Monthly Archives: September 2017
2017 SIRF Project Blog Post: Ryan Maia
Singapore—the country where you can be fined for improper disposal of chewing gum—is a democracy. But most Americans would consider Singapore an authoritarian technocracy. And rightfully so; in Singapore, the President appoints heads of each ministry. The ministries enact the majority of the country’s planning and programming. Ministries also have a lot of power to […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Gabrielle Kussmaul
I departed for a summer of research in Berlin with rather naive expectations. I had just spent months reading analyses of the city’s bicycling boom, and envisioned a homogeneous mass of stern Soviet architecture and fashionable Berliners on bikes. Meghan, my research partner, and I had a month and a day to survey each street […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Francesca Giorgianni
Our project initially stemmed from our mutual observations about beauty standards and media influences on appearance ideals. We had both discussed the pervasiveness of thin-ideal imagery juxtaposed with the growing movement of body positivity and natural beauty, and we were curious to investigate measures that could counteract the body dissatisfaction that arises from viewing thin-ideal […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Itxaso Garay
The SIRF I chose to be a part of explores the effects of treatments of ocean acidification on microbial communities and their host associations with deep sea scallops. As a consequence of climate change, rising atmospheric CO2 dissolves into the world’s oceans and causes seawater pH levels to decrease in a phenomenon called ocean acidification. […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Elisa Figueras
This experience has proved just as incredible, if not more, than my time in India last summer. As a researcher and not an actual student on the dialogue, I had “significant autonomy” as we jokingly said. Our first week, in Singapore, proved extremely fascinating and thoughtprovoking. Rachel and I are researching perceptions of flooding and […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Tavish Fenbert
For my SIRF project, I designed a laboratory experimental setup to determine how quickly a parabolic trough solar concentrator would heat spices inside the solar receiver, a stainless steel tube. I used an electric heater to simulate the heat of the sun and 3/8” diameter wooden spheres as simulated spices with known thermal properties. A […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Lauren Enright
I never thought I would be passionate about research. I always pictured spending hours bent over a lab bench pipetting microliters of liquid between test tubes- an image that appeals to some, but most definitely not me. Why should I spend hours, years even, on a project that could be frustrating, tedious, and most likely […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Rachel Dowley
I began my college career with a goal to broaden my global perspective. Three years later, Northeastern has helped me achieve this dream with alternative spring breaks to Costa Rica and New Orleans, a dialogue to India, and marine biological research in the Pacific Northwest and in Panama. I found I especially loved visiting megacities […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Sarina Dass
8 p.m. on a summer night. The sun had just set, and I was sitting in Snell Library waiting for my request for school discipline data from the Massachusetts Department of Education to come through. I saw that it worked, and I clicked a link. When I first opened it, I was overwhelmed. There were […]
SIRF Project Blog Post: Elisa Danthinne
“I’m just trying to lose weight.” I cannot count the amount of times I have heard this statement in the past year, from the people around me, from myself. As a female young adult, a culture divided by body image seems especially relevant. “Too fat” is too common, “too thin” likewise. Perfection, inspired by inequitable […]