Steinmetz Symposium presentations
ran the gamut, and some had special meaning for their presenters. Here are a few:
— Tom Jenne '99 presented his design for an all-terrain wheelchair, inspired
by his sister, Christina, who had difficulty negotiating her wheelchair over the rough
trails at a nature preserve near their home. “If she hits a bump or a hole, her
wheelchair easily tips over and she falls out,” he said. “It will be nice to
enable her to do some of the things she hasn't been able to do before.”
— Irene Kan '00 spoke on the coverup of the “forgotten Holocaust,”
the Nanjing Massacre during World War II in which 300,000 Chinese died at the hands of the
Japanese. “I was shocked because (the massacre) was so atrocious that the least the
Chinese government could have done was to commemorate it,” said Kan, a
first-generation Chinese American. “It wasn't until four decades later that the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum was built.”
— Daniel Pesikoff '99 studied the “Crypto-Jews” of the American
Southwest and Mexico, who trace their roots to 13th-century Spain. He says he learned of the secret societies, who practice Jewish
traditions while publicly appearing to be Catholic, while researching his own ancestry.
— Devaraj Pyne '00, a first-generation Hindu American presented on “The
Use of Discipline on First Generation Hindu Indian-American Families.” He collected
data from six Hindu Temples and was surprised to learn that more acculturated parents are
more likely to use corporal punishment; the original hypothesis was that parents with
greater Indian values would be more likely to use physical punishment.
— Rebecca Schwartz '99, who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis last year,
presented on “Coping in College with Multiple Sclerosis: Constructing a Disease and
Defining a Self.” Central to her thesis were responses she received from surveys she
sent to other college-age students with MS. “It is the best therapy possible to
e-mail people who actually understand what you are going through.”