Brackenridge Fellowship winners to be released this week

Somebody needs to tell Alice Cooper that he doesn’t speak for everyone. For a particularly… Somebody needs to tell Alice Cooper that he doesn’t speak for everyone. For a particularly brainy set of Pitt undergrads, school’s definitely “in” for the summer.

These are the 127 students vying for 40 coveted seats in this summer’s Brackenridge Fellowship, an elite research program open to all undergraduates.

The chosen applicants, whose names will be unveiled this week, receive $3,500 stipends that allow them to focus full-time on self-designed research projects.

“One of the ideas behind the Brackenridge [is] to give people a chance to spread their wings and not be held back by their normal classes,” said Nate Hilberg, an adviser who co-directs the fellowship for the University Honors College.

But what Hilberg’s understatement conceals is just how different participants’ projects really are from your average term paper. With past research topics as varied as the nightingale’s place in ancient literature or the composition of Mongolian horse teeth, the most identifiable feature of submissions is their novelty.

Enter senior Mark Oleksiuk. His proposal – to study the opposing rowing styles of crew teams in Europe and the United States – wasn’t exactly the kind of topic he could readily research in class.

As an avid rower and member of Pitt’s own crew team, Oleksiuk grew interested in the subject when he noticed that American crew teams rarely beat European teams in most international rowing competitions, like the Olympics, which require the more prominent style of sculling. In this style, a rower holds an oar in each hand.

U.S. college crew teams almost exclusively train and compete in the sweep style, where rowers are only responsible for a single oar extending on one side of the boat.

In the first part of his proposed project, Oleksiuk would empirically demonstrate the dominance of each style on respective sides of the Atlantic and crunch statistics to find the odds of Americans winning in sculling events.

Secondly, he would argue for turning the tide on sweep’s American monopoly by beginning here on the three rivers.

“In this country there is a wide-open niche,” Oleksiuk said. “I more or less just want to show that [U.S.] collegiate rowing is narrow-minded. And there is an entirely new market to go in[to].”

Oklahoma City University is the only U.S. university to have a collegiate sculling team. If Pitt were to build a strong sculling team, he said, Pittsburgh could reap the benefits of forging a long-sought new identity.

“If you look at Philadelphia or Boston, for example, which are places that are thought of as traditional rowing cities, that’s because their colleges have great rowing teams,” Oleksiuk said.

By placing Pittsburgh on the map as the sculling capital of the northeast, the city would not only transform its steel town reputation but also attract river tourism, Oleksiuk said.

For evidence he points to Boston’s Head of the Charles Regatta, the world’s largest two-day rowing competition, which brings in about 300,000 tourists every October. The 38-year-old event was established at the behest of a Harvard rowing instructor.

Oleksiuk doesn’t think his idea is far-fetched. After all, he said, Pitt’s rowing instructor, Daniel Grancea, is a former member of the Romanian National Team, which performs sculling, and the Steel City Rowing Club in nearby Verona has produced a slew of national champions in sculling events.

Oleksiuk’s project, while original, is far from unusual in overstepping the boundaries of a single discipline.

“One of the unique things about the Brackenridge is that we’re not just looking for specialists,” Hilberg said. “We’re looking for people who can speak to a wide array of disciplines.”

This aspect of the program is reinforced by holding mandatory weekly seminars in which three Brackenridge fellows present their projects to the whole group for feedback and discussion. Having to explain a project to members of a different discipline requires fellows to understand their subjects’ practicality and interest to a general audience.

“Someone who looks like they might do spectacular research but won’t be able to articulate it to the non-specialist isn’t in keeping with the spirit of the Brackenridge,” Hilberg said.

Hilberg has watched this process increase in difficulty since he became co-director in 2003. Since then, the number of applications has grown by 50 percent. And for every single one, as many as four faculty members (and a minimum of two) must rate the contents.

“I literally read every single one over spring break,” said Hilberg, estimating that it took about 21 hours. He said the increase in applications has not diminished their quality. This makes turning down applicants all the more complicated.

Brackenridge-hopeful Kelly Coburn knows the odds aren’t in her favor. But in terms of completing her project, a rejection slip would do more to slow her down than end her research.

“If I don’t get this [fellowship], I’ll be doing this research anyway and getting a job to pay the bills,” said Coburn, a junior, who plans on submitting her research eventually for a bachelor’s in philosophy.

Coburn applied to study the effect of instant messaging on people with Asperger’s syndrome.

“My younger brother has Asperger’s, so I’ve been interested in it since he got his diagnosis [about 10 years ago],” Coburn said.

Her goal is to discover whether her hunch – that instant messaging could become a socializing method for those with the syndrome – is valid.

Coburn completed a Brackenridge Fellowship last summer that allowed her to perform the preliminary research for her current experiment. At that time she conducted a literature review on Asperger’s and compared the verbal communication of people with Asperger’s to people without the disease.

“People with Asperger’s have trouble holding eye contact, but with IM you don’t have to look at anyone,” Coburn said.

Coburn decided to perform an experiment in which she studies the instant-messaging communication between someone with Asperger’s and someone without. If her hunch is correct and Asperger’s patients do communicate better via instant messaging, she hopes her discovery helps people like her brother.

If Coburn has any advantage in winning a Brackenridge, it’s her high level of ambition. Ambition is almost a prerequisite for scoring a fellowship.

Hilberg emphasized the success of past fellows. “Students often go to their grad school of choice,” Hilberg said, before adding, “not that we want any more exposure.”

One of those students is Nathan Urban, who took part in the first fellowship summer in 1989. Now the Eberly Chair in biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Urban views his Brackenridge as a major factor in his academic success.

“It was a great opportunity. I was able to go to Oxford [University] on a Rhodes scholarship to do a second degree in mathematics and philosophy,” Urban said. He said it’s unlikely that he would have had that opportunity without a chance to perform the serious independent research that the Brackenridge allows at the undergraduate level.

But Hilberg doesn’t think applicants are motivated by self-interest.

“We value intellectual breadth in its own right,” he said. “This is your last chance to embrace whatever intellectual interest you might have, since