Emily Neelon |
At the mention of Founder’s Day, students get excited about the cancellation of classes and prospect of catching up on much-needed sleep. But in honor of this annual celebration on Tuesday, April 8, students in disciplines from across campus will be presenting their senior projects and theses. So, instead of sleeping in extra late and wasting away the day in a lazy haze, find out what your fellow classmates have achieved. Here are a few of the projects seniors will present.Intervention practices for consumers of sex work
In their presentation “Can’t Buy Me Love: A History and Theoretical Analysis of Sex Work and Those Who Consume," senior social work majors Victoria Rosas, Kaitlyn Schuh and Maria Whearty examine how to implement theories and intervention practices in the sex work industry.
The students, who are completing this project for their practicum seminar class, chose to pursue this topic because of their combined interests in sex workers, prostitution and human trafficking and their experience working with women at Raphael House and Catholic Charities in their practicums. The seniors explore both women who choose to become involved in prostitution because of financial burdens and women that are trafficked into prostitution.
Taking these issues into consideration, the students investigated how to intervene in these dangerous situations, researching past studies on the subject.
“It’s basically interventions for male perpetrators or male clients, taking the blame off of women, and criminalizing men, because usually women are the ones that are arrested and not the men that are paying for them,” Rosas said.
The seniors are looking at intervention at multiple levels and how to keep female prostitutes out of harm’s way.
Rosas, Schuh and Whearty’s ultimate goal through their project is to bring attention to the issue, by discussing the history of and strategies for dealing with prostitution.
“The goal isn’t necessarily to eliminate prostitution,” Rosas said. “It’s to eliminate (exploitation) and violence in prostitution, because if we eliminate all the clients then we eliminate the living of prostitutes.”
They will present in Franz 015 at 10:15 a.m.
Localizing water systems in Arizona
In their presentation "Water System Improvement for Two Native American Communities in Arizona," eight senior civil engineering majors work to put into effect more effective and cost-efficient water systems. Seniors Matthew Chastain, Emily Eichner, Kathryn Husk, Courtney Langer, Charles Newman, Michael Tarbert, Chelsea Trotter and Meghan Veregge have been working on this project since the beginning of the school year along with their faculty adviser civil engineering professor Mark Kennedy.
The team took a trip to Arizona over fall break to visit the site and the Indian Health Services, which is a third party aid that works with the utility association to provide water to various Native American communities.
“We got to go do testing, meet our clients, and really get to know the site for the project we were working on,” Kennedy said.
After collecting data, the team designed a new system that connects water between two different Native American reservations that are five miles away from each other, in the hopes of lowering costs for their utility association. By localizing the water, the association will save millions of dollars in operation costs.
The project proved to be difficult in multiple aspects.
“I think the challenging part of this project is that we are working long distance,” Kennedy said. “It has been challenging for everyone to stay in communication with each other.”
Chastain found it tough to work in such a large group.
“It was hard because it’s hard to find work for everyone,” Chastain said. “One person has to finish something before another can begin. I feel like a lot of people didn’t get as much experience as they would have liked, but I think it worked out OK.”
Chastain believes the students’ presentation on the change they are making to the communities’ water system will be helpful to underclassmen engineering majors.
“If they’re interested in any kind of water resources engineering, you can really see what goes into the design process,” Chastain said.
They will present in Shiley Hall 319 at 10:15 a.m.
Rebekah Markillie |
Nursing political activism
Out of the 3.1 million registered nurses in America, only 100,000 are members of the American Nurses Association (ANA). According to their website, the ANA is the only full-service professional organization that represents the interests of nurses all across the country. However with such a small number of ANA members, nurses are having a hard time getting the policy changes needed to advance their profession and provide better care for their patients.
“Ultimately, what we’ve learned is that the scope of nursing practice is in the hands of the politics and we don’t have many nurses in politics right now. Our voice is not strong enough to advocate for ourselves as a profession,” senior Francis Moore said.
Having nurses involved with politics allows for policy changes to be made, which leads to the upstream effect: the effects from the policy trickle down to help working nurses. As of now, Oregon has the best nursing autonomy in the country. Even still, by expanding the scope of their practice, health care can be more accessible and affordable.
March 20-25 senior nursing students Moore, Mathilde Christophersen, John Adamson, Christy McCall and Jason Tuttle attended an American Association of Colleges of Nursing conference and lobbied four different requests at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. for their senior project “Advocacy Through Political Action.” They were lobbying for increased nursing education funding, increased nursing research funding, expansion to the scope of nursing practice and workforce development.
“(Lobbying) added another lens,” McCall said. “It’s not just about taking care of my patients, its about advocating for them at a bigger level, and my fellow nurses.”
With their Founder’s Day presentation the group hopes to raise awareness and emphasize the importance of political activism, not only in nursing, but in other professions.
“(Policy) is sort of hidden. You don’t really see it but it affects us every single day,” Christopherson said.
They will be presenting at 10 a.m. in Buckley Center Auditorium.
Psychology and Jails
Based on senior Chelsea Roake’s research on Clark County Jail inmates and UP undergraduate and graduate students, she discovered that UP students smoked more marijuana than inmates who were arrested for drug use. This past year Roake surveyed inmates and UP students to see the differences in their attitudes towards crime for her senior project: "Comparison of Inmates and College Students on Background, Mental Health, and Attitudes toward Crime." She surveyed them with questions about mental health, education levels, parental education, substance use levels and attitudes towards crime.
The most common drugs UP students used were marijuana and ecstasy while inmates most commonly used methamphetamine, heroin and crack cocaine.
“We actually had some students put barbiturates and tranquilizers and crack cocaine (on the survey) which was kind of scary,” Roake said.
Both inmates and students reported similar levels of anxiety. Because inmates also reported more learning disabilities, Roake believes crime is related to the amount education inmates received and stability of childhood home life.
“Because of that, my assumption was that maybe these inmates don’t have the same coping skills university students have,” Roake said.
With her research, Roake hopes to develop new rehabilitation techniques for inmates. One of her ideas, moral recognition therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy, would try to get inmates to relearn societal morals towards behavior and crime. The inmates would discuss why or why not different behaviors, in their eyes, were criminal or not. Since inmates generally had less stable homes growing up and many of them didn’t complete high school, they made less educated decisions about behavior.
To decrease crime in the future Roake hopes to see a more fair education system where kids from less stable homes and who have learning disabilities could still receive education without getting discouraged.
“When you have a school system that doesn’t match your style of learning it results in crime,” Roake said.
She will present Shiley Hall 124 at 3:15 p.m.
CORRECTION: An earlier edition of this post said the faculty adviser for "Water System Improvement for Two Native American Communities in Arizona" is named Mark Jefferson. He is actually named Mark Kennedy.
