The Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Fair has become a highlight of every spring semester at Penn State Altoona—even the Zoom format this year could not dampen the experience. Students in four categories— Performance and Exhibition; Nursing, Behavioral, and Social Sciences; STEM: Engineering, Computing/Information Technology, Physical, and Health & Life Sciences; and Internships—presented their work to a panel of judges and the public, and then followed with a Q&A. The winners’ list is can be found here but below are just a few of the highlights of the day:
STEM: Engineering, Computing/Information Technology, Physical, and Health & Life Sciences
Ian Fisher, a senior majoring in environmental studies, never asks, “Why’d it have to be snakes?” By his own admission he has been “fascinated with them” his entire life. And he saw an opportunity while working on a long-term research project about powerline rights-of-way on state game lands in Centre County with Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies Carolyn Mahan (who was also Fisher’s advisor for this research). For years groups of academics, environmentalists, and even industry representatives have been studying the effects of Integrated Vegetation Management treatment methods on migratory bird, ground beetle, and insect pollinator populations in Pennsylvanian sections of rights-of-way. As part of that project Fisher began doing bird and pollinator surveys but changing to a snake survey “was a chance to be a primary investigator on an undergraduate research project, studying my first passion,” he says. “We found a lot of spectacular snakes by flipping rocks and logs.”
Professor Mahan says Fisher’s work “has been an important addition to our research on wildlife use of rights-of-way that are managed with mechanical and selective herbicide application approaches. Snakes last were studied on the rights-of-way in 2001, and 20 years later Ian has documented an increased abundance and species richness of snakes in this study area.” While Fisher was pursuing his passion, he was also providing valuable information for the larger project, Mahan notes: “Researchers now recognize native snakes as bioindicators and as critical components of ecosystems. After one research season, there is evidence that our native snakes are compatible with careful and selective management on transmission line rights-of-way.”
After his URCAF presentation, Fisher was quizzed by three judges. When Assistant Professor of Biology Sarah Allen asked why he did his surveys in the morning, Fisher explained, “Snakes are most likely under cover in the morning. Before it warms up, they’ll still be curled up.” Assistant Teaching Professor of Geography Candice Landry asked about Fisher not finding snakes in a particular plot area and he explained that they had found snakes there at other times, just not during June 2020, the time frame of his survey. Assistant Professor of Psychology Danielle DelPriore gave Fisher something to think about: “What would you say is the next question that you or someone after you would be poised to answer?” Fisher was quick to respond: “I seem to find a lot of smooth green snakes in May and June and not in the end of the summer. Where do they go near the end?”
Performance and Exhibition
From the beginning of language people have used poetry in many forms to express feelings, speak out against injustice, and record historical events. The poems written by Mary Stewart, a junior majoring in English, for a “Writing Documentary Poetry” course with Assistant Teaching Professor, English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Lee Peterson could not be more relevant to the 21st century. The course covered “a lot of ‘big world’ issues,” Stewart says; Peterson “was constantly asking us to reflect on what was going on in this historical period.”
While Stewart is comfortable with the act of writing, poetry was a new experience for her. “Normally what I’m used to from class is the structure. Opening yourself up to writing and letting the words flow out of you was a different view for me.” She obviously adapted well. Peterson says, “I was amazed that Mary hadn’t written poetry prior to the class. Good writers don’t seem like they’re trying. The words on the page feel sort of inevitable. But that inevitability is the result of real attention and consideration on the part of the writer or poet. Mary had this sense of ease and naturalness in her work, one that was the result of care, thoughtfulness, and attention to craft.”
The appearance of “ease and naturalness” came through only with effort and focus. Stewart says, Peterson “really challenged us with taking time to look at our current lives. It was intense to take certain literary techniques and apply them to how I really feel.” A topic both current and intense right now is COVID-19, which became the focus for Stewart’s “Pandemic Series” poems, titled “Blur” and “How Does a Ventilator Work?” Stewart recognizes that most people can relate to what she has written: “What I like about those poems is they’re universal. Both poems look at COVID-19 through different perspectives. One deals with society and the isolation brought on by the pandemic, while the other focuses on the medical and fatal realities of the illness.”
The first poem, “Blur,” came out of “what it was like to be stuck in quarantine,” says Stewart, who fought her own battle with the virus early this year. “Economically it was a hit, an abrupt and difficult transition. ‘Blur’ explores those adaptations.” Inspiration came from a photograph. “We were doing a free-write on photos,” and she selected Dorothea Lange’s iconic “migrant mother” image of Florence Owens Thompson. “Lange was given a series of themes—cooking, sleeping, praying, and socializing—for her photography for the Farm Security Administration.” The use of those themes is evident in Stewart’s final work.
The second poem, “How Does a Ventilator Work?,” is even more intense in both subject matter and writing technique. “This poem consists of two forms of poetry,” Stewart says. “The first section is an erasure piece that defines the functionality of ventilators, while the second part is an ekphrastic poem based on a painting by Caspar David Friedrich titled Monk by the Sea. It compares this painting with the spread of COVID-19 through a patient’s lungs. There is a shift to dialogue between stanzas to express a change in tone from diagnosis to fatality.”
