Ninth Annual Celebrating Student Achievement Day
By Melyssa Allen
 
More than 100 students shared their research accomplishments during Meredith College’s ninth annual Celebrating Student Achievement Day on April 23, 2009. The day included nearly 12 hours of research presentations, arts performances and academic and leadership awards ceremonies.

Celebrating Student Achievement Day is a showcase of student work in all disciplines.

“It is my favorite day of the year. It is a time when we see the best in students,” said Professor of Human Environmental Sciences Deborah Tippett. “We have a glimpse of their research and a forecast of their future. It is a time when we see Meredith students fulfill our mission of educating women to excel.”

Topic areas covered this year in presentations and poster sessions included technology, art, politics, gender issues and cultural issues.

Student research presentation titles included “How does your vote count? Comparing voting algorithms effects on elections,” “Teaching/learning the Spanish past tense using communicative processing instruction methodology,” and “Embarrassed but full: Requesting emergency food assistance and the presentation of self.”

Classes are canceled on Celebrating Student Achievement Day so the entire campus community can participate.

“It is important to celebrate the achievements of [Meredith] students because we are able to show our faculty, staff and fellow students what we’ve been working on all year,” said Whitney Rains, ’09, who presented her work with the Scanning Electron Microscope. “It’s a chance to validate all those late nights in the library, meetings with faculty advisors and endless hours of research.”

For more information on undergraduate research at Meredith, visit www.meredith.edu/urp.

Achievement Award Presented to Celine Cousteau
By Melyssa Allen

Meredith College presented the 2009 Woman of Achievement Award to Céline Cousteau, Ocean Futures Society international project coordinator.

President Maureen Hartford presented the award to Cousteau, granddaughter of the legendary Jacques Cousteau, prior to her Earth Day lecture on April 22.

“Through her extraordinary career and accomplishments, she is an ideal expert to represent [Meredith’s] theme for the year, “Sustaining Our Environment: Developing Our Greenprint,” said Hartford in her presentation of the third annual award.

The daughter of ocean explorer and filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau, Céline Cousteau is featured in the PBS series “Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures.” Cousteau has collaborated with her father's Ocean Futures Society promoting the educational program “Ambassadors of the Environment” throughout her travels.

As an educational ambassador and “oceanaut,” Cousteau seeks to educate through adventure and exploration. In her multi-media presentation at Meredith, Cousteau aimed to “take the audience on a few journeys,” including into the Amazon, where she has worked on a variety of projects, such as a collaboration with Amazon Promise to bring medical care to the region. Amazon Promise is a U.S.-based non-profit organization founded to provide medical care to remote populations living in the Upper Amazon Basin.

Calling herself an Amazon addict, Cousteau said “the people of the Amazon are what connected me to the region, along with extraordinary experiences such as swimming with an anaconda.”

Using unique experiences to bring the story of the natural world back to audiences in the U.S. is one of Cousteau’s primary goals. She hopes to show that “all of it is connected to our lives, that what we do here affects what happens there.”

Cousteau encouraged the audience to find something they are passionate about and advocate for that, “whether it is a region, a topic or a people … you don’t have to be an environmentalist, a conservationist or a scientist. You just have to care.”

The Woman of Achievement lecture is held in conjunction with Meredith's annual Celebrating Student Achievement Day. The lecture was part of The Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Presidential Lecture Series at Meredith College. The series stimulates and enhances the intellectual and academic climate at Meredith College and the broader community.

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