Psychology major Beril Esen ’13 spent the early months of this summer conducting a study on the recently discovered concept of defensive self-esteem. But when her psychology research ended in late June, her academic plans for the summer were hardly complete. Esen was also awarded a Summer Research Fellowship by the Levitt Center for Public Affairs to study the issue of domestic violence in her native city of Istanbul, Turkey.

A Levitt Public Service internship this summer has solidified Jose Vazquez’s ’15 desire to pursue a career in education policy and reform. Vazquez is in Washington D.C. as an intern for The Heart of America Foundation, a non-profit organization that builds libraries for under-resourced schools across the nation.  The organization partners with Target and embarks on their 15th year anniversary building 150+ libraries nationwide.

Whenever a financial institution nears bankruptcy and requests federal bailout funds, it often claims to be “too big to fail.” Unlike the Titanic’s designers who believed that she was too big to physically sink, financial executives hold no illusions about their firms’ lack of invincibility.

Catherine Gold ’14 took advantage of the Career Center’s HamiltonExplore career shadowing program in January by spending a day with Meg Harrison ’91, patient services manager at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in New York City. Now, six months later Gold is a Levitt Public Service Intern there, thanks in large part to the connection she made through HamiltonExplore.

Biology and women’s studies are two concentrations not usually associated with one another. Ashley Perritt ’14, a 2012 Levitt Summer Grant Recipient, plans to bridge this gap with her summer research project, “An Investigation of the Profiling in the Emergency Room.” Perritt will be advised by Elizabeth J. McCormack Associate Professor of Women's Studies Vivyan Adair.

The Levitt Center has announced the 2012 Levitt Summer Research Fellowship recipients and Levitt Summer Research Group Grant Recipients. Twenty-one students will conduct research with 13 faculty members.

Austin Walker ’12 has been awarded a Fulbright Grant to Kenya. He will spend the 2012-13 academic year working on his project “Kenyan Youth Development: Youth as Kenya’s Development Architects” in Nyanza Province of western Kenya. Walker will rejoin the Lwala Community Alliance staff and director Robert Kasabala to build upon the baseline study about youth perspectives on development that they conducted last summer.

To conclude its program series on Security, the Levitt Center brought John Dehn to campus to present a lecture titled “War and the Constitution: Military Commissions, Targeted Killing of Citizens, and Other Hard Cases.” Dehn – a senior fellow at the West Point Center for the Rule of Law at the United States Military Academy – discussed the philosophical, constitutional and legal underpinnings of the doctrine and law of war and the implications they have on the international system, as well as on due process rights of American citizens and foreigners involved in war.

Author Michael Egan preceded his April 18 lecture, “The History of Now: Decoding Environmental Sustainability,” by taking a refreshing bike ride with Professor of English Onno Oerlemanns.  Later in his talk Egan mentioned that all five of his family members bike to work or school nearly every day.