[The Devine Intervention: Through Buried Paths Download
Virginie Fayad
The annual Smith in the World Conference celebrates the incredible off-campus work students achieve through internships, community service, study abroad, and research. The conference features presentations by student panelists who reflect on their experiences and the impact those experiences have had on their academic work and future plans.
Whether working with Tibetan Buddhists in China, volunteering at a hospital in Zimbabwe, or providing community service in New Orleans, Smith in the World gives students an opportunity to share their stories.
Each year, Smith students thrive in a wide variety of off-campus experiences, bringing their curiosity and passion for learning out into the world. In turn, they enrich their academic experiences and plant the seeds for their future career paths.
This small-scale ethnographic project explores how Black African immigrant women situate their hairdressing practices within post-apartheid South Africa. I will reflect on the first semester of my Junior Year Abroad, during which I conducted an independent study project in Durban, South Africa. Working at the heart of some hair salons in Durban, are women from the Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Malawi who have to take up hairdressing work for economic survival. Through a series of interviews conducted over a four-week long research period, I learned--despite the constraints in which these women work--of the opportunities for community-building within the hair salon. For immigrant hairdressers, styling hair was more than a source of economic agency, it is also an opportunity for community-building. From this research experience, I learned that Black immigrant women cultivate spaces of belonging within spaces like the hair salon.
From its landscape of rolling hills, to its persevering minority language, to its stone age structures layered with time and steeped in legend, Wales is a living archive of (hi)story. In late May/early June 2018 I participated in the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Creative Writing at the University of Wales Trinity St David, in West Wales. In December 2018, I completed a 116-page comic memoir about the experience of forming community with other writers during our time together. Through written word, I reflect that relationships with and perceptions of place are inextricably bound to relationships with and perceptions of people. Through image--a language of emotion, creativity, and imagination--I illustrate my cartoon-self exploring these relationships in a semi-realistic, semi-abstract and synesthetic visual world. I draw the past into the present, contemplating stories as liminal spaces of connection that transcend time. Combining word and image, I discover that storytelling is a form of empathy, which allows us to inhabit multiple worldviews and find new solutions to problems. This lays the foundation for a future comic about the life of Welsh poet and language activist Menna Elfyn, and how perspectives gained from minority languages--like Welsh--are tools for social change.
During my summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to use my Praxis grant to work with Child Family Health International on their program, Realities of Health Access and Inequities, in Oaxaca, Mexico. This internship was very exciting for me as it combined my three areas of study: pre-med, sociology and Spanish. I had the privilege to observe alongside medical professionals and residents in a variety of hospitals and clinics serving mixed-income populations, as well as attend lectures about preventative care and public health crises that were affecting Mexico. I was able to immerse myself into an entirely Spanish-speaking environment while gaining valuable and unique clinical experience and learning about the social, economic, political and geographic factors that affect the healthcare system in Oaxaca. My work this summer was a major deciding factor in my choice to study abroad in Crdoba, Spain, next semester in pursuit of total fluency in Spanish. It has also moved me forward towards a career in the medical field working with Spanish-speaking populations and advocating for immigrants in the healthcare system in the US. In my talk, I hope to inform the Smith community about cross-disciplinary internship opportunities abroad.
Every summer, we go to remote villages and public schools in Ladakh to teach young girls and their mothers about their bodies. We encourage young girls not to feel they are less important than boys just because their bodies work differently. Since 2015, we've met with 1,300 girls and women. We work with local Ladakhi leaders to make our workshops more effective and reachable. Besides women's health, we talk about mental health, women's empowerment, safety, and sexual harassment, and wellness in Ladakhi society. This past summer, we gave workshops on sustainable and healthy menstruation hygiene, introducing products such as menstrual cloth pads and menstrual cups to women and girls. These options proved popular with the local people, as they are less harmful to Ladakh's fragile ecosystem, affordable, and non-toxic to our bodies. I continued to be inspired by my professors and colleagues at Smith. The college's open and free-thinking environment and passionate commitment to gender equity continue to influence and inform work in ways that reach far beyond myself and touch my sisters back home.
