{"id":62878,"date":"2022-09-14T12:04:40","date_gmt":"2022-09-14T16:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?p=62878"},"modified":"2025-04-14T10:24:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-14T14:24:51","slug":"a-skill-building-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/a-skill-building-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"A Skill-Building Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY STEVE HOLT<\/strong><\/p>\n

While some of Neil Baker\u2019s BU classmates spend the dog days of summer by the pool or at the beach, the rising senior is shooting ions at different materials and logging the patterns they create on the surface. Another CAS undergraduate is learning how books are published, while a third is documenting the pressures on Boston\u2019s service workers.<\/p>\n

Baker (CAS\u201923, CFA\u201923) is one of many undergraduates who\u2019ve taken research appointments or internships this summer to explore the practical applications of their fields. Statistically, these students will be better prepared for the workforce or continuing education than many of their peers. According to research conducted by BU\u2019s Center for Career Development, graduates from the class of 2021 who participated in an internship showed stronger teamwork and collaboration, oral and written communication skills, and intercultural fluency, and demonstrated better career readiness overall than graduates without an internship experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile internships facilitate the transition of knowledge and skills from school to work, they also allow you to observe different work roles and styles,\u201d says May Perriello, who coordinates BU\u2019s Yawkey Foundation Nonprofit Internship Program. Interns are immersed for a time in what could be their future profession, where they can see both the good and the bad, she says. \u201cLearning what you don\u2019t like at an internship is equally important as learning what you do like.\u201d<\/p>\n

arts&sciences<\/em> caught up with three CAS undergraduates\u2014Baker; Kasandra Kue-Rojas (\u201924), a junior majoring in anthropology with a specialization in health and medicine; and Roni Lakin (\u201925), an English major\u2014to talk about what they\u2019re doing this summer.<\/p>\n

Researching Workers in Precarious Professions<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Kasandra Kue-Rojas<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Kasandra
Kasandra Kue-Rojas (CAS\u201924)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kue-Rojas says she \u201cfell in love with anthropology\u201d in an Introduction to Medical Anthropology class her first year and changed her major from biology to anthropology. She picked the health and medicine track, which was rolled out in fall 2021, and would like to become an advocate for healthcare staff and doctors who are too often undervalued, sidelined, or facing difficult work environments.<\/p>\n

So, when the Providence, R.I., native learned about a summer internship interviewing Boston-area hospitality and senior care workers and managers hard-hit by the pandemic, she immediately recognized the overlap with her own interests and jumped on the opportunity to apply. Kue-Rojas is one of two Faculty Pilot Grant Research Assistants, funded through the Center for Innovation in Social Science, working with Makarand Mody, director of research and associate professor of hospitality marketing at the BU School of Hospitality Administration, on a project investigating the strategies workers in precarious service jobs develop to remain safe and flourish.<\/p>\n

She has been meeting with hospitality workers like restaurant managers, dishwashers, and hotel housekeeping staff to find out about the challenges they\u2019ve faced at work and strategies they\u2019ve used to overcome them. She asks them to reflect on their childhoods and work histories, what success means to them, and how they could feel more supported by their communities. Besides picking up valuable interviewing skills that she\u2019ll use as an anthropologist or social worker, Kue-Rojas says she identifies with many of those she\u2019s interviewed because she comes from an immigrant family (Dominican and Hmong) and has worked in restaurants.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can relate to a lot of the struggles,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s the job that I\u2019ve known the most leading up to my career as a student. And being a [person of color] and a first-gen [college student], having the opportunity to do research has always been a passion of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Learning the Publishing Business, Inside and Out<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Roni Lakin<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Roni
Roni Lakin (CAS\u201925)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Roni Lakin has always been a voracious reader. The Charleston, W.Va., native remembers his mother taking him to their local library and limiting the number of books they could check out to 10. If mom didn\u2019t set some limits, young Roni would have walked away with several bags full of stories.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to this summer, Lakin is getting a glimpse of how the books he devours are produced. In an internship funded by BU\u2019s Center for Humanities, Lakin is getting a taste of how new books at Beacon Press in Boston are both edited and publicized. In his editorial rotation, Lakin has been reviewing book proposals from potential authors and writing reports for editors on the most engaging submission. He even wrote a discussion guide for an upcoming book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World<\/em>, by Danya Ruttenberg, due out in September.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just very cool to know that something that I wrote is going to be read by all of these people and used for discussions,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Lakin says he\u2019s read articles and listened to podcasts about book publishing, but nothing replaces the hands-on experience he’s getting at Beacon. \u201cBeing in the office and seeing exactly what people do is very different from just looking at the entire industry as an outsider,\u201d he says. \u201cYou start to see why things work the way they work and who exactly is in charge of which pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is Lakin as jazzed about going into publishing now as when they started at Beacon?<\/p>\n

