When you step away and look at the bigger picture: That’s when you appreciate what’s really going on. That’s when you make connections. That’s when you see what opportunities lie ahead. And, when these three students in the College of Charleston Honors College stepped away to look at the bigger picture, they not only saw opportunity – they ran with it. Their opportunities are boundless.
Ashlan Bishop
Ashlan Bishop
Photo by Gately Williams
Ashlan Bishop came to the College of Charleston from Boca Raton, Fla., because she was impressed by its art history program. Then, when she interviewed for the William Aiken Fellows program, she was even further impressed with the advising and the interdisciplinary programs that the College offered. As she studied art, she became more and more interested in the story – the life – behind the actual art. Now a premed junior majoring in art history and minoring in Hispanic studies, she has taken her interest in the story behind the subject and applied it to medicine – focusing on the conditions and the circumstances behind the sicknesses of the patients she has worked with – whether it be at a MEDLIFE clinic in Peru or through Coastal Connections in the Lowcountry. Bishop has taken every opportunity given to her as a Bonner Leader and a William Aiken Fellow to step back, look at the big picture, make connections and figure out how to make a difference from there.
ARTICLE: Find out why Ashlan says art and science are similar.
Eden Katz
Eden Katz wanted to volunteer with a clinic in the village of Okurase, Ghana – and, when she got a scholarship that she could only accept if she were getting college credit, she figured it’d be an enlightening experience that would culminate in a research paper and could fulfill the Honors College requirement for independent study. In other words, she thought it would benefit herself. It wasn’t until she learned about the project and the enormous waste management problem in Okurase that she realized she actually had the opportunity to make a real impact on people’s lives. She did her research, talked to the people in the village and visited the mountains of waste – and eventually came up with a proposal for the nonprofit Project OKURASE and the village leaders. With the opportunity to make connections with the village of Okurase, its people and its problems, Katz was able to step away and see the real opportunity for change – and to do her part to make it happen.
ARTICLE: How Katz made change happen in Okurase.
Tyler Perini
Tyler Perini
Photo by Karson Photography
Tyler Perini’s professors had a challenge for him: Help us make a computer program to determine how humble people are. And do it by analyzing their written responses to questions about their own humility. It was an opportunity to step back and look at what is behind people’s words, to see the bigger picture. Perini dug in and started researching. Before long he became acquainted with linguistic theories by professor James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker argues that people’s use of so-called functions words, which include articles and pronouns, can be dead giveaways to people’s emotions. The presence or absence of these otherwise insignificant words, for example, can indicate if someone is untruthful. Or humble (or not). Perini then devised a computer program to analyze writing samples, and, through some fine-tuning, made the program 67 percent accurate in its detection of humility. Not content to stop there, Perini has started a new project to detect self-control through writing samples.
