Sal Cania ’07 was a global studies major from Hannawa Falls, N.Y.  He was president of St. Lawrence’s chapter of Amnesty International, and served as public relations chair for the Thelomathesian Society, St. Lawrence’s student government.  He spent a semester on St. Lawrence’s study program in France and has done extensive research on the media.

World Wide Research
At St. Lawrence, you can do research from the minute you arrive on campus—in the real world or the virtual world.
By Sal Cania ’07

To most students, Facebook is just a way to get in touch with their friends online and share pictures. But Sean Watkins ’07 wanted to know more, so he wrote his senior thesis on it.

Research opportunities at St. Lawrence are boundless, allowing students to explore the natural and social sciences, humanities and the arts. From the moment you step on campus, you are immersed in a diversity of academic fields that will afford you the chance to do your own research even as soon as your first semester. In fact, one of the goals of St. Lawrence’s First-Year Program is to teach research skills, and one way you will learn them is by exercising them.

The liberal arts education that St. Lawrence offers stresses the importance of research in strengthening critical thinking, communication and analytical skills that you will need to succeed in life after graduation. By learning how to do academic research, students acquire and develop the skills that they need in all aspects of learning, whether giving presentations, writing papers or doing field work. Looking for opportunities isn’t difficult, either: the faculty at St. Lawrence are engaged in their own research, which contributes significantly to their teaching, and many of them involve their students in that research.

The First-Year Seminar that you take during the spring semester of your first year is one of the first opportunities you will have to apply the research skills you learned in your First-Year Program course. “The First-Year Seminar offers students the chance to build their base for the rest of their college experience,” says former Associate Dean of the First Year Steve Horwitz. “Every first-year student has the opportunity under the guidance of a professor to learn the skills of researching: finding, evaluating and integrating sources.”

After constructing this base of skills, you may move on to study topics closely aligned with your interests, particularly once you declare a major as a sophomore. You’ll find dozens of choices for topics and methods within your chosen field or fields.

Alexa Unser ’09, of Bozeman, MT, found a passion for photographing impoverished children, for the purpose of helping them, for a University-sponsored research fellowship during the summer of 2006. “Artists have an obligation as sociologists to reveal their observations of the world,” says Unser. “I believe it is important for them to understand the spaces around them and to be able to comment on them visually.” Unser worked in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Melissa Schulenberg, a collaboration that gave her resources and the guidance needed to accomplish her project.

“We were interested in volunteering for an organization called Safe Passage, which provides humanitarian aid in Guatemala,” says Unser. “One of the challenges in applying for research and travel grants is the artist being able to prove that what he or she is doing is linked to art. However, I believe that everything is linked to making art, humanitarian aid in particular.” She and Professor Schulenberg collaborated on the creation of 10 prints, which they offered for sale, with the proceeds going to a charitable organization that aids in the education of poor Guatemalan children.

Students at St. Lawrence don’t have to apply for funding in order to pursue an interesting field of research, however. Lyndsay Belt ’08, of Potsdam, NY, took Associate Professor of Biology Brad Baldwin’s marine ecology class, during which she traveled to the Bahamas to investigate fish populations and aid in the conservation of reefs around the island of San Salvador.

“This trip gave me the chance to gain some valuable first-hand experience working with wildlife,” says Belt. “Subsequently, through the University I got an internship working in Yellowstone National Park for summer 2007, working on species conservation and doing research for the Student Conservation Association.”

Many majors, such as global studies, require students to engage in a Senior-Year Experience.  This is a collaborative research project; each student researches a topic of choice while working closely with a faculty advisor, which helps with not only the “what” but also the “how” of research.
And that’s how Watkins, of Lowville, NY, came to do his senior research with Associate Professor of Global Studies John Collins on the Facebook internet networking phenomenon. “I discussed Facebook as a global, imagined, democratic, technological space,” says Watkins. “For this, I received grants from SLU to conduct my research in both the United States and England. I found the experience to be very rewarding because it gave me a chance to bring the theoretical and the practical together in a way that brings a voice to young people.”