Gallery: Semester Event Wrap-Up

As the 2023-2024 academic year wound down to a close, there were a bevy of on-campus student and faculty events that were quintessential Wesleyan.

Here is a selection of photos from some of them.

Psychology Department Poster Session

Students and faculty gathered in Beckham Hall on April 25 for the annual Psychology Poster Session. The event, which was in-person for the first time in three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, featured 28 posters, with 54 presenters across 10 advisors.

“We have a lot of students who are working in labs with faculty, and sometimes students present work that they have conducted as part of a research methods course,” Chair of the Psychology Department Lisa Dierker said. “There’s just a range of qualitative projects and quantitative projects–psychology is a very diverse area, and we’ve got lots of different subject disciplines.”

The research presentations covered topics from mental health treatments to language development in children to the impact of exercise on cancer patients. Ama Tuffour ’26, for instance, worked with Rena Chen, Oluchi Chukwuemeka, and Jonghwa Kim in Assistant Professor of Psychology Michael Perez’s lab, studying deflection trends in racial and non-racial apologies.

“We noticed that extant research focuses a lot on what makes an apology effective, and they don’t really study apologies in a racial context—so we studied 164 apologies–racial and non-racial—opened in a public forum, and we noticed a tendency to deflect in these apologies,” Tuffour said. “This is very relevant in today’s world, where there’s a lot of emphasis on intention rather than impact. …We feel like for the offended communities of marginalized groups, we don’t really care about your intention, but the impact is still very real for our communities. So we feel like there shouldn’t be an unequal balance–impact should also weigh in on the matter.”

Tuffour is currently interested in pursuing cultural psychology, and expressed that this experience in research and presenting at the poster session was beneficial to her future goals.

Big Drop

Students, faculty, and staff members gathered behind Exley Science Center on May 9 to watch fruit, old computers, bouncy balls, and water balloons drop from seven stories up at the annual Big Drop. The Wesleyan Mathematics and Science Scholars (WesMaSS) and the Free Radicals started the Big Drop in 2016 and have kept the tradition going.

The Final Cram: An Experimental Study Space

Students went to Daniel Family Commons in Usdan for a night of studying, games, giveaways, and more, on May 13 during finals weeks. The alternative study space was sponsored by WesWell and The Wesleyan Writing Center.

Rose Chen ’26 contributed to this story.