The Fall 2018 Honors Symposium was held at the Alexandria on Friday, Oct. 26. Two of the participants have kindly provided information about their presentations for which we are grateful.
Beyond Our Borders: Why American Students Should be Multilingual
Daisy Garner
Abstract
At the age of eighteen, Daisy Garner boldly decided to leave her northern Virginia home and move to Germany for six months. She knew only a few phrases in German before moving to Germany, but she was excited to become acquainted with the language. Daisy soon learned, however, that almost everyone she met in Germany would speak to her in English. She was highly impressed with that fact, since, according to Pew Research Center (2018), very few people in the United States speak a second language. The main topic of her presentation was on whether American students should learn another language.
In her presentation, Daisy took her subjective experience learning other languages and combined it with a plethora of data. She also included fascinating data on the cognitive, career, and social benefits of being multilingual. She also encouraged American students and school systems to embrace multilingualism and explained how they can do this.
The Exponential Decay of Beer Froth
Sarah Olsen
Abstract
Sarah Olsen chose to present on the Exponential Decay of Beer Froth at the Fall 2018 Symposium. She was inspired to choose that topic when she read an article about it on the IgNoble website which honors scientists for their achievements that make people laugh and then think.
The Exponential Decay is a very significant process and can be observed in many fields such as biology, economics, chemistry, physics, etc. The German physicist A. Leike chose to study this topic because beer froth is a widely known phenomenon, at least in Europe where the legal age for drinking is 18. Possibly shockingly to American audience, the author was able to easily demonstrate the beer froth decay to his students in the university classroom and published his results in the European Journal of Physics in 2001.
Since the typical american college student will not be allowed to reproduce this experiment in the foreseeable future, here is a link to Sarah’s presentation for those interested.