WINTER 2020
Jake Exler
Victory Ogubuike
Devon Patel
Megana Sundar
Alden Eckman
Connecting. . . .
Sarah Thompson
Neha Kapur
Devan Karp
LeeRoy Tiger
Steven Drake
Josefina Hajek-Herrera
In Full Zoom
Nearly 150 students get hands-on research, internship, and startup experience despite the pandemic
Unprecedented Obstacles, Precedented Breakthroughs Trinity students will always have chances to pursue hands-on learning opportunities inside—and outside—of the classroom. This summer, even while working through challenges that prevented in-person gatherings, Trinity students still made breakthroughs by conducting research alongside professors, interning at organizations both in San Antonio and around the nation, and building their own startups as entrepreneurs. Because at Trinity, experiential learning is more than words on a whiteboard: It’s a spirit of collaboration and enterprise that has remained rooted in Trinity’s culture for more than a century. And even in the face of unprecedented obstacles, nothing can stand in the way of Tigers who are looking to create opportunities. Flip through this magazine to see how Trinity used experiential learning this past summer to cultivate a community of lifelong learners.
The Trinity Perspective magazine is produced quarterly. Through these pages, explore the many facets of life at Trinity University and get to know the students, faculty, and staff who call Trinity home. With the vibrant city of San Antonio as a backdrop, discover the many benefits and opportunities our community has to offer. We invite you to read these pages to explore some of the many ways we make a great education possible, then take a virtual tour to get a sense of our 125-acre skyline campus.
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ABOUT TRINITY
Trinity University is a private, residential, co-educational institution with an undergraduate focus. So, what does that mean? It means that we focus on YOU—connecting you with the best possible resources, caring faculty members, committed staff members, and other world-class students destined to have a positive impact in our community.
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Devan Karp
Kailey Lopez
Josefina Hajek-Herrera
Brandon Niday
Sarah Thompson
Steven Drake
Megana Sundar
LeeRoy Tiger
Jake Exler
Zachary Young
compiled by the editorial staff
Nearly 150 students get hands-on research, internship, and startup experience despite the pandemic Even a massive shift in the ecosystem of learning and student opportunities couldn’t stop Tigers from making the most of their summers. Despite the challenges COVID-19 presented, Trinity students still innovatively took on internships, launched businesses, and discovered new truths about themselves and the world through undergraduate research. Almost 150 students engaged in summer experiential learning, mentored by 67 faculty members across 27 academic departments.
Undergraduate Research At Trinity, undergraduate research is about more than crunching data doomed for the dusty back pages of an academic journal. Our students make breakthroughs that enact real change. Trinity’s support for undergraduate research empowers Tigers to dig deeper, all under the tutelage of qualified professors. This summer, more than 90 undergraduate students collaborated with more than 50 faculty members to conduct research, despite being off campus for the work.
Katie Maloan
Bradley Sykes
Rachel Poovathoor
Kailey Lopez
Kailey Lopez ’21, Katie Maloan ’22, Rachel Poovathoor ’22, and Bradley Sykes ’22 teamed up to study how COVID-19 has affected human rights around the world. Alongside professors Rosa Aloisi, Robert Huesca, and Roberto Prestigiacomo, the students examined how various governments have used the pandemic to oppress marginalized populations around the world. The group plans to compile their findings into both a global report and a performance art piece that offer solutions to the issues they find in their research. Josefina Hajek-Herrera ’22 collaborated with both the chemistry and entrepreneurship departments at Trinity to develop a product and determine its market potential. Hajek-Herrera helped develop an electrodynamic balance, an instrument that can be used to study aerosolized particles in airborne viruses such as COVID-19. Hajek-Herrera worked alongside the Stumberg Venture Competition finalists in the summer accelerator program, creating a startup based on the electrodynamic balance and learning the ins and outs of building a chemistry company. She’d like to patent the device and sell it to other scientists looking to use it in their own research.
