ON CAMPUS: Student projects honored in Unity

BY OLIVIA HANSON

01/11/2010

At the end of every semester Unity College hosts a conference to showcase different student projects. They create posters, videos and PowerPoint presentations to show off their research and community work.

Besides showing off our hard work, we also have the chance to win awards, some of which come with a $250 cash prize.

The conference is always a great opportunity to show what you can do as a student and to see what other people have been working on. The dedication that some of these projects exhibit is amazing and they all showcase one of the best aspects of Unity: hands-on learning.

This semester's conference started with poster presentations and judging in the basement of the Unity College Center for the Performing Arts. The room was packed with people moving around the winding poster display wall, which had projects ranging from information on Unity College's medicine wheel to the effects of rut on buck weight loss.

Students, professors and community members mingled, enjoying the posters despite the strong smell of manure in the poorly ventilated room (we are a very hands-on group).

Multi-media presentations in the auditorium ranged from the scientific to the wickedly hilarious.

Sophomore Patrick O'Roark presented a slide show on his trip to Indonesia conducting primate studies with project Wallacea.

For her mythology and the Bible class, senior Tiffany Dorsey showed a video of hell, with her cat starring as the devil.

The awards ceremony was the highlight of the conference. Winners included Hannah Kreitzer for Creativity with her embroidery work, Unity's environmental sustainability class for Environmental Professionalism with their research on chromium in river sediment, and Lacie Scheuer and Kristen Cowen for Academic Excellence for work with starfish.

One of the conferences' biggest honors is the Unity Award for a project that embodied Unity College ideals. It is one of the awards with a cash prize.

This semester's winners of the Unity Award were Andy Gagnon and Rory Dwyer for their project on the many uses of the Unity College Forest. Their work showed the recent improvements in the forests trail system and focused on how the forest is used for recreation and education, being a feature of hands-on learning projects.

The most decorated entry at the conference was Ashley Sutton's Saddle Up for Change! project, winner of both the Education award and the Partnerships award.

Sutton began with an assignment in her community practices class to design a project that benefited a local organization. Sutton chose Last Chance Ranch, a horse rescue organization, because she had always been interested in horses, but had never worked with them.

She expected to do some grant writing, but found the opportunity for something more. Working directly with the ranch owners Sutton developed a complete program, with lesson plans, for using equine therapy to improve the lives of at-risk youths.

She called on her own experience of learning to handle and ride horses for the first time to develop a program to encouraged teamwork, confidence and maturity.

Now what started out as a class project has become something real, the Last Chance Ranch hopes to start this program soon.

For Ashley Sutton, an environmental education major, this has been an amazing experience and when the program starts, pending funding, it could be the beginning of a successful career.

This student conference was one of the most successful the school has ever seen and will continue to produce excellent work, like Sutton's project, in the future.

Olivia Hanson is a senior studying wildlife at Unity College.