This year, Temple University’s Undergraduate Symposium for Undergraduate Research and Creativity was moved to an online setting in order to observe social distancing. The annual event’s inaugural virtual session featured over a dozen students who are either enrolled at Klein College of Media and Communication or who were mentored by a Klein faculty member, with topics ranging from Taylor Swift and Hozier to mass incarceration.

Though hosting events via video conference is becoming more and more commonplace, there were some fundamental differences between the usual in-person conference and the online version.This year, students were required to shorten their presentations from about 10 minutes to between five and seven minutes. Additionally, while students were still able to answer questions at the end of each presentation, they were not able to have a group panel discussion with their peers at the end of each session.

However, the digital format had its benefits. Klein’s Director of Communication Studies and Undergraduate Studies Scott Gratson, who has been involved with organizing the symposium for over a decade, found that the format granted some flexibility usually not present in person.

“What impressed me was the level of engagement across the symposium,” he says. “This format let us see far more people than if we were in person. The same finding applies to the questions. In a live session a student may get one or two questions directed at them. Sometimes, no questions are asked at all. This format allowed us to ask questions and to look at different presentations.”

When faced with the transition to an online format, students hit the ground running. Sean Starosta, a junior economics major with a minor in journalism who was enrolled in Professor Carolyn Kitch’s Media, Memory, and Social Change honors course last semester, did his first formal academic presentation on themes of history and memory in the music of Irish musician Hozier.

“I would've presented my paper as a talk on a panel, which I was really looking forward to,” Starosta says. “I think my presentation was largely the same; I presented a Powerpoint and a video of his song with my audio commentary. The biggest difference was not being able to present alongside a panel and in front of a group of peers.” 

Starosta is currently in the early stages of finding and submitting to an academic journal, and he said that preparing for the symposium helped him understand where the project might go in the future. Similarly, senior English major Morgan Alexander who also enrolled in Media, Memory, and Social Change with Professor Kitch last semester, says that pursuing her presentation on Taylor Swift’s allusions to history and memory helped her redefine her guiding research questions and prompted her to continue to project.

“I would be interested in doing more research to see how her references to history have evolved since the beginning of her career to now,” she says.

Regardless of format, students and professors felt that the symposium was an overall success. After all, the research process that went into developing each of these projects was done in the months leading up to the event. Professor Kitch mentored several student presenters, and was able to see the way each student’s work developed during that time as well as the end product.

“In several cases, the process of preparing a research-conference-style presentation actually had led [my students] to clearer and more thoughtful conclusions—their analysis had gotten stronger when they revisited and revised their own research several months later,” she says. “That is a big part of the research process overall, and an event like the symposium gave them the opportunity for that kind of growth as scholars.”