The 34th annual presentation of student scholarship and creative expression offered the campus and the broader Bloomington-Normal community an intellectual tour of Illinois State University.

More than 400 graduate and undergraduate students from across 32 academic units displayed their research posters and explained their projects at the University Research Symposium, which was held across two sessions Friday, April 11, in the Brown Ballroom in the Bone Student Center. Next door in the Circus Room, 73 e-poster submissions could be viewed on a 65-inch computer monitor while surrounded by the finalists’ entries from the Image of Research competition.

Research topics at the symposium spanned the gamut of the University’s academic offerings, with several students exploring the implications of artificial intelligence, and others taking on subjects from the amusing to the depressing, including examinations of 1800s fashion apparel, the effect of social media on student performance, eating disorders, the well-being of international students, avant-garde poetry, forensics tools, the history of corn, and hundreds of other subjects in the arts, business, education, and hard and social sciences.

Attendees maneuvered through the corridors of posters as Illinois State faculty, staff, and students and local high school students and other community members spoke with the presenters. The Graduate School sponsored the event, while presenters received a big assist from the Center for Integrated Professional Development (CIPD), which printed close to 200 posters for the symposium.

“There are a number of things that have caught my eye, both as it pertains to my own scholarship, but then all the amazing things that these students are doing that I have no concept of,” said Graduate School Interim Director S. Gavin Weiser, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations. “Getting to learn from our students is a joy, because it flips the faculty-student relationship on its head. When you’re talking to someone from biology as a nonbiologist, learning about the really cool things that they’re doing over there is an absolute joy.”

Dr. Weiser hopes students gained “scholarly confidence” by presenting at the symposium: “In my experience, many students don’t think of themselves as producers of knowledge, but as consumers of knowledge, and so this helps them to begin to transition to being able to contribute to the scholarly conversation in their discipline. And it’s a great opportunity for them to learn how to present their work in a way that is hopefully safer and makes them feel affirmed in the wonderful research that they’re conducting.”

Sara O’Dowd, a senior philosophy major, presented for the third time at the symposium: “I love coming here every time. You get a lot of communication skills and a lot of research and analytical pieces when it comes to being able to communicate to the various people and building your poster. And from the philosophical side, it’s being able to take all of these (philosophical) figures and connect the ideas in all of these different ways to keep it altogether and make it applicable to everyday life.”

Jacob Rollins, a junior in the School of Biological Sciences, said conducting his research project on red-eared slider turtles taught him valuable technical skills. “(Before the project) I didn’t know how to do qPCR, which is how you analyze DNA. I also didn’t know how to run R that well, which is the statistical analysis program that we used.”

Seven of Dr. Maria Boerngen’s students presented “Farm Management Shaping Illinois Agriculture” at the symposium. The research came out of the associate professor’s Advanced Farm Management course, which she started at the request of students who wanted to learn more about the subject. To help the students gain a real-world perspective on farm management, Boerngen had them interview farm managers from around the state who were recent graduates of Illinois State’s agriculture program.

“In Illinois, more than half of our farms are operated by somebody other than the landowner, and a lot of those landowners don’t necessarily know how to make decisions for that land,” she said. “So our professional farm managers work for the landowners and communicate with the farm operators, come up with leasing terms, land management plans, conservation plans, those kinds of things, and they’re that important go-between, between the owners and operators.

Hattie Koeller was the group leader for the farm management research: “It’s always good to learn how to talk to people and build relationships with people. So that interview process was beneficial for all of us. We also learned how to work together and have good discussions.”

Faculty mentors like Boerngen play a key role in guiding the students through the research process.

“It’s such a joy to be able to do that as a scholar, as a mentor, to provide that guidance to the next generation of thinkers and creators,” Weiser said. “And it’s truly an honor and a joy, and I hope also that (the students) then take the next generation under their wing and help them.”

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