Giving Back to Our Community

By Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies

In the spirit of community action, service and initiative we hope to see in our students, several Quinnipiac faculty members including Jill Martin, Deborah Clark, Diane Ariza, Xi Chen, Nancy Burns, Karen Bliss, Courtney Marchese, and Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox came together to give back to the community as part of the Big Event on Saturday, April 6, 2013.

The Big Event is a day of service organized and run by students in universities and colleges across the nation to express gratitude to the local community. The students form teams that participate in a variety of largely non-profit community organizations dedicated to issues such as social justice, children and elderly services, and health initiatives, among others. We hope this day provides students with more than an artificial engagement with community action. Perhaps instead this will be one of many opportunities for students to become involved in their local community, understand the importance of community action, and grasp the reality that so many community members are struggling to meet the most basic needs.

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Baseball and Statistics

By Stan Rothman, Professor of Mathematics

From 9 AM on March 26 to 12 PM on March 27, I had the privilege of spending time with two special people. One man, Rico Brogna, was a former Major Leaguer; the other man Gabriel Costa is a Catholic priest.

My 27 hour adventure begins with Rico Brogna’s visit to my baseball and statistics class at Quinnipiac University on March 26. What follows in this posting is a summary of Rico’s presentation to my class on the scouting philosophy for one ML team. The first new thing I learned about scouting was that a ML team has two scouting departments. One department scouted only the amateur players; the other department was assigned to scouting the professional players. Rico scouted the professional players.

Why Fulbright?

By Hillary Haldene, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

When I first started at Quinnipiac, in 2007, I was struck by the fact that we had a number of faculty who had received CIES Fulbrights, but not a single undergraduate had applied for an IIE. After my first couple of semesters, I was convinced we had students who were smart enough, enterprising enough, and creative enough to apply for the prestigious award. The beauty of the IIE is the length – short and sweet. Two pages for a research statement, one page biography. The pedagogical potential of assigning an IIE proposal in virtually any class – anthropology of gender-based violence; anthropology of health and medicine; anthropology of development – seemed limitless. The value of teaching a Fulbright proposal in an anthropology class was obvious. A Fulbright forces you to consider how the “Other”, the reader from the country you are writing about, would respond to your idea. For example, if you are writing a proposal to study women’s rights in Morocco, you have to imagine how a Moroccan would read your proposal, and how positively, or negatively, they would respond to it. In other words, a Fulbright is a simple way of teaching students the core values of anthropology: you are forced to see things from a different worldview, and put yourself in the shoes of someone from a different cultural context. I cannot think of a better assignment to have students fully develop the values anthropology brings to an undergraduate education. We can no longer assume that how we see the world is the best way to live in it. Therefore, it is necessary to consider how others are experiencing our global existence to find common solutions to the problems that affect us all.

Professors Present in Japan

By Courtney Marchese, Assistant Professor of Interactive Digital Design

At the beginning of March, Prof. Courtney Marchese and Prof. Charmaine Banach of the Interactive Digital Design Department, attended the 7th annual Conference on Design Principles and Practices at Chiba University. The event held just outside of Tokyo, Japan, included almost 200 accepted academic presenters representing the design field from all around the world.

Prof. Marchese and Prof. Banach’s interactive workshop was based off of a jointly-authored article called, “A Closer Look at the New Phenomena of Mob Hack Reviewing”.