Jasmine Ma Award Winners
2018: Grace Chen
Grace has been influential in so many of our experiences here in so many ways. On a personal level, she is always reaching out to people to hear how they are experiencing various facets of graduate school or life, and genuinely working to solve issues that are within her control. Academically, she is so generous with her time in a way that improves the work and thinking of everyone around her. She is often willing to read and think about a draft, even when the topic is far outside her own work. When she does, we inevitably come away with new insights. She is warm, yet unyielding as vibranium when there’s an injustice at stake. If it weren’t for her presence, intellect, kindness, and intentional community-building in this program, many of us would have had a much poorer experience on the path to Ph.D.
2017: Brette Garner
Brette Garner has done just about everything for the Doc student community. She’s served as social chair, webmaster and DSA president, giving up a lot of her time to organize all kinds of events. This includes both fun stuff (happy hours) and tedious stuff (webmastering). She has showed up at everything and made a point of building connections across cohorts both preceding and following hers. Her time as DSA president has seen great BBLCs and she is wisely thinking about how to pass on the wisdom of doc students before they leave. She has always worked hard at recruiting weekend to bring in great talent. And of course the one thing I haven’t yet mentioned that yet again demonstrates Brette’s willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty: her memes. While others might not even think to send reminder emails about events and deadlines, Brette does so with gusto. While others might think the memes are just being silly, they are actually a way that Brette shows she cares about the doc student community, and wants to bring a little more joy to everyone’s day. Celebrate with a Bretteface today.
2016: Jennifer Kahn and the Interaction Analysis Lab
Interaction Analysis Lab/Jennifer Kahn (IAL; this nomination is for the group as one entity, with the official title going to Jen).The best part about Interaction Analysis Lab is that it’s still kind of underground. It’s not in your plan of studies, or even on the DSA website. It’s a social practice born out of mutual interest, along with a sincere curiosity and commitment to learning together with peers. It succeeds in bringing together folks from every program in the department, and provides a unique opportunity to immerse ourselves in the full range of exciting approaches to video research that are going down around the Wyatt atrium. But the best part of IAL is that you never know what wild new educational context you’re going to see, from racially charged teacher-student conference simulations, to families rhizomatically wending their way around museums, to kids stomping around in creeks. But the very best part of IAL is that if you read it phonetically it’s a homophone for “y’all,” and what’s more “community” than that? Special props to Jennifer Kahn for taking point on organizing [Interaction Analysis Lab]. If anyone should get to put “Jasmine Ma Award” on her CV on account of IAL, it’s her, especially since Dr. Ma herself played the very same role in a previous manifestation of Interaction Analysis Lab back in 2010 or so.
2015: Liz Self
Liz has been around for a while, but the summary of her service even just this year is a pretty impressive one:
- She helped plan a baby shower for all our new arrivals this year, which was good fun and well appreciated by all the new families (even dads!). The attention to detail of the party made it fun. In particular, the baby pictures of the profs in this department were hilarious. Baby Bob Jimenez was clearly the beauty prizewinner.
- She volunteered her newly renovated place for our end-of-year party this year, which means having all of us over to eat and drink and make messes all over her brand new place. Dang! That alone would have been enough!
- She’s currently serving as faculty rep and has such excellent stenography that at the last DSA meeting we could all laugh while imagining Leona telling Lani that something just isn’t true.
- She was the first year liaison this year, taking on a new DSA position. While I don’t know what that actually entailed, it looked like they had lunch sometimes, and since all the first years are an attractive, intelligent, and reasonably well-adjusted group of people I think we can say she did a good job.
- She helped coordinate our presentation to faculty about research group at their retreat way back in August. Damn, guys, that’s doing service before the school year even started!
- She coordinated the Pen Pals with a Purpose letters pickup and drop-off. Basically she took on the extra work of delivery and checking in with us letter writers – the kind of work nobody else wanted to do. Serving our department and serving kids at the same time.
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