MENOMONIE — When it came to her final project at UW-Stout, senior student Maya Anderson dreamed big, crossing the ocean to achieve her vision of the perfect music video.
“I wanted to go really big with my capstone, because it’s my final project here to wrap up everything,” Anderson said. “I had the idea to go abroad for it, specifically Japan, because I’m obsessed with the architecture, the lights, everything that makes up video — Japan is the most perfect place for that.”
After reaching out to an up-and-coming Japanese musician, Anderson applied for a research grant to travel abroad, eventually filming the video for “Under the Moon”.
Last week, Anderson was one of several undergraduate students showing off what they accomplished throughout the year at the university’s Research Day.
Heidi Smith, Research Program Coordinator at UW-Stout, said over 300 staff, faculty, and students helped out with the exhibitions of research from first-year undergraduates, all the way to the graduate students presenting in their final year.
“I’m really excited to see the breadth of what students at the university are working on,” Smith said. “I’ve been to Research Day before, but I haven’t seen it start to finish, so I’m super excited, [for] the students to get here.”
Tina Lee, program director for the Applied Social Science major at UW-Stout, notes the event is an effective way for undergraduate students in particular to develop professional skills, while also contributing to the community.
“For the undergraduates, it’s really practicing a lot of skills that employers want to see, so critical thinking, time management, data analysis, teamwork, all of those good things,” Lee said. “Being able to do research at the undergraduate level is really impactful on students, and we here at Stout do a lot of applied research, so it’s all going to have some benefit, either for local businesses or the local community or practices in a whole variety of professional fields.”
Research Day happens amidst several year-end events at UW-Stout, including the Unspooled Film and Animation Festival. UW-Stout filmmakers showed off some of their projects in anticipation for it during Research Day.
Students like Michael Romero were able to present on the big screen to an audience of UW-Stout faculty and staff, including Chancellor Katherine Frank.
Scenes from Romero’s film, “What Remains,” became a showcase of how 3D modeling could be used to work out variables before a film shoot, a method that the young filmmaker started incorporating into his classwork.
“I found it two years ago, and I started using it for my lighting projects, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this could actually work for my videos,’” Romero said. “So I started implementing that in my little ideas that I had for class and everything, and then I presented that to our faculty.”
STEM subjects were heavily explored in Research Day, where a group of students elaborated on their hypothetical setup for households to utilize wind energy, with a scale model made from scratch to go along with it.
Through the UW-Stout chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a team of engineering students sought to build an affordable, clean energy solution for households in England, using wind technology.
Griffin Boldt, a member of the team of engineering students working on the project, said his engineering class gave the team real-world experience.
“The purpose of the class is just to get the whole engineering analysis of it, to get on a whole project, like if you were working for an actual company,” Boldt said. “Obviously you don’t go to full scale, but you get to make these models.”
