By Caitlyn Sanchez '12
The College’s Academic Celebration was held at the end of the spring semester to give students from Siena’s schools of liberal arts, business and science the opportunity to share their research with the campus community. The Maloney Great Room was filled with posters, papers and conference presentations as dozens of students discussed their hard work.
Senior Timothy Metz ’12 presented his project, “Facebook’s Impact on Relationships, Buying Habits, and Personality.” Metz’s study was supervised by Professor of Psychology Paul Murray, Ph.D. as part of the Sociology Research Methods course.
“800 million people have a Facebook account and most check their account over two times per day,” said Metz. He surveyed Siena students to find out how the social networking site has impacted their relationships with close friends, their interactions with significant others and their opinions of themselves.
Anne Conahan ’12, Dominic DiPresso ’12 and Kerry McGrath ’12 presented a project titled “Expedia,” which they completed as part of the business course, Computer Auditing and IT Controls. The project was supervised by Assistant Professor of Accounting Sunita Goel, Ph.D. The project was based on risk analysis, security assessment and the selection of IT controls for Expedia.
“We learned a lot about the risks that face online websites,” said DiPresso. “Now we know how IT businesses are run, which will be helpful for auditing in the future.”
Denis Kalic ’14 Matthew Kemmer ’12 completed research titled “STIRS (Siena Twitter Information Retrieval System)” as part of Siena’s Summer Scholars program. Their research on the creation of a new information retrieval system for tweets was done for an international programming competition sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of the Text Retrieval Conference.
Kalic’s team of undergraduate researchers built a system that finished in the top third of the competition. “We were up against some really tough competition, including 50 leading universities and business,” said Kalic. “Finding out what works to generate a specific tweet was a really cool thing to learn.” Their research was supervised by Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sharon Small, Ph.D. and Associate Professor of Computer Science Darren Lim, Ph.D. from Siena College’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Sophomore economics major Aaron Parker ’14 showcased his project “The Effect of China’s Growing Middle Class on GDP.” Parker’s research was supervised by Professor of Economics James Booker, Ph.D.
“Since I’m an economics major, I must know how the world functions and I thought this would be a great way to learn for myself and share the knowledge with the rest of the Siena community,” Parker said.
Parker measured the number of private vehicles on the roads and the number of internet users in China to reflect that an increasing number of Chinese citizens have attained a level of expendable income that was previously unattainable in large numbers. Those figures allowed Parker to make an approximation of the size of China’s middle class and to assert that the size of the middle class positively influences China’s Gross Domestic Product.
The research shared by these students marks just some examples of the in-depth, faculty-led, undergraduate research being conducted and celebrated at Siena College each year.
