Checking in With our College-Aged Alums By ANITA BUSHELL
Every year the Journal checks in with our alums who are either in college or have just graduated. With the pandemic, the economic downturn, and the national demand for social justice, this is a crucial year to find out how our alums are coping. This year, we checked in with Cecilia Emy ‘16, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate (‘20), Emmitt Sklar ‘17, a rising senior and Belk Scholar at Davidson College, Henry Killen ‘16, a Reed College graduate (‘20), Ben Francis ‘17, a rising senior at Brandeis University, Sam Francis ‘17, a rising senior at Brandeis University, and Sierra Vines ‘16, a graduated of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (‘20).
Tell me about your work at college?
Cecilia Emy At RISD, I studied Furniture Design, where students explore product design and sculpture through an abundance of materials, with a focus on wood and metal. I found that I enjoyed working in wood the best. My work is accentuated by an attention to color and shape, often looking eclectic and bright. I find myself rejecting the formal language of traditional furniture and embracing the colors and shapes of public furniture, like bike racks and subway interiors. Emmitt Sklar I just wrapped up my Capstone for Political Science. I studied Arabic in Amman, Jordan and I wanted my research to focus on U.S. involvement in the Middle East and North Africa. I wrote about the U.S. intervention in the 2011 Libyan Civil War and 2013 Syrian Civil War to examine the strength of Responsibility to Protect, an international norm on responding to genocide. A little bit after I finished the Capstone, Susan Rice, who was [President] Obama’s National Security [Advisor] and U.N. Ambassador during this period, came to Davidson and I was able to ask her some questions about the topic, which was a really cool experience. I also just finished up a year as Student Body President at Davidson. I was elected my sophomore year and served until this March. It was an incredibly meaningful experience
that gave me the opportunity to put into practice many of the values that I have as a result of my time at BFS. We started a micro-grant program for sustainability projects in order to help our campus meet our carbon neutral goal. We also were able to reevaluate what justice looks like on a college campus. We eliminated punitive fines which affect students of different background[s] in different ways and replace[d] [them] with a restorative, service-based model. Henry Killen I majored in neuroscience, which meant
taking a large number of prerequisites. All of this was rewarded by the work I was able to do on my senior thesis. I spent the last 15 months or so establishing optogenetics as a viable tool for neuroscience research at Reed. I then used optogenetics to examine the interaction between dopamine and a peptide produced in the gut—ghrelin—during drug-seeking behavior. The research is ongoing, and hopefully I will present it at the next Society for Neuroscience meeting in October.
Sierra Vines While at college I was granted the opportunity through my work-study grant to become a research assistant at the Program on Integrative Medicine my junior year. At this job I was assigned to a project that aimed to develop an artificial intelligence chat-bot for African-American Type II Diabetics. To my surprise I was given a lot of freedom to provide input and direct messaging into the software that would aid a group of people to whom I belong and chose to study academically—African Americans. To combine my love for health, culture and race in a program that seeks integrative approaches to wellness and health was an awesome experience, to say the least.
What’s a lesson you’re taking from these last several months that you feel will impact your growth or has made you more resilient? Emmitt Sklar How much the ability to be resilient is built into the structure of the world around us. It is in
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