SURES 2024 (Week of June 3rd)

The theme of this Thursday activity was Professional Development. Students started the session with an opportunity to choose from a selection of goodies provided by UK-CARES. After settling in with our snacks and goodies, Dr. Hollie Swanson led a brilliant discussion on how to curate a successful LinkedIn page and how important networking is during career development. We reviewed several of Dr. Swanson's connections to see how different people in various career spheres catered their pages to their intended audience. Rounding out the session, we sent our own LinkedIn requests to learn more about prospective fields and get a head start on networking!

Following the LinkedIn session, Program Coordinator (Sunny) and Summer Intern (Sam) led a discussion on the importance of maintaining accurate and updated CV, Resume, and Bio-sketch documents. Both Sunny and Sam provided examples of their CVs from high school, undergrad, and current working documents as Graduate Students to demonstrate how formatting and details change over time. 

Dr. Diane Lally then led a session on how to craft informative and innovative personal statements while remaining within the scope of what the prompt asks. In this session, students were able to practice their personal statement pitches and receive feedback on "Dos and Don'ts" to convey an impactful personal statement. 

The final portion of this Thursday activity included a variety of panelists that were present to provide advice and answers to the questions proposed by students. We were fortunate to hear the perspectives of a Graduate Student in the Department of Civil Engineering, an MD/PhD student, a Graduate Student in the Department of Communication and Center for Health Equity Transformation (CHET), and a Graduate Student in the Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Science. 

I would consider this day as a success and a very informative session as tudents were offered a brief introduction to a myriad of subjects that are beneficial at any stage of a career!

SURES 2024 Week of May 27

    On Tuesday, we met with Dr. Yisi Liu to hear about her career journey and research on the health impact of air pollution, noise, and built environment exposures. 

    On Thursday, we held a Restorative Justice Community Building Circle on Mental Health exercise and built connections between the SURES students and the Near Peer Mentors. We had two very successful circles! Then, SURES students and Near Peer Mentors participated in a speed networking session to help identify good mentor/mentee pairs for matchup. We ended the week with cookies and smiles all around.

Welcome to our 2024 SURES Participants

 

On May 20, we welcomed our 2024 cohort-our 11 participants joined us from the University of Toledo, University of Kentucky, Savannah State University, Morgan State University , New Jersey Institute of Technology, Old Dominion University and Centre College.  During our orientation, we spent time getting to know each other, practicing our hypothesis testing and  data interpretation skills and of course, completing all of our requirements for doing research.    We also got familiar with the campus by finding the Environmental Safety Office where they loaded us up with "Safety Goodies" and then met "Bowman the Wildcat".  On Wednesday, we traversed the campus to find our research laboratories and mentors.

Our Final Week

 Our final week was a busy one.  Despite the rush to finish up our experiments, complete our posters and get them printed, we still found time for one last activity.  Ms. Tanya Whitehouse at The Food Connection showed us how to make sauces from the herbs that we had grown in our global gardens and how to incorporate those into nutritious food bowls.  

The next day, we joined several undergraduate research programs for a poster session.  It was very inspiring to see all of the outstanding work that had been done by these talented young scientists.  Terrific work, everyone!!

 

SURES Week of July 17

 

Map of the University of Kentucky campus.  The soil sampling sites by the SURES students are indicated by the red stars.

On Tuesday, discussed how to create professional CVs and resumes.  

 On Thursday, first met with Dr. Jason Unrine  talked  about his career journey as well as some of his research projects pertaining to heavy metals in the environment.  We learned about the work of a former SURES student, Julianna Dantzer which involved the analyses of lead levels of children and the extent to which these levels correlated with that in blood and IQ.  He also talked to us about his role as Director of the Kentucky Water Institute and its work in maintaining healthy and sustainable water for Kentucky’s communities.    He then showed us the lead levels that he had determined from the soil samples that we collected on campus.  The values ranged from 30.4 mg/kg to 55.7 mg/kg.  It appeared that the samples with the highest lead concentrations were from soil that was next to roadways.  Fortunately, all of the levels were well within the normal background levels typically found in Kentucky.

SURES Week of July 10

 

On Tuesday, we met with our Co-Director, Dr. Kevin Pearson  who discussed his career journey and his research on maternal exposure to environmental contaminants such as PCBs and the impact of exercise in modulating the effects of these exposures. 

On Wednesday, some of us attended the ice cream social hosted by UK’s Office of Undergraduate Research and got to meet students participating on other summer research programs.

 On Thursday, we met On Thursday, we met with Associate Dean Wendy Jackson who described the processes involved in admissions to UK Medical School and gave us great advice on how to improve our applications.  Afterwards, we painted depictions of our summer research projects which helped us visualize the science behind our work.