Reflecting on the entire class, Peterson says, “So many students in Documentary Poetry impressed me this past fall. There’s something about documentary poetry specifically that allows even inexperienced writers to make powerful pieces. We make poems, inherently emotional creative objects, in response to real world events and histories that can sometimes feel dry or remote. In the class we bring abstract or, in the case of COVID, living and difficult histories into a certain kind of focus through the lens of poetry. By making a work of art out of something we’re struggling to understand or get through, we often transform it into something beautiful. That’s a very positive thing, not only for the writer but for the reader. The poems themselves become places where others can engage their own similar experiences and feel kinship. Mary’s work is a perfect example of that transformation, of that relationship.”
Nursing, Behavioral, and Social Sciences
Rich Patterson, a senior nursing student in the BSN program, has been a nursing peer tutor for two years. From his own experience he knows that “tutoring is beneficial. I’ve seen both struggle and success.” What he witnessed, though, made him curious about “the factors that make some choose tutoring.” He knows that “nursing programs can be highly stressful” and “nursing students have a higher level of testing anxiety than other students” (per a study by Driscoll et al.). For his research project, Patterson says, “the aim is to see if there is a relationship between peer tutoring and testing anxiety.” The cohort consisted of “all BSN or second-degree nursing program students registered for spring 2021 and taking nursing courses” at Penn State Altoona.
Using an Institutional Review Board–approved online survey, Patterson asked “open-ended, short-answer questions” and rated the responses using the Westside Test Anxiety Scale. With a 54.9 percent response rate, he says, preliminary data shows “there is significantly higher testing anxiety in those who attend peer tutoring.” Any student who gets a grade below 77 on an exam is encouraged to seek tutoring but Patterson found that only a quarter of those actually did it. Common reasons for not attending, he says, included the belief that “it would not be helpful, it wouldn’t fit in with their schedules, or going would actually increase their anxiety.” However, of those who attended tutoring, 78 percent said they found it helpful regarding to test anxiety.
The URCAF judges had comments as well as questions. Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies Kelly Munly said, “As a professor I was taken by your findings that of those who were recommended for academic support only a quarter attended. In my experience those students that are struggling don’t respond to outreach.” Patterson concurred: “I think engagement has been the hardest area. I was kind of shocked by the response that ‘this wouldn’t be helpful.’” When Associate Professor of Criminal Justice Lacey Wallace noted that “almost 77% of people in your sample were recommended for academic support. Is that common?” Patterson said, yes, “the majority who did respond were recommended.”
Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Nicole Gilbertson noted, “I found it interesting that the second-degree individuals had lower test anxiety.” Patterson responded, “My assumption for this (I have not crunched all the data yet) is that they already understand the workload. The highest is when people are new to college. It kind of decreases over time. Natural progression of past experiences makes them more prepared for the environment.”
Patterson made a point of recognizing those individuals who supported him in his research efforts: “Dr. Cathleen Dillen was my faculty advisor and she was instrumental in helping me through the entire research process and guiding me through survey design. Dr. Laura Cruz of Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence was indispensable in navigating the complexities of the IRB-approval process. And Altoona’s nursing faculty—including Dr. Marcia Satryan and Cindy Bowman—allowed me the opportunity to garner interest in my research by talking with their students.”
Chancellor and Dean Lori J. Bechtel-Wherry visited during Patterson’s presentation and commented, “It was very interesting. Despite all the test anxiety, Penn State Altoona has the highest pass rate of the campuses that offer nursing programs. Sometimes it forces students to study harder.”
Internships
Raya Kenepp, a senior majoring in human development and family studies (HDFS) and minoring in women’s studies, had a unique opportunity for her final semester at Penn State Altoona. Instead of taking an existing internship, one that was already planned out, she was able to develop her own virtual internship. A “personal contact,” she says, pointed her in the direction of Chapin Hall, a former orphanage that in the mid-1980s became “a policy research institution that focuses on child welfare, foster care systems, youth homelessness, and community capacity to support children, youth, and families” (according to their website).
It couldn’t have been a better fit. “It wasn’t like they had this structured internship,” she explains. “They wanted to create something around my requirements, what I was interested in, and my long-term career goals. There were a lot of meetings, a lot of emails last fall about what opportunities they had, what my interests were, and how we could align those.” In the end, Kenepp was able to work on a number of projects, such as “the creation of a systematic review for New Opportunities, a national youth homelessness prevention program we are developing. I was able to sort through relevant research and assemble a visual chart that outlined essential information on program development.” The video Kenepp created about her experience, “Blown Away by the Windy City,” can be viewed here.
What might have been the biggest benefit for Kenepp was unexpected: she learned that she does not want to do “direct service work”; she prefers research. She had started out working on research projects with Assistant Teaching Professor, HDFS, Lauren Jacobson as a freshman and knew she enjoyed it but her time with Chapin Hall confirmed her suspicions. That revelation was “one of the most valuable things I could have learned.”
As she looks toward employment and grad school, Kenepp will definitely be looking for more research opportunities and her advisor could not be more supportive. After working with Kenepp for four years, an experience Jacobson says has been “a true delight,” she has confidence that her now-former student will excel. “Raya has a natural talent for thinking critically and asking questions that are deeply thoughtful but also reflect a strong understanding, an awareness of the complexity of the contexts of human development. She combines this with a passion for pursuing ways to ‘right the wrongs’ of society by advocating for marginalized people especially young people, e.g., adolescents and young adults, in order that they can flourish and meet their full potential.”
Looking down the road, Jacobson notes that after graduate school “Raya could move into University research arenas or into areas of public policy, with the ability to make an important impact regardless of which direction she turns. I am excited to see where her path leads and the impact she is able to have on the lives of people left behind by society!”
—Therese Boyd, ’79