This summer I worked at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) studying HIV. South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world, with an estimated 7.2 million people living with HIV as of 2017. To try to combat new infections, young women aged 15-24, who represent a key transmitter population, are increasingly being given pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). For my research, I was situated in KwaZulu-Natal, the province with the highest HIV infection rates in the country. My project sought to understand some of the immunological effects of PrEP in young women at risk for HIV infection. Ultimately, the goal of my project was to aid in the design of more effective treatment and prevention methods for young women as well as the broader global community impacted by HIV. My time in South Africa gave me a more holistic understanding of the disease as I was able to learn about the virus in the context of the immune response in humans as well as the cultural stigma surrounding the disease.
This Spring 2019, I took a gap semester to work on a seven-month project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. This work was a great opportunity for me to be exposed to real field research. For seven months, I built an automated framework that can generate the parameters for Molecular Simulations in much faster time compared to existing quantum mechanics approaches. The project has helped me learn about myself, specifically my interest in software engineering and data science. I also learned how to overcome Imposter Syndrome when I felt like I was the minority on the team: the only undergraduate and the only female who was working with all post-docs and "famous" mentors. However, my fear quickly disappeared because I had the chance to work with many post-doc colleagues whose research and educational experiences provided a strong foundation for growing my own learning. They taught me the beauty of diversity, cooperation, and hard work. I also learned from my great mentor, Dr. Chris Neale, who not only taught me the knowledge I needed to conduct research but also many skills I can use for life such as admitting "I don't know," because "there is no one that knows everything," or willing to say "No," when the tasks are not part of your project, and even writing my very first paper as first author. In my presentation, I will talk about what I worked on for my project as well as what I have learned through meeting people at the lab.
I will review my experiences as a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates student at James Madison University during the Summer of 2019. For eight weeks, I worked on a team mathematically quantifying surface roughness in regions of Virginia with and without landslides, and creating a logistic model to automate the process of landslide identification for geologists. The impact of my experience was profound in shaping my perspective on the importance of mathematics in other disciplines, and my role as a woman in mathematics. For the first time, I actually understood what my professors were saying when they told me that math can apply to anything, and that what I am learning in class will apply directly to my future in math. I return to Smith College with a sense of excitement to go further in my math studies and learn how I can use what I learn here at Smith to assist researchers in many other fields, as well as an investment to continue to support the diversification of researchers in mathematics.
I will review my experiences studying in Iceland and Greenland during the Spring of 2019 with SIT World Learning. For four months, I travelled in these two countries, learning about the effect climate change is having on local communities. I also conducted independent research on the ways that climate change is affecting Icelandic ecosystems, focusing on trees and herbaceous plants. These experiences helped me realize the urgency of the climate crisis, and they encouraged me to pursue a career in sustainability and environmental justice after graduation.
I will discuss clean energy, the limits of silicon solar cells, and the potential and development process of organic solar cells to the general audience. I will be also talking about how I find about the research and reached out to the principal investigator.
Over the summer, I was a research intern at the Department of Environmental Conservation Hudson River National Estuary Research Reserve (HRNERR) at Norrie Point Environmental Center, a funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reserve. I received this internship through the Smith College Agnes Shedd Andreae Summer NOAA Internship Fellowship from the Environmental Science and Policy Program. As a BA engineering student, I interact with systems-thinking applications, design-oriented solutions, and research-based methods on a daily basis. Through this internship, I had the opportunity to apply perspectives I gained from my engineering courses outside of the classroom. I assisted in monitoring water quality, meteorological, and nutrient analysis. As a resourceful and flexible problem-solver, I calibrated, monitored, maintained, installed, and deployed environmental data collection tools. I collaborated on a variety of projects, including lab processing, data collection, field work, office tasks, and education programming. By building agency for environmental protection through research, education, and the celebration of natural spaces, I want to invest my resources into sustainable community solutions and to continue to build on my skills as an environmental activist. I look forward to growing as an environmental steward and advocate.
795a8134c1