Terry Plater, top center, associate dean in the Graduate School and director of the Summer Research Program, joins student participants, from left, standing: Lashonn McNair, Israly Echegaray, Michele Hamilton and Claudia Lago, and seated: Daniel Huitt, Royce Smith, Jennifer Aponte and Christian Grafals. Robert Barker/University Photography
While most tier-one undergraduate programs these days have more black, Hispanic and Native American faces than they did a few decades ago, that is not so for most top-level university graduate programs. And a Ph.D. population lacking in diversity means few minority faculty members, which in turn narrows the educational experience of all students.
One of the ways universities such as Cornell have chosen to remedy the situation is to interest top students in graduate-level research while they are still undergraduates. Initiatives like Cornell's Summer Research Program, the Hughes Program and the Leadership Alliance -- a consortium of 30 universities, among them Cornell -- enable small groups of students, mostly minorities, to spend their summers working one-on-one with top scholars.
"Wisdom has it that these educational linkages bear fruit," said Terry Plater, an associate dean at the Cornell Graduate School who runs the Summer Research Program.
Among the students who came to Cornell this July and August as part of the program was Jennifer Aponte, who studied why birds, like their human counterparts, learn vocalizations better when they are babies. She measured how much song learning happens in one species of songbird, the African marsh warbler, a species that no one had studied before. She also completed a literature review and designed an empirical study she hopes to do for her honors thesis at the University of Puerto Rico, where she will be a senior this fall. The study measures the effects of social mediation -- what society does and doesn't do -- on the psychological development of people with handicaps.
Aponte, who is from San Juan, was born with a gap between two vertebrae and has used a wheelchair to get around since she was a child. The spinal malformation, with the clinical name spina bifida, led to her interest in neurobiology and psychology, which in turn led to her research topics.
At Cornell Aponte worked with Timothy DeVoogd, an associate professor of psychology, and Harry Segal, a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer in psychology. She spent her days doing laboratory research and lived at Cornell's Hasbrouck Apartments. This was her first experience at independent living.
"I was nervous because I had never done this before," Aponte said, "but it turned out to be a wonderful, enriching experience. The campus was accessible, and the grad school staff and professors were attentive and very accommodating to my needs." Aponte hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in developmental psychology at a U.S. university after she graduates next spring.
Another Summer Research Program scholar, Royce Smith, from Philadelphia, worked with Theodore Lowi, the government department's John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions. Lowi, who has given some thought to the privatization of prisons, encouraged Smith to do research in that area. Smith looked for common themes in state legislation governing prison privatization and conducted a state-by-state analysis, cataloging problems that have surfaced since states began allowing their prisons to be run by private companies. "We looked at 11 of the 26 states that have authorized privatization of prisons and are subcontracting their management to private corporations," said Smith. "It's a profitable business that is intended to save money," but is vulnerable to abuses. For example, because the corporations are reimbursed per prisoner, said Smith, they have a vested interest in retaining prisoners. Yet in half the states that permit prison privatization, it is the corporations that get to recommend for parole, a clear conflict of interest, according to Smith's findings.
Smith found vast inconsistencies among states' legislation governing prison privatization. For example, Ohio has comprehensive laws governing every aspect of prison privatization, while Oklahoma's laws are vague, particularly about the uses of force and discipline, leaving far too much discretion to the private prison managers and staff.
Smith is a political science major at Williams College, with a concentration in U.S. constitutional law. A professor of his at Williams, Gary Jacobson (Cornell Ph.D '72), will supervise him as he continues his research during the school year, looking for a link between clarity of legislation and success of privately run prisons. Smith initially planned to go on to law school after graduation, but the research project has whetted his appetite for graduate studies.
A third Summer Research Program scholar, Michele Hamilton, worked with Professor A.R. Kennedy, a biological anthropologist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and found a correlation between high childhood mortality rates and changes in public health policies in the 1800s that shifted the care of the sick and needy from the home to state-run institutions, such as asylums, orphanages and poorhouses.
Hamilton, who is majoring in medical anthropology at Hunter College in New York City, said of her research: "I found that as economic conditions changed, the view of the poor changed. In colonial times they were seen as part of God's plan, to be taken care of by the community. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution came the notion of the self-made man and the belief that the poor were responsible for their condition, that they were poor because they lacked moral fiber." She added, "The more I read about [19th century U.S. health policy], the more parallels I found between then and now."
Hamilton, who grew up in the East Bronx, wants to go on to graduate school "to add more science and culture studies" to her knowledge base. She called Cornell's library resources "remarkable" and described her research involvement as "demanding but great" and her summer experience "one of the most life-marking events."
"I never thought I'd enjoy a place so much that wasn't New York City," Hamilton added.
"The professors were extremely pleased with the quality of the student researchers' work," said Plater. As part of the program, she accompanied the students on trips to Niagara Falls, Toronto and New York City and a stay at the IBM Executive Conference Center in Palisades, N.Y., where they presented their research findings to about 300 fellow students from 13 other top-tier universities.
"When you're going on to graduate school, you have to have a passion for research," said Aponte, who discovered she did. "The program allowed me to decide what I want to do for the rest of my life."
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