Ignite USU Preview: The best year yet
In its fourth year as a student-speaker event during Utah State University’s Research Week, Ignite USU is poised to be the best one yet.
“Every year I think, ‘We can’t possibly do better than the previous year — the talks last year were incredible,'” said Scott Bates, the Associate Vice President and Associate Dean in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at USU.
Bates, however, thinks this year’s set “are even better than the last.”
Ignite is an annual event that highlights student researchers at USU during the university’s research week. The event is designed to create an environment where students present a set of diverse and compelling ideas to an audience in a short amount of time.
“The idea is you get people to get up and do brief talks so the audience can hear a lot of things quickly,” Bates said. “Ignite is defined by its natural constraints — the talks are five minutes long, the slides auto-forward, and you have to, as a speaker, prepare and be diligent about what goes in and what stays out, boiling the message down to its core.”
This year’s presenters will discuss an array of topics, some of which include: trespassing for the sake of learning and connecting emotions felt on and off the soccer pitch.
Jeannie Woller, a senior at USU and Ignite presenter, believes the event, if anything, is a celebration of passion and hard work.
“The people I am working with are fantastically enthusiastic about all of their research,” Woller said. “Ignite is a place to showcase students and their passions, specifically through the title of research.”
C.J. Guadarrama, a fellow Ignite presenter and senior at USU, shares Woller’s sentiment. He believes Ignite is an event that crosses educational boundaries and allows audience members to consider ideas that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Students are often unable or unwilling to trespass into new territory for the sake of learning, Guadarrama said.
In addition to being an educational experience for presenters and audience members alike, Ignite empowers students to venture beyond the classroom.
“To me, the value in Ignite is people telling their underlying reasons for doing what they are doing in college,” Bates said. “And that’s the amazing part of what Ignite does — it really gives students a chance to say, ‘I’m not just a student with a grade point average, but I’m a person who has a reason to be involved and this is what excites me.’”
Ignite, overall, is a valuable experience for presenters and audience members because it enlightens and shows, Bates said, the reasons why students participate in research at USU.
“The presentations are entertaining, they’re inspirational and they’re compelling,” Bates said. “They really give you a sense of the breadth and depth of what happens on our campus.”
Ignite will take place on April 15 at 12 p.m. in the South Atrium in the Merrill-Cazier Library. The event is open to all, and those who wish to attend are asked to RSVP on the Ignite website found here: ignite.usu.edu/attend.
— jordan.floyd@aggiemail.usu.edu