Life and Violence: One Student’s Study of Biology and LiteratureEcheverry Shares Her Symposium Story

By Melissa Valentovic
Staff Writer

East Stroudsburg University’s Annual Student Research Symposium is accepting applicants for the 2016 Symposium now through April 1.

The 2016 symposium will be taking place at ESU’s Hoeffner Science and Technology Center on Thursday, April 21from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Joshua Aronson, who was named by Education Weekly as one of the Most Influential Academics in Education.

One past participant of the symposium, ESU senior Biology major Valeria Echeverry, recalls having a great experience last year.

While presenting her poster, the symposium made her feel like what she had been learning about in her classes was significant and that the effort she invested in it had paid off.

“It was just cool to see how bright people at ESU really are,” says Echeverry, looking back on her time presenting at the symposium and the positive, academic atmosphere of it.

Echeverry’s poster was based on a paper she had written for her Spanish Critical and Literary Approach class last year.

Upon handing in her paper entitled, “Violence As a Means of Control,” Echeverry says Dr. Esther Daganzo had loved it so much she was told she “HAD” to showcase it at the symposium, which prompted her to make her symposium poster based off of the topic.

The final assignment for her class was to write an essay that compared either the themes, styles or allusions of any of the different stories they had read.

These stories were written by different authors from Spain throughout completely different periods of time, according to Echeverry.

Regarding the theme of violence in her paper, Echeverry says that it, “seemed almost like a subconscious topic so I concluded that the violence represented in these stories overall talk about the challenge that is life; it can be so brutal, so borderline violent.”

Echeverry explains that she is absolutely interested in participating in this year’s symposium again, however this time she thinks she would like to present research that is somehow related to her Biology major.

Participating in the research symposium has also allowed her to set the basis for her research experience as she was also encouraged by Dr. Daganzo to further her research on the topic and present her paper at the first ever Latino/Hispanic Studies Conference that ESU will be hosting this April.

Email Melissa at:
mvalentovi@live.esu.edu