Steven Drake ’22 conducted education research alongside professor Rocio Delgado, examining how teachers include LGBTQ topics in their classrooms. His research focused on what teachers know about LGBTQ topics, how they employ that knowledge, and why they choose to include or not include LGBTQ curriculum. As president of PRIDE at Trinity, Drake’s research is close to his heart. “When you focus on LGBTQ inclusion in schools, there’s always a ton of pushback. Sometimes you feel it’s so much that you don’t know how you could possibly overcome that,” Drake explains. “But speaking with a couple of queer educators and seeing that they are risking everything to include LGBTQ topics; uplifting, celebrating, and saving queer children; and redefining their school environment gives me the strength and resolve to continue this fight.” Steven Drake
Devon Patel ’21, Megana Sundar ’22, and Zachary Young ’22 originally planned to spend their summer conducting experiments in psychology professor Kah-Chung Leong’s lab, but they redirected the focus of their research to something that could be completed remotely. They worked on a review paper examining oxytocin as a potential pharmacotherapeutic for addiction due to its ability to suppress addictive behaviors. Megana Sundar
Devon Patel
Zachary Young
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Victory Ogubuike
Jake Exler
Neha Kapur
Sarah Thompson
Students+Startups Since 2016, Students+Startups has placed Tigers right in the middle of San Antonio’s exploding startup scene. The program matches students with internships at a variety of San Antonio startups for the summer. This initiative is funded by the 80|20 Foundation and run in partnership with Geekdom, a unique coworking space in downtown San Antonio. This year, more than 20 Tigers interned with local startups. Victory Ogubuike ’22 interned in a human resources and operations role for Mailgun, an API-based email delivery platform. As part of her remote internship, she worked on various projects centered around integrating a Europeanbased email services company that Mailgun acquired last year.
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Jake Exler ’22 interned with Launch SA, an organization that helps small business owners and entrepreneurs develop and grow by providing them with personalized assistance. Exler helped with logistics for San Antonio Entrepreneurship Week and also analyzed data on the organization’s impact in San Antonio.
Neha Kapur ’22 interned with VelocityTX. Kapur used skills from her business analytics and technology major for a bio asset mapping project, locating and compiling all of the potential resources for entrepreneurs in the healthcare and bioscience industry in San Antonio.
Brandon Niday
Alden Eckman
Devan Karp
Arts, Letters, and Enterprise Founded in 2013, the Arts, Letters, and Enterprise (ALE) program is Trinity’s one-of-a-kind connection between the liberal arts classroom and the professional world. The program connects humanities and arts students with area nonprofits for highly competitive, coveted internships.
Alden Eckman ’22 held a remote internship at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. She helped plan and promote community programming for the Esperanza, including virtual film screenings and panel discussions. She also worked on improving their social media pages, which are crucial during the pandemic. “These platforms are the Esperanza’s main outreach methods right now, so they need to be accessible to the Esperanza community,” Eckman says.
Devan Karp ’22 and Sarah Thompson ’21 both returned to the San Antonio Symphony for repeat internships. As a marketing intern, Karp learned to create content, manage social media platforms, dive into web design, and do community outreach and other administrative duties assigned. Thompson is a development intern with the Symphony. She assisted with gift records, fulfilled acknowledgment letters, and developed language and statistical information for reports.
Brandon Niday ‘23 interned in public relations and marketing for the Boy Scouts of America, Alamo Area Council, where he helped create content for the organization’s website and YouTube channel. Niday broadened his skillset with real-world business experience, but he also found one trait that will help him in whatever career he pursues: “Remote internships are a crash course in adaptability,” he says.
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Making the Cut Three Trinity students intern as associate producers for film about Gandhi
(left to right) Seniors Ethan Jones, Rylie Snell, and Natalia Salas interned with Alamo City Studios through Students+Startups.
