Johns Hopkins 2018 Summer Research Experience: Leadership Alliance National Symposium

Welcome back to the fall!

This first week of college has been surprisingly quite hectic for me. You may have observed me shuttling back and forth the campus in between my classes, several welcome week events, and all the while assisting new students getting registered at the last minute for their classes. It reminds me of my own CCBC journey; I too had decided at the very last minute of last fall that CCBC was to be my home for the foreseeable future.

And what a home it has been.

In my last post, I promised to share my final thoughts on the 2018 Summer Research Experience fellowship, a 10-week residential collaborative program between CCBC and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) designed to revitalize student motivation in the humanities. As you may recall, I said I would share what we did at the Leadership Alliance National Symposium (LANS) conference.

Practicing for one last time at the JHU Humanities Collaboratory

This conference was held in (out of all places) Hartford, Connecticut — a place that holds particular significance for me. This time, I was eagerly traveling with nine of my fellow CCBC scholars and other researchers from around the country on Amtrak on a restful (though some may call it restless) journey to the Connecticut Convention Center. Here, we were to present our research findings to our audience. With our scripts reverberating against our inner voices, it seems safe to say that most of us were nervous. Some of us had our scripts down to the letter. Others were still rehearsing with their friends on the train.

We were all excited to showcase our findings. The bio/engineering students from other universities confidently held their long rolls of posters for the poster sessions. We humanities students held nothing: our Powerpoint presentations had already been preserved on flash drives. Our brain’s hard drives had taken care of the memorization part.

Dr. Natalie Strobach, the director of undergraduate research at JHU, stressed that Hopkins is the best and will always remain the best in LANS. She had all of us motivated enough to present our diverse topics with enthusiasm and vigor. We CCBC students together with three HBCU students did not want to let our mentors’ expectations down. So we rode the train in anticipation of taking the audience’s breath away.

And that’s exactly what happened at LANS. I remembered what I promised you — my readers — and took videos of the presentations of some CCBC students. While these videos cannot capture the joy of attending the conference, I also took pictures that may give some clarity of fullsome experience of being in this prestigious fellowship program. Here you go!

So that’s that! I hope you enjoyed it. Next post is going to be about the final segment of the program — another symposium at JHU and the farewell.

If you have any questions about this research fellowship or the application process, please feel free to reach out to Ms. Nicole Daniels, the Honors Program Coordinator, at ndaniels@ccbcmd.edu. You can also reach out to Dr. Natalie Strobach, JHU director of undergraduate research at strobach@jhu.edu.