LLI Scholarship Winners: Creative, Resourceful, and Enthusiastic

by Deborah Lanser

Student Photos by Charles Hobson

Introduction

Nine impressive students described their senior projects and future plans to an engrossed audience of LLI members, Bard faculty, and students at the annual Dean Stuart Stritzler-Levine Seniors-to-Seniors tea on April 17. Each student had a compelling story to tell. Here is a brief overview of their work.

Arghawan Bani: Choice Overload

Arghawan, who comes from Afghanistan, wondered whether the large number of choices that confront us in our everyday lives produces suboptimal decisions. So she combined her joint studies in psychology and economics to run a controlled experiment in which 102 participants chose options from small, medium, and large menus. The results, which she explained in her senior project “When Less Is More: An Experimental Study of Menu Size and Consumer Welfare,” showed that a large number of choices systematically pushed people away from their preferred choice. The $500 funding from LLI enabled her to recruit the number of participants she needed to produce a meaningful result. Arghawan believes her conclusions have implications for how firms and policymakers can design the environment in which consumers make choices. She hopes to expand on her research into choice overload at another institution after she graduates.

Hazel Cash: A Musical Drama

Hazel’s major is musical composition, but she says what has always interested her most is stories. That led her to write “Lost Daughters and Prodigal Sons,” a 90-minute musical about a dysfunctional family, in which three siblings in their teens and early 20s attempt to move out of their family home despite their controlling and abusive father. The $500 she received from LLI enabled her to purchase supplies to create a set and props for a recent production of her show. During her show’s run, she also auctioned off beautifully bound copies of the script, with the proceeds going to Sanctuary for Families. After graduation, the Long Island native intends to work on developing her next show and several other projects, apply to theater workshops, and return to her EMS job.

Maya Davydova: Émigé Writing

Maya’s journey to Bard started in Moscow and ran through Yerevan, Armenia. She became interested in women’s exilic writing, which she considers an underrepresented but important and intriguing form of literature. She found the focus of her project when she stumbled across the works of Nina Berberova, a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of anticommunist Russian refugees in Paris. Maya’s project, titled “Mapping Nina Berberova’s Writing Selves through Archive and Autobiography,” explores “the literary self-fashioning in public-facing writing and archival documents, identifying the tension between different modes of self.” The $550 scholarship provided by LLI allowed her to complete this project by funding a trip to Berberova’s personal archive in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. After graduation, she wants to work in publishing or archival research and eventually apply to graduate school.

Danika Dortch: Virginia Woolf and Classical Music

Danika, who has a double major in literature and music performance, found her inspiration in a 2013 study of how classical music influenced Virginia Woolf’s novels. She was intrigued by the idea that Woolf, who had little formal music training, adapted compositional structures into her fiction. That led her to create “Variations on a Theme of The Voyage Out: Investigating the Implications and Resonance of Virginia Woolf’s Musical Enthrallment,” an event that was held on April 28 in Bard Chapel. The $500 LLI scholarship helped fund the event. After graduation, the Illinois native will use funding from a Fulbright independent research grant to go to the Czech Republic, where she will study the preservation of the Moravian linguistic and cultural identity through Leoš Janáček’s music, using Milan Kundera as a case study.

Narges Ghaznawi: A City of Walls

When she lived in Kabul, Afghanistan, Narges was surrounded by concrete barriers known as T-walls. She reported, “Despite the inconvenience they created in my everyday life, at a certain point, their existence had become so normalized to me that I stopped realizing their presence in every corner of the city.” She decided to explore the power of architecture beyond its physical structure. Using murals, paintings, and pieces of wood, she created an installation titled “A Concrete Geography of Afghanistan: The Economic, Social, and Psychological Impacts of T-Walls in Afghanistan,” which was partly funded by her $400 grant. After graduation, she will attend Princeton University to obtain a master’s degree in architecture.

Rodaba Noori: Foiling Cyber Attacks

Rodaba, who came to Bard from Afghanistan, created “A Machine Learning–Based Intrusion Detection System” using her $500 to expand her access to large datasets and to invest in tools and storage to manage the data safely. In simple terms, she says, the system “learns what normal activity looks like and then flags anything that seems suspicious. For example, it can help detect attacks such as someone trying many passwords to break into an account, overwhelming a website with too much traffic so it crashes, or scanning a system to find weaknesses. These are real types of cyberattacks that happen every day, and my system is designed to recognize patterns like these and alert the user.” After graduation, she will pursue an MS in security information at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Yadier Pérez Pagán: The Play’s the Thing

Yadier adapted his memories of growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico into a play titled Soñar No Tiene PRecio (Translation: Dreams Don’t Have a PRice). The main character, Yadi, wants to become the best artist he can be while he is increasingly aware of the price that his dreams may or may not have on him and his family. The play’s purpose, said Yadier, was to challenge “the notion of the American Dream and the stories told about how immigrants from all over the world, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, can just will success into fruition. I also wanted to honor my family and my homeland by showing our strengths and our moments of darkness.” The show, with a stage set and props funded by the $500 LLI scholarship, will be performed on May 15 – 17. Yadier plans to continue working in the theater as a writer, director, and actor.

Keta Tavartkiladze: A Visual Language of Emotion

Keta traveled to Bard from the Republic of Georgia to study studio art and art history. As a guarded person who is careful about expressing her feelings, she was interested in using art as a way of being vulnerable. So for her senior thesis, she created an untitled exhibition “consisting of abstract works of art that explore the process of translating my feelings and emotions into a new visual vocabulary that is inspired by microscopic shapes and structures.” She used her $300 scholarship to purchase the materials needed to bring her vision to life.

Amy Xiang: Competing Interpretations

Amy used her $500 grant to cover part of the costs of the materials for her complex exhibition ”Quārtum Quid: neither one thing nor the other, nor the other-other.” The exhibition, which drew some inspiration from the poem “The Ballad of Mulan” and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, requires the viewer to swear an oath before entering an immersive, multipart installation using video, pictures of poems, books, shopping carts, chairs, and aluminum-wire words, among other components. After graduation, she will take one year off and then apply to MFA programs.