IU Southeast hosted its third annual Student Showcase in the Hoosier Room on April 14.
Student displays and demonstrations encouraged attendees to participate and learn more about their personal research or projects they had worked on in an academic group.
The event was coordinated by the Academic Success Center in partnership with the Student Research Conference.
Sarah Gierke, academic adviser and coordinator of the Adult Student Center retention programs, had a hand in planning the event this year.
Gierke said the Student Showcase is a laid-back environment for students to promote their research or the academic clubs they are involved with on campus.
Dilu Nicholas, graphic arts senior, displayed a piece of his artwork at the show.
In the piece, Nicholas took the painting “American Gothic” by Grant Wood and subtly edited his and his partner’s face into the painting, replacing the original faces in the piece.
“My goal was to take that painting and to reconfigure it to modern contemporary society and to show how that society is changing,” Nicholas said. “I am a gay male who is also from Sri Lanka, so I am dark-skinned — my partner is a Caucasian male. We’ve been together for eight years.”
Nicholas said the fact that most people don’t notice the change in the faces at first demonstrates how subtle and smooth the transition to a different and more diverse culture has been.
Heather Taylor, geosciences senior, displayed some of the rocks and minerals the Geosciences Department had gathered on trips throughout the year. The display featured rocks the group had collected on a trip to South Dakota.
Taylor said the Geosciences Department tries to take trips every year. In the past, they have gone to Alaska and South Dakota, and, this summer, they plan to travel to the Ozarks in Missouri.
Vicki Mann, French senior, displayed information about 14th- and 15th-century French writer Christine de Pisan.
“She was 200 years ahead of her time,” Mann said. “She wrote [about] everything the Renaissance writers would write about a couple hundred years later.”
Pisan wrote about warfare and subjects women were never supposed to have any knowledge or opinion of in a time when poetry was the only acceptable topic for women’s writing.
“As far as I know, she was the first woman in Europe to get paid for her work,” Mann said.
Derek Cassady, safety sciences senior, demonstrated hearing safety on behalf of the Department of Applied Health Science on campus. The program is through Bloomington, taught by adjunct teachers who also currently work in the fields they are teaching. Cassady is studying workplace safety.
Cassady provided a machine to test student’s iPod’s according to Occupational Health and Safety Administration standards for safe decibel levels for hearing.
“The decibel levels where you start to do damage [to your ears] is 65, and when you think about it, when you drive with your window down, you are hearing about 85 decibels,” Cassady said.
By MICHELE HOP
Staff
mhop@ius.edu
