Last week or so, in the UT News of January 21, we were informed that
"Geography student places at national science competition
"A University of Toledo geography student recently competed against some of the nation’s most intelligent young scientists and engineers from top U.S. colleges, including Harvard, Stanford and MIT.
"Jeff Kodysh, a senior at UT, placed third in the energy division of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2010 Science and Energy Challenge."
...
(See
http://utnews.utoledo.edu/index.php/01_21_2011/geography-student-places-at-national-science-competition
for the whole article.)
This is terrific news in and of itself--congratulations to Jeff and to his adviser, Dr. Nemeth! And I personally am also pleased to see some attention given to someone in a field other than totally STEM(M) or sports. We of the former A&S--whatever college we're in now--should think about tooting our own horn a bit more. (No one else will do it for us!) We have a lot to be pleased with and proud of that the rest of UT should hear about. I don't know how things are chosen for the UToday, but maybe someone out there does.
And now to my second post-within-a-post: Last week, while I was home sick, I read the book In the Pond by Ha Jin. It's quite an interesting--and fairly quick--read about corruption. Worth a look at least.
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5 comments:
Go Jeff! I had him in one of my upper level classes once... he was a wonderfully intelligent and polite young man, a pleasure to have in class!
I wish him the best in all of his endeavors! He is just one more example how a liberal arts-based education prepares our students for the both challenges and unique opportunities of the future.
"Kodysh competed in the energy category and received third place with his research project titled 'A GIS-Based Methodology for Assessing Rooftop Solar Energy Potential.'" -- This sounds pretty STEMMy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, one of the strengths of Arts and Sciences over Engineering is that A&S science students get full training in the humanities as well. Or at least they did before the Jacobs scheme took hold.
Indeed, postdoc.
The fact that Kodysh recognizes the social reasons and implications for rooftop solar energy production is because he has social awareness. He probably did not need a professor to tell him to "do this project", or why this project might be important.
Some postdoc brings up one of the beauties--and one of the most important things--about the humanities: the combination of arts AND sciences! Just a couple quick examples:
Geography: physics, anthropology, cartography, vexillolgy ...
Languages (English, foreign languages): literature, logic, linguistics (involving physics!)
Visual arts: chemistry, physics
Music: physics, math
Social/cultural/diversity aspects in all of them
And so on. (I'm sure you can think of more examples--and also of humanities aspects of STEM(M), I'm just not as familiar with them.)
"In the Pond"--recommended reading!
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