By Julia Burns /// Staff writer
It’s what every upperclassman never forgets and what every freshman must overcome—the ascent into college-level academia via E&D research paper. For Isaac Goldstein (’16) and Kristina Dill (’16), this feat held a particular sweetness. Goldstein and Dill, winners of the James J. Kopp First-Year Research Award, were awarded a prize of $200 for the quality of their papers and their utilization of Watzek resources.
Isaac Goldstein chose to research the scandal behind the brief presidential candidacy of Thomas Eagleton in 1972 for his Exploration and Discovery class titled Scandal, Sensation, and Fraud. The scandal of this election rose from Eagleton’s dropping out of the election after it had been revealed that he had been hospitalized for depression ten years earlier. Goldstein set out to find out how big of a role mental illness played in the resignation and whether or not this deserved to be considered “scandalous.” What he found was that there were too many conflicting narratives about the event to pinpoint the exact nature of this so-called “scandal.”
The idea for Goldstein’s paper came to him by looking in the Watzek news section. With the prospect of the assignment looming overhead, Goldstein was inspired when he saw the book “The Eighteen-Day Running Mate” on the shelf in the library. His initial interest in this source eventually gave him an idea for his paper. “I started there and accidentally fell into my thesis when I started looking into journals about this stuff,” Goldstein said. “I used a lot of journals, newspaper articles, and definitely some books,” Goldstein said, but his research did not end there. When he shifted the focus of his paper to mental illness within Eagleton’s scandal, Goldstein ventured past the political sources and found himself looking for psychological journals. In terms of advice for this year’s freshman class, Goldstein’s biggest recommendation is to ask librarians for help. While his award proves that he has mastered navigating the library, no one can find sources better than librarians.
Kristina Dill wrote her research paper on a topic that hit close to home. As an accomplished student violinist, Dill chose to write about Mozart’s three final violin concertos for her E&D class––Mostly Mozart. Her paper traces the origin, history and legacy of these three masterpieces. For Dill, the interest came from a specific question: why aren’t Mozart’s last concertos as widely received as his other works in today’s popular culture? Through her research, Dill discovered that while Mozart’s later works aren’t widely known among the general population, they are of the utmost importance in the world of violin pedagogy.
Using multiple resources in Watzek including books, journals, and articles, Dill uncovered the true value of these works. “Mozart’s violin concertos have been central to the education of virtually every serious violin student,” Dill said.
The research process proved to be indispensable for Dill. She used the paper as an
opportunity to research a subject that pertained to her life in a major way. Dill recommends that freshmen “start working on the paper as early as possible, so that there is plenty of time to enjoy doing the research.”
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