STRIDE Projects

Dive Deeper

Enrolled students who are offered a spot in the STRIDE program will receive an extensive list of projects—spanning countless disciplines from history to engineering and nearly everything in between—to choose from.

A brief description is provided for each project. Some projects also include a list of skills the faculty member or project supervisor prefers in a STRIDE student and some sample tasks that you could be asked to perform.

50+ Projects

Here, we’ve compiled a small sampling of the more than 50 research projects that were offered to STRIDE scholars last year. (Note: not all departments offering STRIDE projects are represented!)

Insect Ecology & Conservation

Biological Sciences

Insects are one of the most diverse groups of living organisms both in terms of species richness and ecological function. Diversification has allowed insects to colonize every continent on Earth, exploit an assortment of food sources, and perform a variety of ecological roles (e.g. herbivory, predation, decomposition). Thus, insect activities provide critical ecosystem services, including provisioning, pollination, and soil formation. Human activities pose severe threats to insect populations such as habitat loss and degradation, climate change, chemical and light pollution, pesticide use, and altered plant communities. The combined effects of these threats have triggered severe insect population declines. Research in the Insect Ecology lab focuses on the effects of altered plant communities and thermal stress on butterflies and moths.

Students joining the lab may choose to focus on a.) habitat restoration at the MacLeish Field Station, b.) studying the effects of novel host plants and thermal stress on a native butterfly, the Baltimore checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton), or c.) developing and improving automated insect monitoring systems.

Skills to be developed during this project: experiment design, critical thinking, data management and processing, ecological field techniques, entomological techniques, teamwork, creativity and problem solving.

Reproducibility in HPC: A Literature Review

Computer Science

Reproducibility, or the ability to reproduce an experimental result, is a key component of the scientific method. However, in the field of high-performance computing (HPC), reproducibility is an often overlooked aspect of computational experiments. HPC presents an interesting case, where there are unique computing environments, e.g. the fastest supercomputer in the world, but also the ability to utilize software tools to precisely capture the exact inputs and outputs of an experiment. Our lab is currently studying the state of reproducibility in the field of HPC in the form of a literature review. By joining this project you would work alongside senior students in our lab reading and summarizing articles in HPC and related fields from the perspective of reproducibility (or lack thereof).

During this project you will learn how to read a scientific paper, summarize their findings, and contribute to a broader literature review article. This will involve learning skills such as typesetting using LaTeX and team collaboration via version control. Long term, you will, based on our findings, learn to deploy various reproducible technologies, e.g. code notebooks, for several real-world scientific applications. This project has the potential to make a real impact on the reproducibility and validity of scientific experiments utilizing computational resources.

Curricular & Program Research

Dance

This project is designed to study curricular initiatives and innovations at liberal arts college dance programs throughout the US. The goal will be to develop a database that compares the requirements for majors, the technique course offerings, the composition courses, the theory and history courses and the science and somatics courses. The overall goal will be to provide comparison data for our upcoming curricular initiatives.

Understanding Anti-Poverty Programs in the U.S.

Economics

In the United States in 2020, 37.2 million people lived in poverty—that is, they did not have sufficient income to meet their basic needs. I am an economist who uses data and statistical methods to study anti-poverty programs in the United States.

Questions that I am currently examining include:

How do different types of anti-poverty programs (including cash transfers, tax credits, food benefits, and public health insurance) interact with each other?
How does assistance for those in poverty vary depending on the state in which you live?
How do anti-poverty programs affect the well-being of vulnerable families in terms of things like food security and mental health?

Sustainable Energy at Smith College

Engineering

Smith College is in the middle of a multi-year project to convert the campus heating and cooling system to geothermal energy with ground source heat pumps. This exciting project positions Smith to both make great progress toward our goal of zero pollutant emissions, as well as share our experience with similarly-sized colleges who are thinking about converting to geothermal systems.

