Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

Image credit: A VerMeulen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

For Senior Hannah Murphy, education and teaching have always been among her top interests.

Born in Annapolis, Hannah grew up in Owings, Maryland after her family moved there when she was in the third grade. Foreshadowing her later interests, she took Spanish all throughout high school, reaching the AP level.

When it came time to pick a college, Hannah looked to smaller liberal arts schools and those with historical settings including Hood College and the College of William & Mary, as well as St. Mary’s. While there were many factors that influenced her decision – including the MAT program, scholarship funds, and the fact that SMCM was her grandfather’s favorite out of all the colleges she visited – what sealed Hannah’s decision to come to St. Mary’s was the great experience she had spending a night here as a prospective student. And on top of that the beautiful waterfront setting didn’t hurt. “Can’t discount pretty,” Hannah says.

Hannah began working in the Archives the fall of her Junior year. The previous summer, she had interned at the Calvert Marine Museum sorting, cataloging, and scanning photos and negatives. She really enjoyed working with the staff there as well as the general atmosphere and was looking for an additional on campus job when she saw the Professional Fellowship Program position open up in the Archives. Her job duties range from sorting and cataloging incoming materials, to cataloging the images on the college’s Flickr site, to assisting the Archivist with research about the college. Her favorite thing about working in the Archives is helping to preserve the history and make it accessible to the community, now and in the future. Through working at the Archives, she has gained quite a bit of knowledge about the history of St. Mary’s, which came in handy when a visiting parent asked her questions about the college.

In addition to her job in the Archives, Hannah worked as an RA in Queen Anne and Caroline residence halls, and is currently the RHC for Waring Commons where she oversees a staff of seven RAs and serves as liaison between the students, RAs, and the Office of Residence Life. Through working as an RA and RHC, she has had to mediate quite a few roommate disagreements, mostly over things like room temperature and lights.

She also spent the Spring semester of her Junior year studying abroad in Granada, Spain. Hannah highly recommends study abroad, saying it’s “awesome and everyone should do it.” She really enjoyed living in a Spanish speaking country for a few months totally immersed in the language and culture.

As a Spanish major with minors in Ed Studies and History, Hannah will be entering the SMCM MAT program in the summer, focusing on becoming a middle or high school Spanish teacher (she just passed her Spanish Praxis exam!). Her interests in Spanish and Ed Studies led her to focus her SMP work on English Learners, a group that doesn’t necessarily get the resources it needs. Her SMP looks at addressing critical thinking skills among English Learners. Her project is based on the Common Underlying Proficiency theory – which posits that cognitively demanding tasks (like critical thinking) are common across languages, despite the surface differences between languages that we observe. Using this theory, Hannah developed a Spanish Enrichment program at Spring Ridge Middle School that helped five English Learners address critical thinking skills, such as identifying the main idea in a text, by reading articles in their home language. Hannah believes that the home language should be seen as a resource when gaining these critical thinking skills, which are more important for the students to grasp than learning them in English. By the end of the six week program, the students showed greater proficiency in learning these critical thinking skills and were able to identify the main ideas in a text.

Hannah will be presenting her work at the 2018 National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Oklahoma City, and hopes to continue this project through her MAT master’s thesis in addition to possibly working with Dr. Katy Arnett to continue the program with St. Mary’s students through the Spanish department or the course ESL Across the Curriculum (EDUC 491). She is also considering getting certified as an English for Speakers of Other Languages teacher. Post SMCM MAT program, Hannah hopes to work in Frederick County, Maryland which has a quickly growing Latinx population.

Image credit: A VerMeulen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Senior Cecelia Marquez is fascinated by invisible forces that shape our everyday live, be it through historical materials or how we live our day to day lives.

From Bethesda, Cecelia initially attended Ursinus College in Pennsylvania after graduating high school. After two years at Ursinus, she felt it was time for a break and moved to Arizona where she worked in collections management and volunteered in the archives of a local history museum. Two years later, wanting to finish her degree and move forward with a career, Cecelia decided it was time to come back to school.

Coming back, it was important to Cecelia to find a small school for the personal connections with faculty and staff that you can’t always get at a larger school. Her family also wanted her to be close to home after the years spent away. She was initially intrigued by the Museum Studies program at St. Mary’s and the possibility of working hands-on with a fine art collection through the Boyden Gallery. Ultimately, Cecelia ended up majoring in Art History with an Art Minor, focusing on film photography. (Fun fact: until taking Advanced Photography in Fall of 2017, she had never used a digital camera!)

