First launched in 1980 under the direction of Dr. Helen Bohmer Daly, Quest at SUNY Oswego stands as both an annual day-long gathering for the free exchange of academic knowledge and ideas between students and faculty members, and a nearly four-decades old tradition that has withstood unprecedented historical events that include even the COVID-19 pandemic.
From an initial count of 77 presentations at its inauguration, the collegiate event now boasts a diverse body of scholastic research and study, with this year’s Quest topics ranging between psychology and economics, to biochemistry and mathematics. Although the university selects a date for the showcase of its student body’s discoveries and achievements, retrospectively-speaking there is little insight as to the work commitments these students personally undergo for the yearly symposium.
Instead, Quest focuses mostly on the results and whatever relevant instructional applications they may have both considered and used in their educational journey. Thus, while there is recognition in their procurements and accomplishments, through a series of questions regarding their work the timelines these students underwent to make the day possible were examined to recognize their true efforts from beginning to end.
With an ever-modernizing society comes the scrutinization of the STEM fields, those of which are science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Considering the groundbreaking advancements that have originated from this portion of academia in recent times, Quest 2023 incorporated a plethora of presentations and posters with topics falling into one of these four categories, all of which yielded fruitful results.
Anthony Austin, a senior at SUNY Oswego majoring in physics and minoring in astronomy, conducted a presentation on the “Progress towards observing electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) in cesium,” and later explained both the path his group took in collaboration and the future of the experiment.
“Just this semester, I’d say we’ve been working on this for two months, where we’d meet once a week for three hours,” Austin said. “Yet it’s still preliminary. Either I will be continuing it, or other students will be continuing it. We want to publish a paper, so it’s not enough yet, we need to collect more data.”
When discussing the most prevalent challenge in his work, it was revealed to be “the experimental setup; there are so many things that can go wrong. It’s a lot of patience, it’s a lot of fine tuning, and it’s a lot of trial and error,” he said.
Katherine Galligan, a senior at SUNY Oswego majoring in chemistry, shared her personal experience in the lead-up to her poster presentation on “Predicting and determining the function of the enzyme 3IRU.”
“I kind of fanned this out for over two years. Under certain conditions, it’s possible that this may have taken just one year, but I wanted to really confirm the specific function of this enzyme,” Galligan said.
When delving deeper into the timeline she took, Galligan described that “there are just certain pieces of this experiment that take a certain amount of time. Trying to find an ideal chunk of time to complete certain things was probably the most challenging aspect of it all. I eventually came in on weekends to finish stuff up.”
Quest, 42 years since its commencement, continues to prevail against the tides of time as a day of academic interchange and partnership. Through dedication and mentorship from their respective department’s faculty, students at SUNY Oswego have the opportunity to share their academic excellence with the rest of the student body and progress their abilities in research and overall higher education. Yet, it is important to acknowledge the endeavors that these students undergo outside of the limelight to comprehend the complete timeline and process of investigation they perform in the name of intellectual enrichment.
