The Honors College believes that individual and collective achievement go hand in hand. So too does Renata Hemstreet, a second-year honors bioengineering student whose exemplary teamwork and initiative in group learning has garnered recognition from peers and professors alike.
Looking for a smaller community within OSU, “especially one focused on academic excellence,” Renata joined the Honors College. “I am an introvert,” she says. “Connecting with new people hasn’t been my strongest trait in the past. I knew, going into OSU, that if I was going to find community it would be through the Honors College.”
Renata reports that living in West Hall, one of the Honors College Living-Learning Communities, helped her form new connections. However, she ultimately credits the honors vector calculus class she took as a first-year with providing the foundation for the network of friendships she has developed over her subsequent year and a half at OSU. “There were only twenty of us, so we were forced to interact,” she jokes. “The first three friends I made freshman year came from that honors class.”
In addition to the small class size, the course, like other honors courses, was structured differently than regular sections of the same subject. “There was basically no lecture,” Renata explains. Instead, “class time was focused on group work and collective problem solving.”
Within this collaborative academic environment, Renata developed lasting friendships and worked to support the learning and success of her peers. A number of Renata’s friends and classmates estimate that their performance in vector calculus, as well as in subsequent classes taken alongside her, was greater than it would have otherwise been, crediting her guidance and encouragement.
This fall, Renata returned to vector calculus as an Undergraduate Learning Assistant, where she continues to support fellow students by “guiding them through problems” and facilitating the kind of synergistic problem-solving that she has found instrumental to educational success. “I find teamwork and group learning to be important in most OSU courses – especially STEM subjects,” she emphasizes. “Working with others encourages more ideas and problem-solving methods to be brought to the table, enabling us to tackle complex questions.”
Classmate Ella Dreke commends Renata for committing time to “tutoring her peers and spreading her wealth of knowledge.” Renata describes her engagement in collaborative learning less as a service to others and more as an opportunity to promote knowledge and understanding for every learner involved, including herself. “Working with other people is helpful!” she says. “If I were to just work on my own all the time, I would get stuck on problems and have no way of figuring out how to move forward. When working with peers, everyone contributes a different understanding, which together allows us to conquer more.”
Renata has further found community in OSU student organizations, particularly the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Involvement in SWE has helped Renata build on connections that originated in the classroom. An additional advantage of SWE is the ability to walk into a new engineering class and see familiar faces. “It’s fun to see the few women in my engineering classes and talk to them on a more personal level,” she says. “The club provides a nice way of bringing everyone together and facilitating friendships.” As a current SWE chair, Renata is shadowing the club’s officers in hope of running for an officer position this spring. She looks forward to the opportunity to advance her involvement and give back to this supportive community.
Renata is also involved in on-campus research in Dr. Tyler Radniecki’s environmental engineering lab, where she contributes to a project involving anaerobic digestion during the wastewater treatment process. “All the sludge that gets separated out from wastewater is put in large scale anaerobic digesters,” Renata explains. “It produces biogas which can either be used to heat the treatment plant facility or be converted to electricity.” The purpose of Radniecki’s research is “to see how best to maximize biogas production and the energy obtained from this process.”
As Renata moves toward her post-graduation goal of conducting research in the bioengineering field, she says her favorite part of her current research experience is “seeing how the stuff I’m learning in class applies to real world scenarios.” Renata finds these connections motivating as she continues to tackle challenging coursework. “It makes it feel like what I’m learning will be used in my future career, rather than just information being fed to me to memorize in class.”
While Renata embodies the second of the HC’s five core values, to work and grow together, she recognizes that forming connections, sharing ideas and asking for help all require a level of vulnerability. “I understand feeling scared to ask questions in class,” she says, encouraging students to take advantage of instructor office hours, where they can get help without speaking out publicly. “In terms of working with other students,” Renata adds, “all it takes is to ask one question to the person sitting next to you, like, ‘How did you do this problem?’ I think the reality is most people would like others to work with, and initiating this kind of dialogue can create wonderful relationships.” Renata describes community as a vital ingredient in her own success and encourages other students to seek supportive connections in the Honors College and beyond.
By Ana Tracy, Honors College student writer
CATEGORIES: HC Student Spotlights Homestories Students