Beloit College Venture Grants

A student-run blog to celebrate and share the achievements of Beloit College Venture Grant winners.

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Andrew Urena ‘18 - EMT Training

I was able to take an EMT course over the summer, which allowed me to gain valuable knowledge and hands-on skills in the medical field. One of my crazy experiences was in the ER; I was feeling nervous about what I'd encounter on a Friday afternoon at Weiss Hospital in Chicago. I took full advantage of this opportunity though - I saw and helped patients with Pulmonary and Cardiovascular Disorders, and I was able to do patient assessment and check vital signs. I was also able to provide oxygen and airway care, and preformed bandaging and splinting, in addition to operating EMS equipment. Most importantly, I learned how to perform all of these tasks while keeping in mind medical law and ethics. Thanks to the committee for my Venture grant!

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Venture Grant Recipients  Winners of Fall 2016 Luke Somers Memorial Off-Campus Photo Contest

First Place: Julia Ring ‘18

Title: Midnight on a Blue Mountain

Place: Coast Mountain Range, Yukon Territory, Canada

Program: Venture Grant

When: Summer 2016

Description: A lone, unnamed peak stands high above our campsite. The tarps contrast with the brown earth, and blue water. They are still in this photo, and don’t show the gale-force winds that blew through most of the evening in this picturesque alpine. Glacial snow melts into this lake, and the water is the coldest I have ever touched. Getting to this site took eight hours, with 50 pound backpacks, and required climbing a 4 km peak, and descending a 2 km near-vertical rockslide. This photo was taken at 11:24 pm, proving that the Yukon really is the land of the midnight sun.

Third Place: Macy Tran ‘17

Title: Home of the Tree-Climbing Lions

Place: Lake Manyara National Park, Northern Tanzania

Program: Venture Grant

When: Summer 2015

Description: In efforts towards team building at the secondary boarding school in Tanzania I was doing research at in the Summer of 2015, the staff at the school went on a two day trip to two different national parks in Tanzania. We took a road trip on a big bus, and drove through the parks on the bus. This photo was taken at the Lake Manyara National Park, where they explicitly advertised they were “home of the tree-climbing lions”. As we were on the bus, our tour guide told us that actually, it’s sometimes rare to seem a lion here. However, on that trip, we ran into several lions, close enough where we had to turn off the bus engine and stay completely still and quiet so that they may leave without disturbing us. This lion was leisurely napping in a tree, seeing as it had pretty much no other predators in the park. We were really lucky that day to see so many lions!

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Sophie Hale-Brown ‘18

Take a look at Sophie’s blog that explores her venture grant experience!

https://eightypercentfull.wordpress.com/2016/10/08/my-summer-collage/

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Jeffrey Lee ‘18 -Chinatowns

This summer I had the opportunity to travel to the Chinatowns of Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I began each trip by following the tourists and taking the same pictures, but as the day went on I would find myself off the beaten track. In Chicago, I went into a basement market and bought a few sausages. In San Francisco, I accepted an awkward invitation to a Christian community event and drank free tea. Later, I visited a urban shrine in a third floor of a apartment and prayed in one of the oldest Chinese temples in the United States. As an Asian American, I find that it is often hard to separate Chinatowns from my conception of myself.  For better of for worse, they are the physical manifestations of our identity, the place we make our stand. Here in these constructed blocks of plastic pagodas which paint a far-away fantastical Orient are our yearning dreams of home. It was an eye-opening experience. 

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Elena Cusack ‘18 ~ Dance Adventure~

Elena spent her summer split between Virginia and Washington state. In Virginia, the venture grant helped with the cost of participating in an arts administration internship at Hollins University’s MFA in dance program. In Seattle, WA the venture grant went towards paying the tuition of attendance for Strictly Seattle as well as Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. Above is the group photo from Hollins (students, staff and interns) and a photo from the Strictly Seattle cast from a piece called Bodies of Water.

