RECENT GRADUATE STUDENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS
The following graduate students were honored for their accomplishments at the annual Department Awards Ceremony at the end of the spring semester:
DARINA LEPADATU received the O’Donnell Award as this year’s outstanding graduate student. Darina’s stellar teaching and research record reflects the multiple contributions she has made to our Department over the past few years. Her dissertation research on cooperative work teams in industry promises to be a significant contribution to the work and organizations literature. Darina has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Sociology at Kennesaw State University.
JEFFREY ROBERTS received the Outstanding Teaching Award for graduate students. Jeff’s contributions to our undergraduate program include serving as the instructor of the required undergraduate statistical methods course over the course of several semesters. The outstanding student evaluations he received in a course that is often perceived as quite demanding by undergraduate students attests to his accomplishments as an instructor. Jeff has accepted a visiting professorship position at Berea College for next academic year.
The Beers Summer Fellowships are awarded to graduate student applicants to facilitate collaborative research between faculty and graduate students. The following students were awarded Beers Summer Fellowships at the Department Awards Ceremony:
MIKE BOSSICK will be collaborating on a research project with Professor Laurie Hatch entitled “College Students as Consumers: A Sociological Analysis of a Metaphor.” This project will survey college students to examine the extent to which they construct their student status in consumer terms.
CHRYSTAL GREY will be collaborating with Professor Thomas Janoski and Darina Lepadatu on a paper entitled “Do Not Pass GO: Integrating the Generalized Other and Emotions into Theories of Difference in Symbolic Interactionism.” The paper is designed to explore what the authors see as a critical gap in SI theory, the failure to integrate emotions into accounts of how social interaction processes work in the construction of conceptualizations of group position differences.
JUI-CHANG JAO will be collaborating with Professor Larry Burmeister on a paper entitled “Middle Class Differentiation and Politics in Globalizing Taiwan.” This paper will employ recent election survey data to examine how changes in the structure of the Taiwanese middle class are related to electoral volatility in recent national elections in Taiwan.
Preliminary results of these research projects will be presented at the annual Beers Summer Fellowship Colloquium to be held on October 13, 2006.
Other noteworthy accomplishments:
MIKE SICKELS received the award for the best poster presentation at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in New Orleans this spring. The title of Mike’s poster presentation is “Christianity in the Hardcore Scene.”
YONG-JU CHOI has received the Dissertation Enhancement Award from the Graduate School to help support dissertation fieldwork in South Korea this summer. Yong-Ju’s dissertation topic is entitled “Farmer Cooperation in South Korea: An Institutional Approach to Collective Action.”
JUI-CHANG JAO has published two articles recently. He is the lead author with Matthew McKeever on an article in Sociology of Education (2006, Vol. 79 [April], pp. 131-152) entitled “Ethnic Inequalities and Educational Attainment in Taiwan.” He is also a co-author with Keith A. Anderson, Leonard Pearlin, Steven Zarit, and Joseph Gaugler of an article in the Journal of Social Work in Long-Term Care (2005, Vol 3, pp. 45-67) entitled “Social Class and the Subjective Adaptation of Caregivers to Institutionalization.”