PEAK Experiences Awardees Conclude Summer of Discovery, Fellowship
Undergraduate Research and Fellowships warmly congratulates our Summer 2021 PEAK Experiences Awardees, who spent the summer researching, creating, innovating, and discovering across disparate fields—all while building skills and community with one another and the URF staff and Faculty Fellows.
The Summer 2021 PEAK Experiences cohort used their awards to tackle intriguing and consequential questions across the disciplines, ranging from payday loan policy in Mexico to human motor skill acquisition to building drones based on the physiology of bats’ wings. Check out the impressive slate of projects here.
Meanwhile, the cohort also came together (from research, study, and living locations worldwide) to get to know likeminded, inquisitive peers from across the university and to practice skills with broad applicability to research, scholarship, creative practice, and professional efficacy. These PEAK Cohort activities, designed and implemented by URF staff and Faculty Fellows, are a key benefit of and complement to the financial support provided by the PEAK Experiences Awards.
PEAK Awardees practiced goal-setting, articulating specific personal, intellectual, and professional aims and reflecting on how their PEAK projects would help them advance toward those. To practice communicating complex ideas to non-specialist audiences, cohort members interviewed one another about their projects and shared summaries of their partners’ projects. Moving from oral and written to visual communication, awardees analyzed images from their daily lives and reflected on the role of images in academic communication. Finally, each cohort member recorded a final presentation on their summer’s work and came together in small groups with a faculty or staff facilitator to unpack all they had learned—both about doing their projects and sharing their projects.
Congratulations to all of our Summer 2021 PEAK Experiences Awardees, and thanks to them for being such thoughtful and generous interlocutors. We all learned a lot from you this summer!