One element currently missing from the campus energy design is energy storage. The project for you will be to join a team that is modeling the Smith College energy system and then add storage technologies to the models and analyze their potential benefits for our energy system. Students will learn to use HOMER Energy modeling software, dig into finding and formatting input data, learn about geothermal, heat pumps and storage technologies and also learn how to model them in the computer model, and help analyze the results. Students will also be encouraged to pursue research into related topics of their interest.

Cooperation and Confrontation in Subnational U.S.–China Relations

Government

A decade ago, the U.S.–China relationship was characterized by high levels of economic and political engagement. But in recent years, federal policy toward China has moved in an increasingly hawkish direction, and public opinion in the U.S. toward China has become increasingly negative. In the context of the changing U.S.–China relationship at the national level, how are US cities and states engaging with China? How has their engagement changed over time, and what explains why some places have sustained cooperation with China while others have taken increasingly hostile, anti-China positions?

STRIDE students who work on this project will join the East Asian Politics Lab, a group of about six students who work collaboratively and on their own on a set of projects on subnational engagement between the US, China, and Taiwan. Students collect and analyze data on state-level policies toward China and contribute to detailed case studies of four states that have taken dramatically different approaches to subnational China policy.

Japan in the Archives: Mary Beard & Her Japanese Colleagues

History

Student paging through book in the Rare Book Room

This project uses the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC), part of Smith College Special Collections, to better understand historical ties between Japan and Smith College from 1920–1950. This archive was founded in 1942 and historian Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958) played a key role. Fittingly, the SSC has Beard’s papers. Beard wrote many books, mostly on U.S. history, but she also published one called The Force of Women in Japanese History (1953).

The story behind how this book came to be lies in the Smith archives. The student will work with me to investigate how Beard came to author it (it turns out to have been more of a collaboration). We will learn about Beard’s relationship with Japanese women activists, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. We will also read the letters they sent back and forth as well as their published writings.

How did they come to know each other? How did they share ideas? How did they understand the goals of women’s history? Along the way, we will also encounter Japanese students who enrolled at Smith, an understudied topic (in contrast, we know quite a bit about Japanese students who attended other Seven Sisters institutions including Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke).

Museum Interpretation

Smith College Museum of Art

The Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) is recognized as a leading academic museum. From its beginnings in the 1870s, SCMA has been guided by the understanding that original works of art can be a powerful component of a liberal arts education. Forming an art collection for teaching and learning was a founding goal of Smith College, which began collecting works of art in 1879, four years after enrolling its first class. The museum’s collection now comprises more than 27,000 objects, representing the diversity of art and material culture across periods and geographies.

The STRIDE scholar will work closely with museum staff to support interpretation research related to the museum’s collection, exhibitions, and installations. Museum interpretation includes text, resources, and activities that help visitors cultivate meaning, connection, and engagement with works of art. The STRIDE scholar will work with museum staff on an evaluation project of our installation “Worlds in Process” and as well as support the development of a new interpretative plan for the museum.

Child Language Research

Psychology

I have an active research program that involves collaboration with scholars around the world, as well as online research with children in English through a program called Children Helping Science at MIT. I am interested in the relationship between language development in preschool children and how it helps with aspects of cognitive development, particular in the domain of “theory of mind,” or how we understand other people’s beliefs, feelings and knowledge might be different from our own. I do mostly experimental work devising new tasks for children to try to test their knowledge.

I am simultaneously working on many languages—Mandarin, French, Romani—and even though I am not fluent in them, I bring my scientific expertise to those who do know them well. I am trying to do everything myself—drawing stimuli, even animating, doing statistical analyses, programming experiments for online use, sending email reminders to parents, writing abstracts and papers, collecting up and evaluating past research, applying for approval from “human subject committees.” I could use help in any of these parts, but it is always most useful if it is someone who is genuinely curious about the human mind or language and its development, and can foresee a future in that path. Then the experience will be invaluable!