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Venture Grant Experience: Galapagos Islands -Becca Gilloway ’18 & Emily St. Onge ’18

Last summer we had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Galapagos Islands volunteering for the organization Eco Volunteer Up. We picked fruit, cleared farmlands of invasive plant species, planted native vegetation, built a rainwater reservoir, and built a drinking pond for a giant tortoise conservation site. We had an amazing time exploring the island of San Cristobal and seeing all of the plants and animals that are only found on the islands.

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Mingyi Zhang ‘18

“This summer I visited five of the former Concentration Camp Sites in Germany and Austria during the Nazi time. Through this trip, I learned about the change in German governments’ policies towards the preservation and presentation of the former concentration camps as international antifascism symbols. Nowadays most of the former major concentration camps are national memorial sites for the Nazi victims, which operate under the fund from both state and federal government of Germany. However, it was because the continuous fight from the survivors’ group and the effort of thousands of scholars throughout the postwar period, the remaining traces of Nazi crimes could be protected and the camps eventually serve as education channels for the new generations to learn from the past. Over the course of 70 years, the perception of “collective guilt” among German people changed significantly from generation to generation, and the use of the concentration camps was one way to reflect the changes. This project offered me an overview of the memorial development for National Socialism victims during WWII, and it further triggered my interests in learning more about the Nazi time and the postwar reconstruction in Germany.”

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Nissa Parker ’18 volunteered with World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) in various locations in Ecuador this past summer. She worked in the greenhouse and the permaculture “food forest”, and had fun playing with the farm dog. 

“I can say I was moved by the opportunity to not only uphold sustainability as an ideal, but to live it as a lifestyle. I went to Ecuador with the goal of learning about sustainable food production, and came back with a much greater understanding of sustainability as a holistic way of life in which growing food is just one part. I am extremely grateful to Beloit for giving me the opportunity to immerse myself in that lifestyle and I am excited to be back on campus to share what I learned about food and sustainability as a whole.” 

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Abigail McCully ′18 shares her venture grant experience: 

I had a great time in Austria studying the Salzburg Theatre Festival. In the first picture I am climbing on the stage of Salzburg's Stone Theatre, a stage that is carved into a cave. The second picture shows me eating Dueruem, a delicious Turkish-Austrian wrap with turkey and a special sauce. I definitely learned a lot and had a great experience.

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Julia Ring ’18 on her venture grant experience:

“I spent a month backpacking and canoeing the the Yukon Territory of Canada researching the benefits and outcomes of outdoor education. The purpose was to further prove the impact the outdoors can have on participants to encourage continued funding for wildness programs for kids who might not otherwise be able to afford them, but still want to benefit. My experience has been amazing, filled with challenging summit ascents, run-ins with grizzly bears, nights under the aurora borealis, and a stronger understanding and desire to help further the cause that I’m studying.”

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This past summer Laura Savage ’18, volunteered with La 72, a nonprofit in Tenosique, Tabasco, Mexico. It is an organization that temporarily houses and provides aid to immigrants from South and Central America on their way to the United States. Through this experience, Laura was able to gain a deeper understanding of the lives of migrants, the policies that surround immigration, and the reasons for leaving their country. In addition, she got to see firsthand how organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees operate on the ground. Though her experience was brief, Laura feels even more compelled to return to Central America to further her understanding in the multi-faceted debate of immigration policy. 

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This past summer, my project, What Can We Learn From Shokuiku in Japan: A Case Study in A Japanese Kindergarten, was conducted in Ustunomiya, Tochigi, Japan. The term Shokuiku, usually translated into English as ‘food education’, somtimes as ‘nurturing through eating’ (Takeda, 2008) or ‘food pedagogies’ (Reiher, 2012), has been widely used in Japan for several years.  During my research, I observed during lunch period, conducted interviews with teachers and administrators. My focus was to see how other education such as physical, moral and intellectual education comprise food education at kindergartens. From the interviews as well as class observations, I was able to see the intellectual aspect of food education, which includes acquisition of food-related knowledge as well as understanding towards nutrition and health. For example, at one class, the teachers explained that our basic diet consists of carb, protein and vegetables by colorful charts they made. On the moral level, food education activities in the two kindergartens focus on teaching children to express gratitude towards food and nature together with people who are involved in food production. For example, before eating, everyone including the teacher has to say “itadakimasu”, which means “Thank you nature for the feast” in Japanese. At last, the physical aspect of food education involves the concept of daily exercise following by healthy nutrition and diet. Children at the kindergartens were made sure to have at least has two-hour recession every day. 

