Students honored for best papers
USU Students, Tricia Randall, a senior majoring in history, and Todd Welker, a master’s student studying history, will fly down to Albuquere, N.M. later this month to receive honors for having the best papers in the undergraduate and graduate division for The Western Social Science Association.
The Western Social Science Association has been handing out two awards every year. The essays were judged based on advancement of knowledge, appropriateness for a broad social science audience, quality of research design, definition and significance of topic, analysis of findings, and clarity of writing, said Welker, who won in the graduate division.
“My paper, entitled ‘Social Activism on Northern Utah Sugar Beet Farms: Mexican-American Farm Workers and the Box Elder Migrant Council,’ is a takeoff of my thesis Welker said. In it I analyze the experiences of Mexican migrant farm workers who came to Box Elder County to work in the sugar beet fields from the 1950s to the 1970s.”
He said he has been working on his thesis for three semesters now. He heard about the competition about two months ago from Anne Butler, a professor in the history department, and he immediately sent in a copy and received a phone call notifying him of the award over a week ago.
Randal, who won the prize for best undergraduate paper said, “I got an e-mail from a professor telling me about the contest. I wasn’t sure if my paper would be a good fit for the contest, but my professor assured me it was OK and I sent it off.”
Randall wrote the paper mainly because of the sources and worked on formulating the thesis for her paper for almost the entire summer, she said.
“When I finally hit on the subject of Czech protest movements, I just started writing. I also knew that I needed a paper for my graduate school writing sample, and I wanted to go to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research again this year because I enjoyed it so much last year,” she said.
She couldn’t really put a number on how much time the original research took her, but once she finally got started, it was at least 20 hours into the initial drafting and revising.
“A couple of professors read over it as well as some good friends. My adviser, Dr. Peter Mentzel in the history department, made some good thesis suggestions that helped refine the paper,” Randall said.
Mentzel said, “Tricia’s extensive work with the Masaryk papers held by USU Special Collections make her probably the world’s leading authority on this important and extensive set of materials. In the paper that won the WSSA prize as in her other essays, Tricia is able to use primary-source documents from the Masaryk collection, in combination with published secondary materials to produce some very strong pieces of work.”