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MALD thesis research on display at Fletcher – their authors on hand |
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For this first annual Fletcher poster session, students were invited to prepare a poster board that summarized their research work for display on easels placed throughout the Hall of Flags. Participating students were on hand to personally discuss their research with members of the Fletcher community – 50 of whom walked through the colorful display. Academic Dean Lisa Lynch created the initiative in response to a Student Council question last fall on how to improve the exchange among Fletcher students about their thesis work. “I thought about setting up a poster session where Masters and PhD students would have an opportunity to discuss their work with the wider Fletcher community,” Dean Lynch said. The format was based on many academic associations where poster sessions are used at annual meetings to increase the number of research presentations that can be made in a short period of time. Dean Lynch said she hopes to make the poster session an annual event and believes such sessions provide a valuable opportunity for first and second year student and PhD candidates alike. “I hope that the session helps those who have written their thesis to have a chance to share their findings with a broader community and increase our community's understanding of the topics they have worked so hard on. “For first year Masters students trying to figure out what this "thesis thing" is all about it the session is an opportunity to find out what types of theses have been done at Fletcher and to see the variety of approaches and themes that students have undertaken in their thesis work “For the PhD students still in progress it gives them an opportunity to share the advanced research work they are undertaking with students who may be thinking about a PhD and it provides a connection between the PhD students and our Masters students,” Dean Lynch said. Second year MALD and future PhD candidate Andrea Dew presented work from her thesis which was titled “Commercial Remote Sensing: National Security Asset or Threat, and the Regulatory Options.” Ms Dew had completed her thesis in January and spent about an hour putting her poster board presentation together using the thesis’s executive summary. “The challenge was how to make it visually interesting and which images to select to illustrate the impact commercially available satellite images can have,” Ms Dew said. She said she received some interesting reactions form students and faculty. “Students asked how I selected the topic, which courses I took, how I linked up my research interests and courses, how long it took to write and why I wrote on that subject,” she said. “Faculty gave me some great angles on where to take the research because they were experts in fields I haven't studied,” she added. Ms Dew welcomed the initiative and said it would be useful for first years to know what second years were writing about. “I think the hardest part of writing the thesis is selecting a topic – aside from having to write the 60-plus pages of course,” she said. “Just knowing what makes a good topic and the kind of detail we need to get into, and how to limit the research to make the thesis manageable would have been really helpful when I was starting to research and write my MALD. “We all pursue such different plans of study here and it was great to see so many different snapshots of people's research interests,” she added. Dean Lynch said she would like to try to set up either informal discussion groups or some Fletcher discussion boards where students with common research interests could exchange ideas. Several students’ abstracts and/or theses are already posted on the Fletcher website so their work is accessible to the Fletcher community and anyone else who accesses the website. To access this site, click here. (Liz, maybe you could link the thesis page -- http://nils.lib.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/perscoll?collection=Perseus:collection:Fletcher) “I was glad that we were able to have this first annual celebration of Fletcher student research and I hope that this becomes as much of a tradition as even the wonderful Fletcher Follies,” Dean Lynch added. |
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2002 The Fletcher School, Tufts
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