While she enjoys learning about different art movements – some of her favorites include both the strange, political Bauhaus and the colorful, impressionistic Fauvism movements – she is most interested in using art as an avenue to explore and understand history and culture. For her SMP, Cecelia is exploring how people map their identities – such and race, gender, and more – to the built environment. She is looking at St. Mary’s as well as other public liberal arts colleges New College of Florida and the U.S. Naval Academy. One of the questions she’s exploring is how does the water setting come into play on all three campuses. The St. Mary’s component has led her to do a lot of research on the building of the college and she plans to assess how students, faculty, and staff use the college today and how it relates to their identities.

Cecelia began working in the SMCM Archives during her second semester in the Spring of 2017 because she loves archives and archival materials. A valuable resource that she feels most people don’t know exists, she says it’s a great way to learn about the history of a place. During her time in the archives, Cecelia has found the silly – like an official college letter from 1997 describing damage to car paint caused by peacocks that used to roam the campus – to the serious – like the time the college was sued by the ACLU in the 90s (for more on both stories, visit the archives!). Though she gets to handle lots of fascinating materials, her favorite part is working with the College Archivist, whom she says truly embodies the St. Mary’s spirit. Not only is he a flexible and supportive boss, but also a great person to talk to about research and or geek out with over music.

In addition to working in the archives, Cecelia has been involved in many groups and events on campus including The Point News, the Campus Farm, the Veggie Co-op, and a Habitat for Humanity building trip.

After graduation, Cecelia plans on leaving a little time to chill before pursuing more school. She plans on becoming more involved in animal rights activism, planning to attend a summer conference in Berkeley, CA before road-tripping back to the East Coast to continue her activism here. Once she feels she’s invested enough time in that movement, she plans to travel to Guatemala where she wants to work and live on an organic farm and finally learn Spanish. Eventually, she plans to go to grad school to study architecture and urban planning, focusing on architecture and urban planning as tools to build resilient and inclusive communities.

Marisa McCormick, a Junior Chemistry major with minors in Math and Materials Science, is great at making connections. Whether it’s finding career advice in a TV show, or combining passions for cross-country and 3D printing, she is inspired to make connections that are uniquely her own.

Marisa grew up in Prince Frederick after her family moved from Oxon Hill, MD when she was 6. In addition to an early interest in forensic science, she also began her cross-country career as a sophomore at Calvert High. When it came time to head off to college, Marisa knew she didn’t want to go to a big school. To keep her options open, she applied to Towson and toured UMBC, but found the large buildings on campus overwhelming. The modest buildings, beautiful campus, and the waterfront at St. Mary’s attracted her to the college, but it was the open and welcoming people and personal connections she made while visiting that made the biggest impression. Meeting Chemistry faculty member Dr. Kelly Neiles (“I loved her!” says Marisa; Editor’s note: we all love her!) and getting a personal campus tour from the members of the SMCM cross-country team sealed the deal.

For Marisa, math has always been a subject that just “clicked.” In middle school, she got into the crime show NCIS and was inspired by the character Abby Sciuto to learn more about chemistry and forensic science. Now, Marisa is interested in going to grad school for forensics or analytical chemistry. And though Materials Science was originally just a class to fill out her schedule, she found it so interesting that she picked it up as a minor. Inspired by work done through a directed research project with Chemistry faculty member Dr. Troy Townsend, she is looking to combine her interests in forensics and materials science through her SMP. Current ideas include investigating ways to link 3D printing and forensics through 3D printing fingerprints or shoe prints.

One of our newer hires, Marisa began working at Library Circulation during the Fall 2017 semester. When looking for a job, working around her class and cross-country schedules was a top priority and the Library’s late evening hours provided the perfect opportunity. Having already spent a lot of time in the Library studying, researching, and doing group work, she knew she already liked the environment and thought it would be a perfect fit. Her favorite part of the job is shelving; she finds organizing the materials very satisfying and appealing to her analytical side.

If you haven’t picked up the clues by now, Marisa also runs for the SMCM cross-country team and has since her first year here. She enjoys running, even outside of practice, and has always found the team very inviting and great at creating a positive environment. At the request of Chemistry faculty – and cross-country team faculty advisor – Dr. Randy Larsen, Marisa combined her passions to create 3D printed ornaments for the cross-country team this holiday season – “It was cool to show them what I was working on.”

In addition to classes and cross-country, she is a Chemistry department SMACS tutor, which offer students drop in tutoring for chemistry classes once a week. For fun, Marisa enjoys watching Netflix, especially anything funny or crime shows (of course!).