Skip to content
GIVING DAY is April 11! Starting now, you can support CSSH students and programs with a $5+ gift to any of our funds.
Apply
Stories

Co-op on display at RISE:2015

A photo of CSSH students Caroline Coughlin and Meghan Carroll talking about their research with President Aoun

Domestic and international co-ops inspired students in their research projects, several of which students presented at RISE:2015, Northeastern's research expo.

Each year I attend RISE, Northeastern’s annual research, inno­va­tion, and schol­ar­ship expo, I leave even more impressed with the high level and range of research hap­pening here. But this year, I’ve been thinking more about how many of the research projects pre­sented at the event stem in one way or another from stu­dents’ expe­ri­en­tial learning opportunities—particularly co-​​op.

Take the Col­lege of Engi­neering senior cap­stone team that devel­oped the Intel­li­gent Vir­tual Reality Aug­mented Cycling Kit, or iVRACK, after rec­og­nizing a need for a more quan­tifi­able way to mea­sure post-​​stroke vic­tims’ phys­ical therapy suc­cess. One of those stu­dents, Ben­jamin Rus­sell, E’15, noted how he used skills he learned from a product devel­op­ment co-​​op at Boston Device Devel­op­ment to help create pedals that attach to a sta­tionary bike and mea­sure a patient’s force and angle as he works the foot-​​operated levers. Rus­sell said the team got good results during lab tests and hopes iVRACK could someday be uti­lized in out­pa­tient facilities.

Another engi­neering cap­stone team pre­senting at RISE—and which I pro­filed recently—developed the “farm arm,” a pros­thetic limb designed to help amputee agri­cul­tural workers operate trac­tors. All five stu­dents drew from their co-​​ops for this project.

Polit­ical sci­ence major Car­o­line Coughlin, SSH’16, and Megan Car­roll, SSH’15, a com­bined major in inter­na­tional affairs and eco­nomics, pre­sented a com­par­a­tive case study of inde­pen­dence move­ments in Scot­land and Cat­alonia. They noted that these seces­sion move­ments are quite dif­ferent, despite the fact that both the media and acad­emia char­ac­terize them as sim­ilar. They also found that the evo­lu­tions of those move­ments were heavily influ­enced by the state responses to them.

For their project, they drew upon their inter­na­tional co-​​op expe­ri­ences, as well as addi­tional research. Coughlin worked on co-​​op for Jackie Baillie, a member of the Scot­tish Labour Party in the Scot­tish Par­lia­ment. She was able to directly cam­paign (for the “Better Together” or “no” cam­paign) in the ref­er­endum, as well as do research and write speeches for use in Par­lia­men­tary debates. Car­roll, for her part, worked at the Catalan National Assembly in Barcelona, which is the leading civil society orga­ni­za­tion pro­moting Catalan inde­pen­dence from Spain. “Com­paring our opin­ions and expe­ri­ences gave us the idea for this project,” Car­roll said.

In our story on RISE:2015, we noted the cyber­se­cu­rity research project pre­sented by Neel Shah, E’15, and Tushar Swamy, E/S’15. But one thing we didn’t men­tion was that Shah’s co-​​op at Mitre Cor­po­ra­tion, a non­profit that oper­ates research and devel­op­ment cen­ters spon­sored by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, served as the inspi­ra­tion for his project. Upon returning to campus, he sought out research oppor­tu­ni­ties in Internet archi­tec­ture and security.

Ditto for his­tory major Martha Pearson, SSH’15, whose co-​​op at the North­eastern Uni­ver­sity Archives inspired her research project to explore the inter­play between edu­ca­tion civil rights in Boston and busing desegregation.

And if those aren’t enough exam­ples of how co-​​op influ­enced the projects on dis­play at RISE, how about archi­tec­ture stu­dent Christina Dadona, AMD’16, who returned to campus from co-​​op in Wash­ington this semester to present her research exam­ining oppor­tu­ni­ties to stitch together the urban fabric of East Boston.

-By Greg St. Martin and originally posted in Northeastern’s Research Blog, iNSolution.

More Stories

Photo of the Capitol Building at night

High stakes for politics, SCOTUS in 2018

01.04.2018
Photo of the crashed truck that was used in the October 31st attack in Manhattan.

Weaponizing Language: How the meaning of “allahu akbar” has been distorted

11.08.2017
Northeastern logo

Why I love studying Spanish

05.29.20
Uncategorized