Column: The Peak of my summer, research abroad

I have peaked twice in life so far. The first time was when I was cast as the lead in an amateur dance-only production of “Hello, Dolly!” The second time was when I got to see the fireworks for Bastille Day over the Eiffel Tower this summer. More excitingly, I was there for research.

This summer, I was incredibly honored to be awarded a Peak Summer Research Fellowship, chosen alongside 13 other students in the Utah State University College of Arts and Sciences to conduct research or creative activities. As a creative writer, my research consisted of studying the structure of memoir to understand how written form can contribute to a piece’s overarching theme. My artistic endeavor was a response to this research. Alongside my personal studies, I attended the American University of Paris Summer Creative Writing Institute, where I focused on the craft of personal narrative, refined my technique through writing workshops and completed a memoir. 

This endeavor was one of many unique experiences fellow researchers from USU had. Between substance abuse studies to researching spacecraft survivability, my cohort of Peak Fellows touched so many important, relevant topics in an attempt to learn more about the world and the real problems it faces. 

On Aug. 20, the Peak Fellows presented at the end-of-summer Student Research Showcase at the Carolyn Tanner Irish Pavillion in the Medhi Heravi Global Teaching and Learning Center. Here, I had the opportunity to learn about my peers’s projects and what research they are bringing into the world of academia. 

India Evans and Tanner Merritt from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics worked with mentor Peter Crooks to research Hamiltonian Reduction at an undergraduate level.

“The motivation behind this project has to do with string theory research,” Merritt said. “Our research kind of boiled down to looking at shapes and that energy flow in systems and looking at how we can simplify them so that way we can look at those different dimensions and see if they function properly within our universe.”

While I didn’t understand their project because I haven’t taken a math course since concurrent enrollment 1050 my senior year of high school, I was impressed with the 230 pages of notes they took over the summer to help their faculty mentor establish the background on the project. 

In a more humanities-focused project, fellow English student Eden Marroquin researched African American writers and intellectuals, specifically James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and their involvement in the Cultural Cold War. She traveled to D.C. to perform archival research on these writers.

“I applied for the Peak Fellowship so that I could have the opportunity to do more archival research this summer,” Marroquin said. “This year, I’m working towards a co-publication, writing articles and presenting my work.”

Emilia Huff, a biological engineering student, held her research around a polymer nanoparticle for targeted drug delivery to the brain. Her lab focused on viral infections and how to design particles that will treat these infections. 

For Huff, the fellowship was exciting because she received funding to work on her research and met a community of other researchers through workshops over the summer. 

“I have a really good research community in my department. However, meeting other people who are doing other undergraduate research in the university was really important to me,” Huff said. “I feel like it’s made the connection of my research to how that impacts our university and undergraduate research community here.”

Trace Taylor from the Physics Department looked at spacecraft survivability.

“I was looking at how you can increase spacecraft survivability based on how rough or contaminated the spacecraft surface is,” Taylor said. 

Taylor hopes to continue this project in order to increase safety on future spacecrafts. 

“This fellowship was great because I could keep doing the research I wanted to do,” Taylor said. 

I don’t think I would ever want to board a spacecraft — although, if someone asked me to, I’m not sure I could say no now — but I’d know who to consult about the safety. 

I got to learn about a social work experiment, in which Kaitlyn Line conducted research on how a community’s attitude toward substance abuse affects people’s access to recovery and perception of it. Creed Jones from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology studied which social factors are driving the evaporation of global saline lakes, which I think is a particularly timely project.

 Every Peak Fellow had incredible, relevant projects that I was simultaneously impressed and confused by — only confused because I am good at reading books and nothing more. It was genuinely exciting to me that our university is housing so many creative and academic minds — so much so that the research projects students are currently working on are already enacting legitimate change in their respective fields. 

I am extremely thankful for the opportunity to be a Peak Fellow this summer, explore Paris and learn from different perspectives while writing a memoir. It might not seem like the most complex research project — probably because after describing the other ones, it is quite clear that it isn’t — but I am grateful the value of research and creative works across different fields is being recognized. At a time where I feel like the humanities are under attack nation-wide, I am comforted by the fact that our university values all types of research and can recognize creative activities as responses to such research. 

USU is a research university, and 2025 is its 50th year of undergraduate research. I encourage everyone who is interested in research, even vaguely, to try and get involved this year. Being a part of different undergraduate research projects and starting my own this summer has been one of the most influential parts of my time at USU. I am building up my resume and portfolio, establishing future career skills and getting funded for work I am extremely passionate about. If you’re interested in getting involved with research, visit research.usu.edu/ur/.