IV Post

San Diego, California - In this week’s SDSUniverse, (San Diego State University’s electronic news weekly), Lorena Ruggero reports that last weekend San Diego State University held its first-ever Student Research Symposium, consisting of more than 300 papers and poster presentations from “across campus”. 

 

In her article, “Student Research Booming at SDSU”, Ruggero, citing Camille Nebeker, director of SDSU’s Division of Research Affairs as her source, states “…the majority of presenters, including both poster and oral presentations, were master's and doctoral degree candidates. However, nearly a quarter of participants were undergraduate students.” 

 

As active supporters of the Student Research Symposium, we would like to commend Ruggero for her highly informative article and to add that, besides the master’s, doctoral and undergraduate degree candidates who participated in this important event, the input and participation of Open University students at SDSU should also be recognized. In particular, Open University student Beneranda Calderon’s paper, “The socioeconomic status of court interpreters in California”, presented in the session on Culture, Identity and Representation, is the product of the collaboration between Open University and matriculated students of the Imperial Valley Campus certificate program in court interpreting who conducted a survey of the members of the California Court Interpreters Association at the latter’s annual conference in 2007.

 

Additionally, Stacy Furrer, also from the Imperial Valley Campus, presented a paper in the session on Literature through the Ages. Applying a methodology known as autobiographical literary criticism, Stacy intertwined her analysis of The Maid’s Tragedy by the English playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher with an account of her own physically and sexually abused childhood to arrive at a novel interpretation of this literary work.

 

Psychology students from the Imperial Valley campus participated in the poster and paper sessions as well. Vanessa Camargo and Denise Widhalm, for instance, presented a poster of the project “Parental Emotional Availability as a Predictor of College Women’s Self-Esteem”, on which they collaborated with fellow student Elizabeth De Armas. The results of this study indicate that perceptions of maternal and paternal emotional availability—variables typically studied in child and adolescent populations—are positively associated with college women’s self-esteem. Additionally, Denise presented a paper, “The Role of Acculturation, Acculturative Stress, and Gender and Marital Satisfaction among Mexican Americans in their First Year of Marriage”, co-authored with other students from Imperial Valley. This paper presented preliminary data from a longitudinal study of marital satisfaction among married couples conducted by Dr. Donna Castañeda of the Imperial Valley Campus.

 

Robert Stone represented the Imperial Valley campus and its Teacher Education Division with the presentation of his paper “Empowering a Border Community across Family Literacy Circles.” For this insightful work, Robert won a dean’s award at the awards luncheon held on March 1.