This project takes a look at the instructors' opinions and insights about the First-Year Experience Seminar course at BSU. I interviewed approximately fifteen professors who taught the class during the fall semester of 2014 and asked them all the same eleven questions about feedback for the course, what kind of curiculum they used, and how they felt about teaching the class. The interviews were then transcribed, and I looked through them all to find common themes and answers to the same questions in hopes of pinpointing some areas of the program that may need extra attention or possible changes and to also see what areas work well for instructors. The results of my project will be shared in aggregate form at two conferences and also with my research mentor. 

Being of service is enriching to say the least. It can yield a sense of community, usefulness, and purpose. As students of mathematics, this endeavor is not always emphasized. We sought such an opportunity with a local non-profit. Young Adults in Transition, or YAIT, is a transitional housing program funded and established by the YMCA. The program takes in homeless youth from the ages of 18-24; providing them with at most two years of housing. These youth need more than a place to stay. Case managers at YAIT work with these youth with the hopes of helping clients develop skills that will reinforce their stability. Chores at YAIT embody these goals. They provide a way for clients to give back, as well as an opportunity to practice having responsibilities. If a client fails to do their assigned chores, they are given a penalty. Currently chores are selected in an arbitrary fashion. The cost of this arbitrary decision is that some participants will be given more responsibilities, while others less, which results in more or less penalties. The case managers at YAIT have asked us to find a more mathematical approach. Hence, our objective is to produce a years’ worth of weekly chore schedules while minimizing the number of extra chores any participant must do yearly. We used an approach that utilized Latin squares. This approach was successful in that it allowed us to produce 52 weekly schedules that minimized the number of extra chores any one participant must complete. Moreover, this mathematical approach ensures chore assignment is a non-personal endeavor. This is to say that chore assignment is more tolerable. This talk is based on joint work with Laura Tackaberry-Barker, Kevin Ma, and Adam Mohr.

College enrollment in the United States is higher than ever before in its history. However, there is a strong delineation between students who know exactly how to use education as a tool and students who do not. The purpose of this research was to find out more about the social intelligence of students in academic settings and its effects on faculty-student relationships. Further, the study aimed to understand the significance of faculty-student relationships in relation to predictors of academic/career success and sense of community. This study (n = 200) used mixed methods to examine these relationships. Quantitative measures included an online survey to assess primary study variables and student demographics, while qualitative focus groups were employed to contextualize and better understand quantitative data. The research literature in this area supports the notion that higher social intelligence, sense of community and quality of mentoring relationships are all beneficial for long term success in academia and elsewhere; however, there is no published research to date that critically explores the relationship between these three phenomena. This study hypothesizes that students with greater social intelligence in academic settings will have both more frequent and more meaningful faculty-student relationships, as well as a higher sense of community. A secondary hypothesis is that faculty-student relationships may matter more for the success of first generation students. These findings have important implications for the fields of education and psychology because if we know what comprises the ability to use education as a tool, we can help others use this tool wisely to meet both professional and personal goals.

Emma Buttles Andrews traveled through Egypt with her lover, American lawyer turned amateur archaeologist Theodore Davis from 1889-1912. She kept diaries during her trips that have proved to be a valuable resource for information about American and Egyptian life at the turn of the century, and in them she provides vital commentary on the archaeology and pioneering Egyptologists of the time. While her diaries speak of incredible discoveries of tombs and other antiquities, Andrews also details her personal and social life on the Nile. Late 19th and early 20th century Egypt drew wealthy visitors from all over the globe, some of whom spent time with Andrews and Davis. From Egyptologists like Howard Carter to bankers like J.P. Morgan, Emma’s diaries portray a wide arrange of figures and the daily life behind living and working at excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Egyptologists have long recognized the importance of her work, yet it is currently only accessible by visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia to examine either of the two remaining copies of the diaries. It remains otherwise unpublished to this day. Thanks to the Newbook Digital Text project at the University of Washington, undergraduate interns are working hard to create an interactive web-based version of Emma’s diaries in an effort to make them universally available to all who are interested in reading them or utilizing them as an academic source. In our presentation, we will be discussing Emma’s diaries as a whole, the work our interns complete to publish this material, as well as give an overview of some of those mentioned in her writings, most notably Howard Carter, JP Morgan, Dame Nellie Melba, her niece Mary Buttles, and scholar Claudius Labib Bey.

Human-animal interaction (HAI) is a relatively new area of study in psychology. Researchers in this field investigate the ways humans and animals interact, the variables related to those interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between mood state and HAI. Participants completed the Profile of Mood States, a measure of mood state, before having a brief interaction with an animal. Animals involved in the study included dogs, cats, rats, a rabbit, and a hedgehog. Following the interaction, participants completed the same mood scale again, as well as a measure of physical HAI on a 4-point Likert scale. Participants were also asked to qualitatively report their experience with the animal. Responses were analyzed to detect anthropomorphism. It was predicted that there would be a significant relationship between emotional connection and anthropomorphism as well as higher scores on the mood. HAI, r(47) = -.33, p < .05, and emotional connection, r(48) = -.29, p < .05, were found to correlate with mood state. The results suggest HAI and mood are related, but more research is warranted. Our operational definition of anthropomorphism was not related to emotional connection. Further Research should incorporate different methodology.

Human males are generally larger than human females in body size, but in the pelvis, this sexual dimorphism is reversed and females are larger. This reversal is unique to humans in the primate order, prompting the question: What causes these differences in pelvic size between males and females? One prominent theory is the Obstetrical Dilemma (OD), which suggests that the female pelvis is a compromise between the requirements of giving birth to offspring with large brains and maintaining biomechanically efficient walking or running. However, research has shown that even with a larger pelvis, the energetic expenditure of women walking or running is equivalent to that of men. Previous research is limited, though, in that pelvis metrics were considered using dry bone, without the contribution from cartilage of the pubic symphysis and the auricular surfaces of the os coxae. To better understand the differences between the male and female pelvic structure, medical images (magnetic resonance, computed tomographic, and radiographic) of living people, in which the cartilage is intact, were used to perform various measurements, which were chosen from the primary literature. Osirix and Slicer were used to perform all measures. These programs are designed to analyze DICOM images such as MRI’s, CT’s, and x-rays and allow you to perform measurements on the images using landmarks or line tools. The anticipated results are that the previous research findings conducted on skeletal remains will be confirmed when measured on living individuals and that new measures may prove significant (e.g. transverse diameter of the inlet). In addition to this, it is expected that there will be a difference in the cross sectional width and length of the pubic symphysis between males and females.