Politics & Int’l Affairs | Psychology

Page 24 | Thursday, April 28, 2022 POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS MAGGIE FOX

Katie Fox/Old Gold & Black

EMILY TORO

News Editor

Maggie Fox always wanted to go to law school, and her experiences at Wake Forest only reinforced that aspiration.

“I think especially after the 2016 election, I really got more interested in political affairs,” Fox said. “And so I thought that was going to be that my law school path was something more related to workings of government, and policy reform, that kind of thing. It was honestly over the last two years that I really got a more specific focus into criminal justice reform.”

Growing up in Conway, SC, Fox’s parents helped inspire her passions, as they both pursued careers as public attorneys.

“My parents have definitely been a huge influence, especially in pursuing a liberal arts education as they’re both public attorneys,” Fox said. “They’ve always been really encouraging of exploring different disciplines like English, history and sociology and that definitely guided my choice of wanting to go to a smaller liberal arts school like Wake Forest.”

Fox received a Stamps Scholarship to attend Wake Forest, a scholarship that “is awarded to entering firstyear students who demonstrate outstanding academic achievement, a high degree of intellectual curiosity and scholarship, exceptional promise in leadership, service and social responsibility, perseverance, character, integrity, and innovation,” according to the Stamps Scholarship website.

Fox has embodied the character of a Stamps Scholar through her exemplary drive in her classes. During her time in college, Fox excelled in classes on constitutional law, civil rights and civil liberties; and judicial politics, a class that encouraged her to pursue a minor in sociology.

“I was able to pick up a sociology minor, where I became especially interested in abolition work and criminal justice reform,” Fox said. “One thing I’ve loved about the politics major is that it’s given me the flexibility to take classes in a lot of different departments as well.”

Fox took a class related to race, racism and racial capitalism from one of her favorite professors, Dr. Hana Brown, who praises Maggie for being an exemplary student and scholar.

“Maggie is such a strong student that I knew her name from other faculty and students long before she ever enrolled in one of my classes,” Brown said. “In class, she has routinely surpassed my already high expectations. She is sharp, intellectually curious, and always one step, or more, ahead of the research we read and debate in class. She embraces challenges and is deeply motivated to use her social science background to advance social justice.”

Fox also excelled in her Division II English course, taught by professor Meredith Farmer, in which she received the D.A. Brown Award for Excellence in writing.

“It ended up being a class I really loved ... it was on detectives and detective fiction,” Fox said. “I think [Professor Farmer] was a professor who really believed in me and my writing abilities, That was a class that really strengthened my writing more than anything else. I think it’s a class that taught me more than anything else at Wake Forest.”

Farmer praised Fox’s excellence in the classroom.

“Maggie is a wonderful student who wrote a beautiful essay about Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and its layered way of calling out racism in the antebellum United States — and in readers today,” Farmer said. “Her paper was impressively researched, carefully crafted, and genuinely compelling. But what matters even more is that Maggie knows how to build not just an argument, but also a mood, which I hope will serve her well as she starts her career.”

In addition to being a dedicated student, Fox spent all of her years at Wake Forest tutoring with organizations like Voices and the Student Association for the Advancement for Refugees (SAFAR).

At the beginning of her sophomore year, Fox also had the opportunity to develop her own research project through a Richter Fellowship. She centered her research on the Dutch criminal justice system. Although she did not have the opportunity to go to Amsterdam to pursue this research due to the pandemic, she completed the project online.

“They have a system that is just really focused around rehabilitation and completely centered away from detaining people for long periods of time in prison, which is entirely different from what we do here in the United States,” Fox said. “I developed a project where I would go to Amsterdam, and talk with different people in the criminal justice system, like judges, attorneys, people who worked at the prisons and academics ... and see what lessons we can learn from that here in the United States.”

After college, Fox will attend the University of Virginia for law school and plans to pursue criminal law.

“I really want to do abolition work,” Fox said. “I don’t know whether that looks like doing advocacy work and working as a public defender or working with more community organizing as a litigator. I don’t have it all laid out, but those are definitely things that I’m still interested in pursuing.”

PSYCHOLOGY AMBER ADKINS

SOPHIE GUYMON Opinion Editor

Amber Adkins’ first exposure to psychology was at a high school summer camp in her home state of Kentucky.

“I had never taken a psychology class before Wake Forest but I did a camp at one point in high school where we were split into different subject areas for the summer, and I got randomly assigned to psychology,” Adkins said. “It was [less the] academic side of it, and more ‘here are problems that people are facing — and what psychologists are saying about that.’ That was probably the first point where psychology sparked my interest.”

Taking Introductory Psychology (PSY 151) her freshman fall confirmed Adkins’ interest in the subject — she described it as the most engaging subject that she had taken. From there, Adkins went on to do summer research and started the honors program her junior year.

“My freshman summer, I did research in Kentucky on child sexual abuse at a child advocacy center there and really enjoyed it — it’s really important,” Adkins said. “But I figured out through some volunteer opportunities that I really enjoy working with the older adult population. This past summer, I did research with a professor looking at mild cognitive impairment in older adults and cognitive psychology stuff.”

Throughout her time at Wake Forest, Adkins has built positive relationships with many of her professors, finding that they have been very supportive of her passions and aspirations.

“All the professors that I’ve had have been very engaging, very willing to help me and meet with me outside of class,” Adkins said. “They’ve helped push me academically in all the different semesters but they’ve [also] been so willing to meet me where I am, to learn what my passions are and to help me get wherever I want to go.”

One professor that stood out to Adkins in particular was Dr. Janine Jennings, with whom she did research this past summer. Adkins noted that Jennings has been incredibly helpful in helping her figure out her postgraduation plans, as well as offering support and advice.

Jennings has been touched by her time working with Amber, as well. “Amber is something of a quiet powerhouse,” Jennings said. “She is intellectually talented, can juggle multiple research projects with a heavy course load while also pursuing her study of the violin yet is one of the most modest, humble and gentle individuals I have ever met.”

As a psychology major, Adkins has come to recognize the power of underlying influences and processes on our everyday lives, noting that little things affect our lives in a big way. She has enjoyed being able to point out the little manifestations of what she’s learned in her day-to-day life.

“[I’ve learned] that we have a lot less control over our thoughts and our beliefs than we think that we do — we’re just influenced by so much,” Adkins said. “Unconsciously, on an everyday basis we don’t really know why we think the way that we do or why we believe the way that we believe — everything that we take in is biased in some way.”

Adkins noted that her time in the department has been somewhat of a learning curve — while some of the classes she took were initially difficult, she’s been able to connect concepts back to them as she’s advanced.

This growth has been aided not only by support from professors such as Jennings, but also by the collaborative and engaging nature of the classes Adkins has taken. She has found many friends in the department, noting that she has not perceived the competition culture that people often worry about at Wake Forest.

“People [in the department] don’t want to compete, they’re just there to learn,” Adkins said. “[We’re] just trying to pursue [our] best, without being concerned about how other people might be better.”

In her final year as an undergraduate, Adkins has been doing part-time research at the medical school for the U.S. Quaker Study, examining the effects of a lifestyle intervention program on the cognition of people at risk for dementia. She has also been working on her honors thesis, studying the emotional well-being of older adults in the COVID-19 pandemic.

After graduation, Adkins will be continuing her research for the U.S. Quaker Study. Her long-term goals include going to graduate school for clinical psychology and expanding on her passion for the well-being of older adults by working with the geriatric population — a demographic that she feels is often overlooked.

As for her other plans, Adkins glowed when discussing her engagement to classmate Noah Edwards-Thro (page 20), whom she has been dating since sophomore year, and their upcoming wedding this summer.