News

Sexual assault is a significant problem on college campuses. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted while they are in college. This summer, Corinne Smith ’17 is using a Levitt Summer Research Fellowship to assess sexual violence at Hamilton.

While students, faculty, staff and visitors to Hamilton know that the Mohawk Valley is a beautiful and engaging place to live, another striking feature of the area is its position as a cultural and ethnic melting pot, thanks in large part to the City of Utica’s diverse refugee and immigrant populations. Tanapat Treyanurak ’17 is spending his summer continuing work related to Project SHINE, a program dedicated to assisting in the incorporation and assimilation of immigrants and refugees into local communities, through a Levitt Center grant.

When most of us think about oral health, we might not think far beyond brushing our teeth and our next trip to the dentist’s office. James Robbins ’16, however, knows that there’s much more to it than that. This summer as a Levitt Summer Research Fellow he is researching water fluoridation for improved public health. Working closely with Professor of Biology Herm Lehman, Robbins has been researching the public health debate about water fluoridation.

Although globally humans rely mostly on agriculture as a source of sustenance, farmers around the world are not on equal footing. Eren Shultz ’15 is particularly aware of this disparity “having both grown up in rural Wisconsin and spent significant amounts of time traveling and living abroad in small agrarian villages in Eastern Africa.” Shultz said he was both “fascinated and concerned” with “the differences in mechanization and lifestyles” between those communities.

Zachary Pilson '16 is spending his summer in an internship at Ashoka, a not for profit organization dedicated to supporting social innovators and entrepreneurs to “advance an ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ world, where anyone can apply the skills of changemaking to solve complex social problems.” Pilson, a biochemistry major, is working in Ashoka's Venture and Fellowship department which helps locate, nominate, fund and connect new and past Ashoka Fellows throughout the world.

While many Hamilton students end up pursuing their passions professionally after graduation, some start earlier. Carolyn Kossow ’17 is spending her summer in an internship with the Health and Reproductive Rights section of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) in Washington, D.C.

While many students undertake research projects over the summer, Rachael Feuerstein ’16 is using her vacation to pursue a particularly charged subject of study: the social psychology behind the Holocaust. Her project, "The Psychology of Evil and Perpetration: A Psychological Analysis of Why and How the Holocaust Happened," under the direction of Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven and funded through a Levitt Center grant, “aims to explain why ‘good’ people do bad things, or more generally, why people can do evil, such as commit mass genocide.”

Hamilton’s Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center is committed to addressing “persistent social problems in innovative, effective and ethical ways.” Tsion Tesfaye ’16 has taken that mission to heart and significantly engaged with the Center. Last summer she was chosen to participate in the Levitt Social Innovation Fellows program, through which she received funding for her pilot project, Youth for Ethiopia. That project led to her selection to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) in March.  Now she’s seeking help to keep the program going.

One of the chief benefits of a liberal arts education, and of Hamilton’s open curriculum in particular, is the opportunity that it affords students to experiment academically and to discover their passions. So it was with Sean Henry-Smith ’15, a student who until the second semester of his first year at Hamilton had never picked up a camera, and who now just graduated from Hamilton with a paid internship at the Light Work center in Syracuse, N.Y.

John McEnroe, the John and Anne Fischer Professor in Fine Arts, is co-leader of a team that is working on a complete architectural survey of the town of Gournia on the island of Crete. The work was highlighted in a lengthy article in the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine. “The Minoans of Crete” focused on site excavation that began more than a century ago.