\u201cBased off of what I’ve done so far,\u201d he says, \u201cI could really picture myself going to publishing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Playing with Particles<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Neil Baker<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Neil
Neil Baker (CAS\u201923, CFA\u201923)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Neil Baker never imagined he\u2019d be spending the majority of his waking hours shooting beams of ions at polymers and observing the nanopatterns they make on the material\u2019s surface. But when Baker approached Karl Ludwig, professor of physics and materials science and engineering, and said he was interested in getting some research experience to beef up his graduate program applications, his professor and adviser invited the junior to join his project team studying novel approaches to ion beam nanopatterning.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thrown in the deep end,\u201d says Baker, who is double-majoring in physics and piano performance. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t something I was previously interested in, but it is something I\u2019m interested in now, which is really kind of cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

When a material is bombarded with ions, microscopic patterns, left on the material\u2019s surface, can be useful in certain products and industries. The types of patterns\u2014such as ripples, holes, or jagged peaks\u2014are influenced by factors including the type of ion, the angle at which its traveling, and the ion energy. While past experiments have used silicon, the Sydney, Australia, native\u2014the sole BU undergrad on a research team working under Ludwig\u2014works primarily with polymers, an umbrella term for a class of materials whose molecular structures are composed of long chains of similar units. Polymers are present in products from clothing to garbage bags. Baker\u2019s research has implications for commercial use. For instance, could ion bombardment be used to create the microscopic holes in filtration systems that strip water of bacteria or toxins?<\/p>\n

\u201cOur overall objective would be to find a way to cheaply and efficiently produce materials with surface patterns that can be used in [industry] applications,\u201d Baker says. \u201cNot a ton has been done in this field, so we are definitely on the frontier. We\u2019re pushing some boundaries, and that\u2019s pretty exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baker\u2019s position is funded through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), with a matching grant from Ludwig\u2019s group. Under Ludwig\u2019s mentorship, Baker spends 40 hours a week in the professor\u2019s lab and will present his findings at the 25th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in October. The ion bombardment research has even brought Baker and his fellow researchers to Brookhaven National Laboratory to use the giant synchrotron, which uses X-rays to provide a more complex picture of how ions transform various materials. The work is \u201cmore slow going and less glamorous\u201d than Baker imagined, but he says it\u2019s made him more patient and methodical\u2014essential traits for complex physics experiments where advances are measured on the nanoscale.<\/p>\n

Should he not continue in physics, Baker could pursue his other passion, music. He\u2019s even written a musical based on the COVID-19 pandemic, parts of which he\u2019s entered in musical theater writing contests. But Baker says his ion research sets him up to continue in academia or work in industry. Computer science is another possibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m manipulating this math and looking at data using computer programming languages like Python,\u201d Baker says. \u201cIf you go down Comm Ave and you see the new Center for Computer and Data Sciences building, it\u2019s a big field and a lot of people are majoring in computer science. Having those sorts of skills, which I\u2019m also developing in this lab, will contribute greatly to whatever I decide to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three CAS undergraduates share how they spent the summer in experiential learning opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21329,"featured_media":62893,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,195,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21329"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62878"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85039,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62878\/revisions\/85039"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}