Stories from and about library student employees and interns.
Student Stories
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Project Alivio is a multidisciplinary global health project team that is a part of Michigan Health Engineered for All Lives (M-HEAL). Our goal is to reduce the incidence rate of pressure ulcers in San Juan de Dios hospital. What makes us unique as a project team is that our 19 students work as a co-design team with the Students Association of International Medical Research (SAIMER), a medical student organization from the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala City. As we design our solution, we are constantly receiving input from peers our age with more medical experience at our target location.
Pressure ulcers, or bedsores, form when a patient is exposed to pressure for a prolonged period of time. This pressure restricts proper blood flow to a certain area on the body, usually the coccyx, heels, back of head, or elbows, causing skin and tissue damage. To prevent pressure ulcers, nurses turn patients to offload the pressure exerted on the body. Pressure ulcers have high incidence rates in Guatemala City for many reasons, but the factor we are targeting is the understaffing of nurses.
Our team meets for several hours a week to design, build, discuss progress, and plan next steps. With the input of professors, physicians, and nurses from both universities, we hope to design a sustainable solution for our end-users. We also value offering our members a meaningful and educational project experience.
This spring, from April 29th to May 10th, seven of our members will be traveling to Antigua, Guatemala. In past, we have made two trips to Guatemala to conduct a needs assessment, which is how we narrowed the need to pressure ulcer prevention. This will be the first trip that is focused on the design itself. We will bring some sketches and prototypes of different concepts to show to our stakeholders to receive feedback. Besides the project itself, the trip will be a great opportunity for some of our newer members to learn more about the global health scene and feel connected to this project.
Pressure ulcers, or bedsores, form when a patient is exposed to pressure for a prolonged period of time. This pressure restricts proper blood flow to a certain area on the body, usually the coccyx, heels, back of head, or elbows, causing skin and tissue damage. To prevent pressure ulcers, nurses turn patients to offload the pressure exerted on the body. Pressure ulcers have high incidence rates in Guatemala City for many reasons, but the factor we are targeting is the understaffing of nurses.
Our team meets for several hours a week to design, build, discuss progress, and plan next steps. With the input of professors, physicians, and nurses from both universities, we hope to design a sustainable solution for our end-users. We also value offering our members a meaningful and educational project experience.
This spring, from April 29th to May 10th, seven of our members will be traveling to Antigua, Guatemala. In past, we have made two trips to Guatemala to conduct a needs assessment, which is how we narrowed the need to pressure ulcer prevention. This will be the first trip that is focused on the design itself. We will bring some sketches and prototypes of different concepts to show to our stakeholders to receive feedback. Besides the project itself, the trip will be a great opportunity for some of our newer members to learn more about the global health scene and feel connected to this project.
The Student Rights Project (SRP) is an interdisciplinary consortium of Law, Social Work, and Education graduate students specially trained to advocate for the educational rights of K-12 students across Southeast Michigan. Through our unique community-university partnership with the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, SRP trains volunteers to advocate for students facing suspension and expulsion to ensure that every student’s right to an education is protected.
Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline is at the core of our mission. We recognize that zero tolerance policies, often codified in school disciplinary codes of conduct, subject students to severe and punitive discipline, criminalizing typical behavior and resulting in academic disengagement, failure, push-out, and delinquency. Moreover, schools and administrators must adapt their disciplinary processes, including their codes of conduct, to reflect changing local, state, and federal educational laws.
Thus, as a part of our advocacy work, SRP launched the School Code Project to work with public schools across Michigan to review and revise school codes of conduct. The purpose of this project is to challenge institutional threats to students’ educational rights and encourage schools to align their codes of conduct with evidence-based, nationally recognized best practices for responding to student misbehavior.
Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline is at the core of our mission. We recognize that zero tolerance policies, often codified in school disciplinary codes of conduct, subject students to severe and punitive discipline, criminalizing typical behavior and resulting in academic disengagement, failure, push-out, and delinquency. Moreover, schools and administrators must adapt their disciplinary processes, including their codes of conduct, to reflect changing local, state, and federal educational laws.
