The first annual Undergraduate Research Journal Symposium, held on Wednesday, April 23, showcased diverse pieces of research from many UC Merced undergraduate students.
The symposium had many topics on various subjects. It was broken into five one-hour sessions that started at 10 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. There was a keynote presentation by Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza around noon. Some of the main focuses of the presentations were humanities, civil rights, and technology.
A couple presentations stood out due to the uniqueness of their source material. The first was by Haruka Motomatsu, whose presentation focused on using virtual reality to cure phantom limb pain.
Motomatsu presented studies in which virtual reality (VR) was used to help patients. One study involved amputees wearing a VR helmet and picking up items in the VR simulator with their missing limb. This is interesting because the idea of phantom limb pain is surreal and using VR, a video method that is fairly recent, to cure it is even more surreal.
Another presentation that caught my attention was called “A Happy Medium: An Ethnography on Fandom in Football” by Katelynn Mashburn, which was about understanding football fanaticism from the eyes of a non-football fan.
As a football fan, I have come to accept the craziness of the fans and the passion they put into cheering for their teams by making themselves stand out.
What caught my attention about Mashburn’s presentation was the fact that she was a complete newcomer. She did thorough research on the topic of football fanaticism and even analyzed the game as a whole to see if she could find an obvious point as to why football fans do crazy things.
The UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal (URJ) Symposium was a great event to attend. The journal publishes research by undergraduates from all areas of academics, and welcomes students to submit their work for publication.
Adrian Toscano
Managing Editor
atoscano2@ucmerced.edu