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Sien Fu ′18 

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Meredith Shimek’17 on her venture grant experience:

"This past summer, I traveled to Brussels, Belgium. Along with three other volunteers and two professionals, I lived in a home with six residents with mental and intellectual disabilities. We assisted them with daily tasks including wake-up, meal preparation, laundry, cleaning, showers, event planning, phone calls, grocery shopping, and most importantly social inclusion and integration. This opportunity to live and work with people with disability every day, to communicate and build family-like relationships was a great test of empathy, patience, and emotional investment. I am very grateful to have called this place home for three months and now carry every experience and connection made with me for the rest of my life. This experience pushed me to develop second language skills, communication skills, to learn to maintain a household, accommodate for special needs, and to understand different perspectives and views of the world. My work this summer directly connected to my experience as a psychology student at Beloit and has given me even more motivation to do things that I truly care about in the future. This summer strengthened my interest and passion for social and developmental psychology and I am now more confident in my ability and energy to work with others."

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Emma Mooney’17 pretty much lived the art enthusiast’s dream this summer: a particularly good paper of hers led her down the path to the Antiques Roadshow convention in South Carolina. Emma is interested in outsider art and the study of material culture, so when an Antiques Roadshow appraiser invited her to shadow him at a convention, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. While she was there, she took the opportunity to explore the outsider art scene in Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA.

To learn more about Emma’s work on this project, check out her blog Quality Junk.

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Bonnie Willison’17 used her venture grant to embark on a 2-week camping trip through some of Wisconsin’s most beautiful state parks. The trip may have been fun, but Bonnie was up to more than just frolicking in the woods - she also researched how each park got its name. She says, “In light of the recent controversy where Scott Walker wanted to rename the state parks with commercial names, I thought it would be an interesting thing to look at, how the names came about.”

This project synthesizes Bonnie’s Anthropology major and passion for nature. What better way to explore the significance of state parks than to immerse yourself in them and then explore the meaning of each of their names?

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Samantha Poyer’17 used her venture grant to work in the Sim Copans Jazz Archive (above) in Souillac, France, combining her interests in archival work, French language and culture, the history of American popular music, and cross-cultural translation. She also had the opportunity to engage with the rich history of Southwestern France– the little things that make a regional identity out of hundreds of small agricultural towns.

The town square of Souillac. The wing to the left of the medieval church at the center of the photo used to house monks, but is now used for exercise classes.

Souillac is on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route, between Rocamadour and Cahors. This small shrine to the Virgin Mary sits on the highway out of town.

Train selfie!

The city of La Roc St. Christophe is carved into the side of a cliff, and was occupied from prehistoric times to the Hundred Years’ War.

The stalactites and stalagmites in Cougnac Caves are so dense that Paleolithic people had to break them to get to the back of the cave system, where they painted mammoths, horses, and human figures.

 [If images are not showing up, simply click them to view.]

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You don’t need to travel far to have a meaningful summer experience. Marina Bagnoli’17 did her venture grant project with Beloit’s own Community Action Inc, an organization that works to create pathways out of poverty. This Health and Society major channeled her passion for public health into an internship that built on her experiences in the Duffy Community Partnerships. 

Her work included doing summer camps for teenagers that teach them about safe sex and personal responsibility, as well as doing research on STI rates in Rock County. Marina’s project was a great way to engage with the local community of Beloit -- there are all kinds of opportunities right here in town.