A&S Magazine Spring 2010 Page 15

T h e a r t o f e d u c a t i o n

"Having the opportunity to travel to Antarctica in support of my
research has definitely enriched my time here at Washington
University," says Heeszel, who will finish his dissertation in fall
2010. "The guarantee my advisor made me prior to attending
Washington University is one of the major reasons that I chose
this program over those at other universities."

Within EPS, other students have also gone to exciting locations,

including Fiji, the Mariana Islands and Cameroon. And that is just
the beginning. In other graduate programs -- history, anthropology,
art history and archaeology, music, economics, chemistry and a
range of languages -- students are conducting research overseas.
While some choose familiar places, others are off to more remote
spots, such as Madagascar, Kenya, Sri Lanka or Syria.

"Graduate students at Washington University are heavily involved

in international collaborations. Approximately one-third of the new
Ph.D. students arriving each year are international students, and our
enrolled students are conducting research all around the globe," says
Richard J. Smith, dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. "The
exchange of knowledge, experience, and cultures enriches our campus."

The chance to study abroad makes it possible for students to learn

about their subjects firsthand. During the 2008-09 academic year,
history graduate student John Aerni-Flessner spent 10 months in
the African country of Lesotho, where he conducted interviews to
gather more information about nationalism during the 1950s and
1960s. At that time, young people were challenging the status quo
through their involvement in youth groups.

He made some of his most interesting contacts serendipitously.

"I knocked on the wrong door, looking for a different person,
and ended up doing an hour-and-a-half interview with the man

who answered the door," he recalls. "I met another interviewee
in a bus station, where we were both standing in line."

First-year Ph.D. student Andrew Findley has been to Turkey

four times and will return for six weeks this summer to delve further
into his topic: sacred spaces in Late Antique Asia Minor. In partic-
ular, he hopes to define the factors that contributed to the creation,
destruction and then re-use of holy buildings in regional centers
like Ephesus, as Christianity gained ascendancy over paganism.

Both he and his wife, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer whom

he married in Turkey, understand Kurdish, and that has made
possible some interesting interactions. Shortly after Kurdistan
gained more autonomy following the second Iraq war, they were
sitting in a small Istanbul restaurant, in which the only other table
was occupied by Kurds. Soon they all got together, exchanging
unforgettable stories and impressions.

Occasionally, graduate students would like to visit the country

they are studying but, for political reasons, cannot. Sarah Kendzior,
a Ph.D. student in anthropology, is examining the resistance
movement among Uzbek dissidents forced to flee after a 2005
massacre. Now they live in countries around the world, unable to
return to Uzbekistan; they rely on the Internet to keep in touch
with each other and also with Kendzior, as she does her research.

And not every memory of a research trip is a triumphant one;

occasionally, students have found themselves in a terrible fix.
When Amanda Lough travels to Antarctica, for example, she
flies first to New Zealand, then boards a military C-17 cargo jet to
get to her icy destination. So if crucial equipment goes missing,

she can't walk to the corner store to find replacements.

"This past season, someone misplaced our instrument boxes,

so I had to help another team member fashion new boxes out of
scrap materials we scavenged around McMurdo Station," she says.

And in 2007, David Heeszel was helping to install a station in

Antarctica when he dropped his specialized tool -- six feet long,
with a sharp point -- and it promptly disappeared. Poking gingerly
into the powdery snow, which might hide a dangerous crevasse,
the team's mountaineer eventually found the upper tip of the tool --
a full two feet below the surface.

Despite such small problems, says Andrew Findley, the experi-

ence of doing research trips abroad is vitally important. "For art
historians, the opportunity to engage in research travel allows us to
establish a physical context for the art, objects and buildings we
study," he says. "We can much better understand the original intent
if we experience the environment in which a work of art was created."

"The exchange of knowledge, experience and cultures enriches our campus."

Richard J. Smith, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

It is no exaggeration to say that Washington
University graduate students go to the ends of
the earth to do research. Just ask Amanda Lough
and David Heeszel, both Ph.D. candidates in
the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
(EPS), who have traveled to Antarctica on separate
projects.He is using surface waves from distant
earthquakes to calculate the age of a mountain
range, completely buried by ice. She is studying
the twice-daily movement of the Whillans
Ice Stream, using seismological techniques.

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