BY SYDNEY RHODES ’23
The Students+Startups (S+S) program gives Tigers the chance to intern with up and coming startups in San Antonio during the summer. Through a unique pilot program this year, three Trinity students extended their S+S internships through the fall: Ethan Jones ’21, Natalia Salas ’21, and Rylie Snell ’21 worked for Alamo City Studios as associate producers for an upcoming feature film. Alongside another student from a different college, the three Trinity students spent their summer and fall working on a documentary about the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and the life of his grandson, Arun. The film follows Arun Gandhi as he travels to India, where the 150th year of his grandfather’s birth is being celebrated. The interns’ roles as associate producers involved everything from promoting the film to working with the rough cut of the footage itself. Jones, Salas, and Snell transcribed and edited more than 85 hours of footage, mostly shot in India last year. At the same time, the interns managed the social media promotion of the film. Due to the nature of the project, a lot of the work was co-dependent. For example, the interns wrote the script as they went through footage,
and they met with cinematographers as they planned marketing and finished logging b-roll. They worked on the film alongside prominent people in the entertainment industry, such as an Emmy award-winning cinematographer and an Emmy award-nominated soundtrack composer. “My favorite part has been actually getting to edit the film, and I’m getting to input my opinions and experience,” says Salas, a communication major from Houston, Texas. “Also, of course, just being exposed to the local film community at Alamo City Studios, a coworking space for people in media. There are lots of local filmmakers and production companies, so we’re getting to learn a lot about the film industry in San Antonio.” “It has been really cool to actually get to work on the film,” adds Snell, who hails from Waco, Texas, and is double majoring in history and communication with a minor in film. “We’re not just watching professional editors or getting coffee or typical intern things—we’re actually getting to work on the movie.”
(left to right) Rylie Snell ‘21, Ethan Jones ‘21, and Natalia Salas ‘21 partnered with a student from another university during their internship.
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Planting the Seeds for Research BY MADISON SEMRO ’21
Trinity student and professor transform home to carry out biology research project
Grace Hanshaw ’22 spent last summer growing plants in a greenhouse, conducting field research, and collecting and analyzing samples of leaf segments. It sounds like a typical summer of biology research, except it all took place at Hanshaw’s home in The Woodlands, Texas, rather than in an official lab on Trinity’s campus. Like many Trinity students, Hanshaw, a biology major and Spanish and religion minor, completed her summer research project remotely because of COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, she had planned to spend the summer researching in biology professor Jim Shinkle’s lab doing wet lab work to study how ultraviolet radiation (UV) affects plants, but she was unsure if her project could be completed remotely. Shinkle, however, showed confidence that it very well could be. It took two trips from San Antonio to The Woodlands, but Hanshaw and Shinkle managed to transport the necessary lab equipment—a chlorophyll meter, a spectrophotometer, and a reflectance meter—so Hanshaw could collect and process her own data samples at home. Hanshaw built both a greenhouse and field site in her backyard and transformed her dining room into a space for lab work. She only had to mail Shinkle dried grass samples for weighing, as the scale was too fragile to withstand transport. Hanshaw studied how short-length UV-B affects native Texas grasses in a natural environment—or, in the case of this summer, her backyard. UV radiation induces a stress response in plants, as it causes gene mutations that can harm the plant. In response to UV exposure, plants produce a variety of UV absorbing pigments to help minimize the damage, and this redirection of resources thus inhibits the plants’ growth. In other words, certain parts of sunlight can actually stunt a plant’s growth, rather than help it. The amount of UV radiation a plant receives can vary based on a variety of factors including elevation, weather, and air pollution levels. Hanshaw’s research focused on how UV affects plants in a natural environment, where those factors cannot be as easily controlled as in a lab environment. Hanshaw, who is attending Trinity on a Murchison scholarship, finds that conducting research independently has helped her grow as a scientist. “I’m learning so much doing this on my own, even though there’s been a struggle and a big learning curve,” she explains. “It’s been really fulfilling.”
