undergraduate Research Symposium featured on UW Discoveries
The Undergraduate Research Symposium is a recent addition to the University of Washington’s YouTube channel. Watch the video and hear what students have to say about the impact of research on their education.
Vice Provost and Dean Ed Taylor recognized by his alma mater
On October 14, UAA Vice Provost and Dean Ed Taylor and his wife Dr. Sue Taylor received the Distinguished Alumni Merit Award from their alma mater, Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA.
Realizing that change takes more than sweat
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After graduating high school in Mukilteo, Wash., Paul Javid, ’06, volunteered in South America for two years. Part of his volunteer work was with a community radio station in Chile that was a lifeline for many rural communities. Witnessing the impact even radio technology can have on people’s lives, Paul determined that his college major should be in an area with practical application—he believed technology could be used to help people and focused on a computer science degree when he came to the University of Washington.
Early on in his undergraduate studies, Paul “realized the value of being at a research university. You can find anyone doing anything. Even though my interest was somewhat nonstandard, I was able to find someone to help me dig into my interest.”
As an undergraduate, Paul worked with renowned computer science Professor Ed Lazowska and graduate student Tapan Parikh, on a system that enabled rural women involved in microfinance projects to keep records and complete transactions over mobile phones. Paul helped build the mobile phone application to facilitate this process and earned a Mary Gates Research Scholarship for his work in the project.
Paul then applied that same technology to help businesses in India keep track of their sales force and manage a rural supply chain. He spent seven weeks in India with this project and later published the results and presented a paper about it at a research conference at the University of California Berkeley School of Information.
After graduation, Paul was awarded the Samuel Huntington Award for Public Service to continue his commitment to using technology to meet the needs of people living in developing communities through Digital Study Hall, a program in India that improves education for children in slum and rural schools through teacher training. A stipend of $10,000, the Huntington award is given to only one or two graduating college seniors in the country, enabling them to pursue one year of public service anywhere in the world.
The Huntington Award allowed Paul to focus on Digital Study Hall. The organization delivers teacher training content to rural schools via systems similar to Netflix and YouTube. Classes taught by exceptional grassroots teachers are recorded and distributed to the schools where teachers watch them with a facilitator and practice the teaching methods in the lesson.
Paul spent two years in India, first in Bangalore and then he and the founder of Digital Study Hall were hired by Microsoft to re-establish a pilot project of it in Calcutta. “Microsoft was interested in understanding the role of technology in rural communities,” says Paul, “and had a hunch that video could be a valuable means of communicating with such audiences.” Paul worked with Microsoft and Digital Study Hall to help get quantifiable results of the work’s effectiveness.
They conducted a small study that showed strong preliminary results that teachers’ learning improved over time as a result of Digital Study Hall. The pedagogical methods the teachers learned changed the classroom from “boring and static to interesting and dynamic.” And though their sample size wasn’t large enough to be statistically significant, student scores improved by 300%.
Paul was responsible for the Calcutta work, finding an office, hiring and training employees. “You really felt like you were working on a start-up.” When Paul needed more video content of teachers in classrooms he started a school for the kids in the neighboring slum.
The project is ongoing and the school Paul started still exists in the form of an afternoon tutoring program that serves about 100 kids in the area. His experiences in India taught Paul that to make a scalable difference, “sweat isn’t enough. You need to be organized and strategic.” This notion is reinforced for him as he finishes a dual master’s degree in business and public health at the University of California at Berkeley. “One of the reasons I’m focused now on entrepreneurship is to acquire contacts and resources so that, should I go back to a developing country one day to start something, I would be able to build something from the ground up.”
The Rhodes to Yale Law School
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When Allyssa Lamb, ’04, earned her bachelor’s degrees in classics and Biblical and near east studies, she had her future pretty well mapped out: earn a master’s in Egyptology from Oxford University on her Rhodes Scholarship, then on to a Ph.D. for a career in academia furthering the fields of classics or Egyptology. Her love of the subjects began when she was a child and deepened at the University of Washington through campus-based classes and international opportunities in Rome and on an archeological dig in Israel.
“That interest in travel,” says Allyssa, “and seeing and experiencing new things is part of what made me excited to go to Oxford in the first place.”
At Oxford, Allyssa learned to navigate an educational system unfamiliar to her in which master’s students work one-on-one with their faculty adviser as well as traditions unlike any she’d encountered before—from wearing subfusc for taking exams to “trashing,” post-exam celebrations that include showering exam-takers with confetti, glitter, flour, yogurt and octopi. “And I’m not making that up,” says Allyssa. “It’s a world-class academic institution but at the same time it has all these quirks.”
Allyssa wrote her master’s thesis on images of magical practitioners in Egyptian, Greek and Latin literature, a topic of interest since her undergraduate work. While Allyssa’s work centered on the ancient world, her friends were scholars with a global, contemporary focus, which helped her maintain her interest in politics and current world affairs.
After Oxford, Allyssa began her doctorate program in classics at the University of Chicago. While she enjoyed the classes, professors and students, she began to question whether this was the path she wanted to travel after all. An unexpected interruption in her Ph.D. program required her to return to Redmond, Wash., to care for her mother and grandmother who were both ill.
At home, she began to reflect on her future. She took a departure from antiquity and decided to channel her growing frustration with U.S. politics into “something more proactive” and applied to law schools. A visit to Yale Law School solidified her interest in the field and in that school.
Now in her second year at Yale, Allyssa is keeping an open mind about the kind of law she may want to practice. A stint with the Innocence Project in New Orleans piqued an interest in wrongful convictions but she says she doesn’t “know if I want to be a proper lawyer.”
As for the radical switch in disciplines, her work as a classicist trained her well for the lawyerly need to research, analyze and pick apart arguments. That said, legal research and writing is quite different than academic writing and an area in which Allyssa continues to refine her skills. However, “one thing I have a leg up on everyone else is that I can read the Latin terms.”
In Memoriam: Ran Hennes, University Honors Program
Ran Hennes, our dear colleague and former associate director, passed away Monday evening, September 13. Ran had been dealing with lymphoma for several years. He was still teaching part-time and enjoying his retirement. During the last six months he had some setbacks and toward the end he choose to go on his own terms.
Volunteer with Jumpstart and help local preschoolers prepare for kindergarten
On Thursday, October 7, the University of Washington community can help prepare preschool-age children for kindergarten by volunteering for Jumpstart’s annual national Read for the Record 2010 Day. The campaign generates public awareness for early childhood literacy and education by creating the largest, shared reading experience across the nation.
Leading and learning from national Campus Compact institute
Undergraduate Academic Affairs service learning leader Rachel Vaughn brought her leadership skills to the national Campus Compact institute this summer. Vaughn is associate director in the Carlson Center.
Students to present their summer research in poster session and oral presentations
Students participating in ten different summer research programs will present their work in a poster session on August 18, from 9 a.m.-noon in Mary Gates Hall Commons. The undergraduates are from the University of Washington as well as institutions from around the country. Students research projects are all in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.
Record number of UW recent undergraduate alumni selected for Fulbright Scholarships
Eleven University of Washington alumni who recently earned their undergraduate degrees have been awarded Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarships. This number of recipients sets an institutional record for the largest number of UW undergraduate Fulbright awardees.