Thus, as a part of our advocacy work, SRP launched the School Code Project to work with public schools across Michigan to review and revise school codes of conduct. The purpose of this project is to challenge institutional threats to students’ educational rights and encourage schools to align their codes of conduct with evidence-based, nationally recognized best practices for responding to student misbehavior.
The BLUElab NicarAGUA team, in partnership with FNE International, has been collaborating with the El Jicaral, Nicaragua community since September 2015. Since that time, three in-country trips have been conducted. First, in 2016, a preliminary needs assessment trip was conducted in the surrounding communities. Through extensive surveys and interviews with members of communities visited, it was determined that the greatest need of this community was access to water during the dry season.
Perch’s mission is to make research more accessible to undergraduates.
UROP, the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, does a great job at its mission: helping underrepresented and first-generation students gain their first research experience and make the most of it. When UROP started 25 years ago, it was able to accommodate every eligible student who applied.That’s no longer true. The number of undergraduates seeking research experience has grown tremendously in the last decade. Why?
For many students, undergraduate research is their first experience working on real-world problems that may provide widespread impact and help people in the future. Through research, students gain valuable critical thinking skills, a new way of asking questions. Research is a chance for students to apply what they’ve learned in class to the real world, to venture boldly beyond the maps of the known. Research is a chance to improve people’s lives, it’s the chance to get a law of nature named after you, it’s the universe trying to understand itself. Not to mention that undergraduate research experience is now necessary rather than an added bonus when applying to graduate school, industrial R&D jobs, and numerous other career paths.
UROP, the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, does a great job at its mission: helping underrepresented and first-generation students gain their first research experience and make the most of it. When UROP started 25 years ago, it was able to accommodate every eligible student who applied.That’s no longer true. The number of undergraduates seeking research experience has grown tremendously in the last decade. Why?
For many students, undergraduate research is their first experience working on real-world problems that may provide widespread impact and help people in the future. Through research, students gain valuable critical thinking skills, a new way of asking questions. Research is a chance for students to apply what they’ve learned in class to the real world, to venture boldly beyond the maps of the known. Research is a chance to improve people’s lives, it’s the chance to get a law of nature named after you, it’s the universe trying to understand itself. Not to mention that undergraduate research experience is now necessary rather than an added bonus when applying to graduate school, industrial R&D jobs, and numerous other career paths.
A week or so ago, I went to pick up a book from Hatcher when my attention was captured by a Bikini Kill poster. It was part of an exhibit in the Hatcher North Lobby on feminist zines. As I wandered through the display of drawings, poems, rants, cartoons, and collages, I was struck by the unique power that zines have to speak directly to the heart. Even though these zines were made and distributed decades ago, I still found myself nodding in agreement with the insights and raw emotions found in their pages.
It is very, very easy to feel intimidated walking into the Hatcher Graduate Library. The front steps are right off the ever-bustling Diag, and they lead to a grand lobby filled with mosaics and elitist Latin proverbs without a book in sight.
Students often find themselves at a loss for how to walk into a library and ask a person for help, which, in turn, prevents them from learning about the wonderful faculty who are hired to help them.
Students often find themselves at a loss for how to walk into a library and ask a person for help, which, in turn, prevents them from learning about the wonderful faculty who are hired to help them.
I joined ScholarSpace in January 2017 hoping to refine and share my interest in the Adobe Creative Suite with University, and while I have had that opportunity, I have also learned so much more.
Most University of Michigan students are well aware of the boundless opportunities offered by the Library within the pages of our books and in the depths of our digital resources. What may be unfamiliar to students are the numerous opportunities to engage with the Library beyond the stacks and databases. The Library Student Engagement Ambassadors, a group of eight undergraduate students with varying majors and interests, have been hard at work all semester bringing the campus community exciting events and a student perspective on Library resources.
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As a Library Environments Support Team member-- everything I do, centers around delighting the students and faculty and creating environments conducive to sharing, learning, growing, and accessibility. From observing how many people use the book drop box, to helping to create a workshop dedicated to having students envision their perfect “Library of the Future.”