Congratulations!
Kelli Fitzpatrick, graduate student in Creative Writing and the Environment, won first place in the Creative Component presentation category. Her talk included her research for her thesis project, a solarpunk climate fiction novel. “Lots of visitors to my station commented that seeing my project helped them understand the kind of research processes English/Creative Writing folks engage in,” Fitzpatrick said. “I had a lot of conversations about the role of storytelling in solving modern problems.”
Febriana Lestari, graduate student in Applied Linguistics and Technology, won first place in the Oral/Traditional presentation category. Her talk was titled “Language Development in Indonesian Learners.” Her research investigated how Indonesian learners learn English across time. To investigate that, she observed one type of “lexicogrammatical feature” named “Verb Argument Constructions” (VACs)—for example, verbs like “look up,” “come across,” “go through”—and compared how the Indonesian learners’ language mastery grows from beginner to advanced levels.
The Graduate and Professional Student Conference was a free opportunity for graduate and professional students to highlight their work while practicing their presentation skills. Grad students and researchers got the chance to participate in competitions through oral, poster, and exhibition presentations. The GPSS at Iowa State University held its 11th annual graduate student research conference in the Memorial Union all day on Wednesday, April 12, 2023. The conference provided an opportunity for ISU graduates to share their research and scholarship with the larger ISU community.
This conference continues GPSS’s effort to cultivate the graduate community across all the colleges and departments at Iowa State University. This year included a focus on interdisciplinary research, graduate student organizations, ISU services, and socializing across the colleges to build community for everyone’s mental well-being. It wanted to show the value that graduate students and researchers provide and to offer a potential vision for reimagining the future of the graduate community here at ISU.