Of the possible ways to spend summer vacation, staying in Walla Walla is a strange choice to some Whitties. Most recipients of the 2009 Louis B. Perry Research Awards, however, will be doing just that.
Named for Louis B. Perry, eighth president of Whitman from 1959-1967, the Perry Summer Research Awards are grants of up to $8,000 given to student-faculty research teams at Whitman.
This year there are 23 teams, most of them consisting of one student and one Whitman faculty member, although some teams are made up of one faculty member and two students. Compared to previous years, the number of teams for 2009 is a substantial increase. In 2005 only 12 teams conducted research, and that number has risen steadily ever since.
Sophomore Jaspreet Gill is conducting research for her second consecutive summer with history professor Julie Charlip. Last year Gill, Charlip and senior Bryce McKay traveled to Costa Rica to research Costa Rican security forces. The group of researchers spent most of their time in the archives of Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly finding relevant documents. This year Gill will work from the University of Washington libraries to help professor Charlip on a separate project.
Gill is grateful for the opportunity to participate in a professor’s research. She thinks the projects are a great learning experience for all parties involved, and an effective way for students to connect with professors and Whitman’s larger academic community.
“I think students benefit a lot,” said Gill. “We all get something different out of [our experience]. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into last year; I was just kind of having professor Charlip tell me what to do. But just spending so much time with a professor…I just kind of started to see professors as more human. [Julie] was telling us so much about Whitman and the history department. Before that I didn’t really know that many people in the history department, but now I know a lot of them on a first name basis”
All faculty-student teams submit an application to a selection committee, which works with Provost and Dean of Facutly Lori Bettison-Varga to assign the awards. Bettison-Varga is enthusiastic about the Perry Awards program.
“It’s a really great program,” said Bettison-Varga. “A lot of undergraduate institutions will have undergraduate research support, but this one –– the $8,000 for the faculty student pair –– is really quite generous.”
The grants are assigned to research teams in all disciplines.
“A unique thing is that you see a really broad distribution across disciplinary areas for Perry Awards,” Bettison-Varga said. “At a lot of [schools] you’ll see mostly scientists doing this, but [here] it’s across the board. You’ve got philosophy, and social sciences and all sorts of different projects going on.”
One such non-science team is Assistant Professor of English and General Studies Sharon Alker and junior Nanda Maw Lin. Their research is on the history of the configuration of martial spaces by focusing on the way culture constructs the spaces of war during a traumatic series of British wars.
The faculty-student teams are formed by professors approaching students and vice versa. Alker commented on the team-formation process.
“It can work either way,” said Alker. “I have been both approached by a student and have approached a worthy student. It’s important to find someone who would be excited about the same sort of work as you, so alongside strong intellectual abilities, professors tend to look for high energy students who have the stamina to engage in intensive research.”