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Connecting to Culture Trinity interns build community with music, storytelling, and archiving at the Carver Center BY JEREMY GERLACH
Mai Vo ’22 and David Lonergan ’21 spent their summer helping build, preserve, and rediscover a vital part of San Antonio’s community. For more than 75 years, the Carver Community Cultural Center has been a hub for cultural and artistic exchange on San Antonio’s predominantly Black East Side, hosting artists and performers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. Vo and Lonergan are both recipients of Trinity’s coveted Arts, Letters, and Enterprise (ALE) internships, which match Tigers with humanities and arts backgrounds to area nonprofits. Thanks to the ALE program’s partnership with USAA, students earn invaluable business experience and are fully paid for their work, while nonprofits get skilled hands for work that might otherwise be tough to fund. Lonergan, for example, is a Spanish major who worked with the Carver as an archivist to help restore records, lost during renovations in the early 2000s, of famous poets, musicians, and artists. He also worked as a video editor for a project in which local celebrities read books to children over the internet using pre-recorded videos. In classic liberal arts fashion, Lonergan picked up a versatile set of skills by learning how to interact with clients, tweaking some graphic design skills, marketing through social media, and diving into video editing. Vo is a double major in piano performance and communication with a minor in film studies. She is from Hanoi, Vietnam. “Being a concert pianist is my dream, but what’s happening right now [with COVID-19] might threaten that, even in 10 years,” Vo says. “So I’m grateful I can explore different options within the music business. I want to spread my musical voice. There aren’t that many Vietnamese pianists out there right now, so I want to be able to represent my country in some way.” At the Carver Center, Vo put her musical talents to work in multiple ways. She worked on two separate children’s storytelling series, one that focused on telling stories about the Black community and another that told stories about race, culture, diversity, identity, and sexual orientation. Vo served as a music producer for these series, even composing her own originals to accompany the stories. “I’ve gotten to be very creative this summer,” Vo says. “It’s a learning experience, because I’ve been playing the piano for a long time, but I’ve learned enough now that I can create music, too.” Vo doesn’t know how her musical future will pan out, but supported by all this creativity at the Carver, she’s glad that she got the chance to workshop some new career paths. “I’m so glad to be doing something that satisfies my curiosity and allows me to explore different career options,” Vo says. “Even though I’m sitting in one place, now I’m really getting the chance to think about how I can help with my music anywhere in the arts.”
Mai Vo ’22
10 David Lonergan ’21
Explore Campus
Financial Aid Application
Check out gotu.us/visit for some great ways to connect with Trinity and explore campus.
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Apply for Specialized Scholarships
Application Deadlines APPLICATION DEADLINE
DECISION NOTIFICATION
DEPOSIT DEADLINE
Trinity offers these scholarships that require separate applications:
Early Decision I (binding)
Nov. 1
Dec. 1
Feb. 1
Early Action
Nov. 1
Dec. 15
May 1
Early Decision II (binding)
Feb. 1
Feb. 15
Mar. 1
• Semmes Distinguished Scholar Award: a fulltuition scholarship and research stipend for STEM-related majors (Nov. 15 deadline)
Regular Decision
Feb. 1
Mar. 15
May 1
Apply now at There’s still time to enjoy the rest of your senior year! Apply early, know early. At Trinity, applying Early Decision is recommended for students who, through diligent reflection and research, identify Trinity as their first choice and commit to enroll if admitted. To assist in your decision-making process, we encourage you to review the benefits, myths, and advice at gotu.us/earlydecision.
trinity.edu/apply If you’re ready to take advantage of the expert faculty, beautiful campus, and first-rate resources and opportunities at Trinity University, apply today via Early Decision II and receive your admissions decision and scholarship eligibility by Feb. 15. This program is a binding agreement. Students are ethically bound to apply Early Decision to only one school and will be expected to attend if offered admission.
• Storer & Tillman Scholarship for Developing Christian Leaders: a need-based award for student servant-leaders (Nov. 15 deadline) • Baker Duncan Fine Arts Scholarships: awards for students with special talents in art, debate, and theater • Music Scholarships: awards for students interested in continuing involvement in vocal or instrumental music
Find more information at gotu.us/meritaid.
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9:1 student-to-
QUICK FACTS
faculty ratio 97% of faculty hold doctoral or terminal degrees
Private, residential, co-educational, undergraduate-focused Founded in 1869 6 minutes from San Antonio International Airport Located in America’s 7th largest city
2,512
undergraduates from 48 states and 57 countries 6% international students
6
125 acre campus
located in a residential neighborhood
minutes from downtown San Antonio
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LeeRoyTheTiger
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A D M I T T E D S T U DE N T P ROF IL E
3.68
Fall 2020 Entry Term
average GPA
3.6–4.0 grade average
30.5
1344
29–33 mid 50%
1310–1470 mid 50%
average ACT
average SAT