by Amanda Dennis | Nov 13, 2019 | Alumni Perspective, International Opportunities |
By Kevin Medansky My name is Kevin Medansky, and I graduated from Haverford College this past May. After a stint in Iowa working on the Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign this past summer, I moved to Paris, France, to pursue a Master’s at the Institute of Theater Studies of the Sorbonne Nouvelle and teach English at a local private high school called l’École alsacienne. For my Master’s, since I’m only in class for around nine hours each week, I’m mostly concentrating on my thesis. The quirky part about this program is that since my degree will be in Theater, not French, I have the liberty to study plays from across the world, including Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Hanoch Levin’s Krum, on which most of my analysis is centered. Nevertheless, all of my coursework, as well as my thesis, are entirely in French, so I still benefit from the language immersion environment I have long been hoping for. Otherwise, my work at l’École alsacienne has helped me test out teaching as a potential passion of mine. Each week, I teach twelve one-hour classes, spanning from seventh to twelfth grade. Since I have total autonomy in determining the curricula, I’ve developed three different syllabi for my classes. In my middle school classes, we spend each class with games and exercises aimed at helping them improve their vocabulary and grammar skills. This is quite reminiscent of my experience as a Teaching Assistant in the Bryn Mawr Department of French and Francophone Studies, and I’m grateful that those skills have transferred so easily. With a number of my high school classes,...
by Amanda Dennis | Aug 5, 2019 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, Internships, Student Perspective |
Pictured: A photo taken by Susan Wright of herself and Molly Biddle, after finishing her closing speech of a money laundering trial. By Molly Biddle Earlier this year in February, I had the opportunity to travel to the Chelmsford Crown Court in East England to witness the sentencing of the Stansted 15, a group of protestors who had been accused essentially of terrorism offences after preventing the deportation of immigrants. This was my first chance to see the English criminal justice system personally. I had been invited to the hearing as the guest of Susan Wright, a barrister from London who was advocating on behalf of one of the protestors. After this opportunity, I reached out to Ms. Wright, hoping that she might take me on for a period over the summer. She very graciously agreed, and due to the generosity of Haverford’s CCPA and the Deborah Lafer-Scher International Internship, I was able to stay in the UK for six more weeks—having already spent the year studying abroad in the country. This is the beginning of my fourth week working as a ‘mini-pupil’ with Ms. Wright, and I must say that it has been an incredible experience. This is largely due to the consideration demonstrated by Ms. Wright. Ms. Wright acted as a defense attorney in the United States for many years before relocating to Europe. She also notably represented one of the first people to be accused by the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone and acted as Head of Rule of Law for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia in addition to holding...
by Amanda Dennis | Apr 13, 2019 | Events, General, International Opportunities |
The CCPA is already gearing up for next year! Specifically, we are beginning to prepare students for the 2020-2021 Fullbright Fellowship applications. Will you be one of the students applying? Read on to discover what the Fulbright Fellowship Program is, who should apply, and where you can learn more! What is the Fulbright Fellowship Program? “The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides grants for individually designed study/research projects or English Teaching Assistant Programs. A candidate will submit a Statement of Grant Purpose defining activities to take place during one academic year in a participating country outside the U.S. During their grants, Fulbrighters will meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Through engagement in the community, the individual will interact with their hosts on a one-to-one basis in an atmosphere of openness, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom, thereby promoting mutual understanding. Grant lengths and dates vary by country. Please consult the specific country summary for details.” Source: https://us.fulbrightonline.org/about/fulbright-us-student-program Types of Awards Open Study/Research Awards: With this traditional award, candidates design a research project for a specific country. Read more here. English Teaching Assistant Awards: The English Teaching Assistant (ETA) awards match candidates with classrooms abroad where they will assist local English teachers and serve as a “Cultural ambassador for the U.S..” Read more here. Who should apply? Students can apply during their senior year...
by Amanda Dennis | Sep 26, 2018 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, Liberal Arts, Student Perspective |
By Claire Burdick This summer I am a research intern in the Behavior Lab at the Saint Louis Zoo. A typical day for me involves collecting data from live and video observations and analyzing data from previous projects. For each study, all of the interns have to take a series of different reliability tests to make sure that we are all collecting data in a consistent way. I start each day by scoring video for a long-term project on mother-infant interactions in several antelope species. The purpose of this study is to learn more about how antelopes in captivity interact with their offspring and how different parenting styles might affect infant outcomes. Twice a day, I head out on grounds to help collect data on the current live observation projects. We are doing a study on the zoo’s new grizzly bears, Huckleberry and Finley, observing their general behavior to see how they are spending their time and how they are using their exhibit. We use a tablet to record what each bear is doing, how close they are to each other, and where each bear is in the exhibit every minute for an hour. Some days I head to the zoo’s primate house with another intern to observe Coquerel’s sifaka, black-handed spider monkeys, and guereza colobus to collect baseline data of general behavior for a study on how noise affects their behavior. The third live study this summer is on the chimpanzees, and we observe the three males in the group because a new male was introduced this summer. We collected data during the introduction process and are...
by Amanda Dennis | Aug 23, 2018 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, International Students, Internships, Liberal Arts, Student Perspective |
Loving the Smell of Fly Food in the Morning or How To Dissect an Organ Too Small to See By Federico Perelmuter This summer I’ve been interning at the Fundación Instituto Leloir, in Buenos Aires, Argentina (aka home). There, in the Wappner Lab, I’ve met some wonderful people, and learned a lot about my country’s scientific system, which I ‘escaped’ in attending Haverford. The main focus of my experience was the analysis of the role of autophagy (the process by which cells eat some bits of themselves for energy and raw materials) in the differentiation of blood cells in the lymph gland. What is a lymph gland? It is a fantastic model for studying the different factors influencing the differentiation (or lack thereof) of blood cells in flies. It is an organ located at the base of the brain of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) larvae, measuring a glorious 200×20 um (about as long as a human hair is wide, and as wide as ¼ of a sheet of paper is thick), and semi-transparent. I had to extract at least 6 in half an hour, in order to make experimentation worthwhile. In my last week at the lab I carried out a full dissection protocol, from crossing the flies (basically sticking a bunch of them in a labelled jar and waiting until they produce offspring) to extracting glands from the resulting larvae, immunostaining and fixing these glands, and then mounting them into microscope slides to be photographed for fluorescence. I thought I’d tell you exactly how you can also tear apart innocent fly larvae to observe an essentially negligible part of their anatomy,...
by Jennifer Barr | Aug 9, 2018 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, Internships, Liberal Arts, Student Perspective |
By Sheraz Qamar Over the past nine weeks, I have learned a great deal about what it is like to be a healthcare provider for under-served and minority populations, especially those without health insurance. Many patients that come to the clinic are self-paying; for this reason, the doctor is always looking for ways to assist patients financially by providing coupons for pharmacies and giving free samples of expensive medication. He is always looking for the best and cheapest options for his patients. During the end of the first month, the doctor told me that the clinic usually sees less patients at the end of each month due to the fact that many patients have to pay rent at that time and are unable to spend money on healthcare services. As I typed notes for the doctor and assisted with billing procedures, I was also able to learn about the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes needed for billing purposes. Each assessment, such as hyperlipidemia, joint pain, and even regular physical exams, has an ICD code that is needed in order to get paid from insurance companies. This was the first time that I had been introduced to ICD codes and how they are used in a clinical setting. Based on each assessment, the doctor also ordered blood work, therapeutic injections, or other tests that were done in another room at the clinic. The lab room was where blood samples are collected and sent to LabCorp, who conduct an analysis and send the results back to the clinic. This was very convenient for patients as they were able to get...
