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While the majority of Hamilton seniors stress their way through each day, balancing four upper-level courses, theses, extracurricular commitments, and, of course, the ever-impending job search, Sabrina Yurkofsky ’15 watches TV on the co-op porch. This seeming recreation is in fact research for her thought-provoking and culturally relevant senior fellowship. She is studying sexism in television programming and its potential effects on viewers’ gender perspectives.

During the spring semester of her junior year, Emma Laperruque ’14 went to a place few students go: the basement kitchens of the Soper Commons Dining Hall. She was down there to complete a photography project of her own design focused on how students and the dining hall staff respectively view the space.

Two poems by Marty Cain ’13 were accepted by [PANK] Magazine and are slated to appear in the March 2013 online issue, including audio recordings of Cain reading the poems. The magazine will also be publishing an interview with Cain on its website.

With hundreds of Walmarts and large malls spreading across the United States, shoppers can enjoy more convenient, sometimes cheaper goods, from groceries to car tires. While smooth highways bridge millions of Americans to glossy new shopping opportunities every year, the nation places less value on the quiet pastoral state that it once treasured. Marty Cain ’13 is exploring this dichotomy of lifestyles for his senior fellowship, The Poetic Art of Rural Decay: Reinterpreting the Pastoral with a Surreal Sense of Place.

An interesting aspect to bike riding is how a bicycle changes how the cyclist experiences his or her surroundings. In an urban area, biking can help define the relationship between cyclist and city. McKayla Dunfey ’13 is exploring this connection through her Senior Fellowship, titled “The Bicycle’s Influence: Changing Perceptions of Place and Space in Urban Environments.”

Caitlin Taborda, Hamilton’s only Senior Fellow for the class of 2011, has begun her research on American food movements with regard to how different people make choices about the food they eat. Her project is titled “Local, Organic, and Sustainable Privilege: Understanding the Social Significance of Food Movements and the Socioeconomic Factors that Influence Participation.”

Kyla Gorman '09 has been awarded $10,000 by the Penny Arcade Scholarship Program. Gorman intends to use her money to pursue a degree in game design from The University of Southern California.

“I want to research the experiences of British and Indian women during the British colonial rule in India,” explains Fiona Kirkpatrick ‘10. And as a Senior Fellow, she has done (and will continue to do) just that: she is exempt from taking classes so that she may devote her time to writing a lengthy thesis of her choosing.

“Your body knows something that your mind has forgotten,” says Autumnrose Haroutunian ’10. As one of three 2009-2010 Senior Fellows, Haroutunian is familiarizing herself with a concept known as phenomenology, a philosophical approach to issues of space and embodiment. More specifically, it professes a necessary break from the Cartesian dualism that separates mind and body. By forming a system with the objects of its perception, the body builds a foundation for an inter-subjective experience. Thus the concepts reflected on by the mind are second-order expressions of the world as we live it.

For the entirety of her senior year, Gail Corneau ’10 will be pursuing research that targets MRSA staph infections, an antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus infection that can be fatal if untreated. Hospitals researching Vancomycin, a last resort antibiotic used to treat MRSA infections, recently discovered that Vancomycin-resistant bacteria strains have emerged during testing.