On April 15, Whitman’s campus was abuzz for the college’s annual Undergraduate Conference. Classes were cancelled for students to present at and attend, and the conference featured 86 presentations and 47 poster sessions from thesis research, major requirements, and independent studies conducted by the campus community. Students explored a wide range of topics, with posters and presentations like “Uranium Concentration in Cooked Mutton” to “Gender/Fucking: In Search of the Lesbian Penis.” Students who participated on Tuesday viewed the conference as a chance to present their ideas and promote academic projects. 

Andrew Tate, Luca Viarengo, Hayden Garner and Neel Troeger presented their capstone project for the Computer Science major, which was a video game based on salmon migration in the Columbia River. 

“[The presentation] was a mixture of a technical showcase of what we’ve done, talking about the learning outcomes of our project as it related to educating youth about salmon migration and river currents. [It] was also a chance for us to push a retail release of our project to also try and make some money on the side,” Tate said.

The presentation also fulfilled a capstone requirement for Computer Science, or CS, majors — allowing them to communicate their work in the major to an outside audience. The team also has plans to release the game for public use, monetizing it for a broader audience.  

“It was a chance for us to kind of like showcase what we have been working on since the Fall of last year for our undergrad presentation and, because we’re both CS majors, for our capstone for CS,” Viarengo said.

The game is called “Fish Game,” and was developed for the Water and Environment Center at Walla Walla Community College to help kids learn about salmon migration in an engaging way. The conference gave the group an opportunity to promote the game’s future retail release by asking students to pre-save the game on Steam, a gaming platform, to help build its visibility. 

Ella Andersen, who presented research from her Anthropology thesis, also developed her research from her engagement with communities outside Whitman. Andersen translated her thesis into French to fulfill the French Plus requirements, allowing her to present to Whitman’s French-speaking community. For Andersen, presenting in French added a new, challenging dynamic to the conference.

“I can’t talk as fast in French as I can talk in English, and I was worried about it coming across as a little more superficial in my thesis, but, I will say, it was a very good exercise in being able to talk a lot more broadly about my chapters,” Andersen said. 

Andersen’s presentation, “Apprendre l’Anglais au Maroc Post-Colonial: Histoire, Identité et Motivations Sociales” (Learning English in Post-Colonial Morocco: History, Identity and Social Motivations), focused on English language acquisition amongst Moroccan youths, an effort which she identified as a way to reject French as a colonial language. 

Like Tate and Viarengo, Andersen’s project progressed from other classes and experiences, as she studied abroad in Morocco her junior year and wanted to continue the conversations she had there when she selected a thesis topic. 

“I had a journal that I wrote in when I was abroad just to remember, and I was looking back, and I was like ‘Oh, a lot of these things that I was just writing about, or noticing everyday, I think it would be really cool to kind of look at them from a more academic standpoint,’” Andersen said.

As a graduating senior, Andersen’s presentation at the conference also allowed her to voice her research and practice answering questions from a variety of student and community attendees. 

“I think presenting it to other people made it feel a little bit more real, too, like it wasn’t just this sixty-page document in my Google Drive that I’ve been sending bits and pieces of to my advisors,” Andersen said. “It felt a little more concrete.” 

 The 2025 Undergraduate Conference saw a wide variety of presentation and poster topics. Whether students were focusing a thesis in their major department or exploring something new with an independent study, the conference allowed presenters to sharpen their communication skills and seek new audiences for their research projects.