1st Place

Teaching is hard. Teaching is not only hard, but it is one of the most stressful jobs, especially for
those at the onset of their careers. Young teachers bring a breath of fresh energy, drive, and
commitment to teaching and learning; many believe it is their calling. Helping and caring are
embedded in the heart of every teacher; we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have something
consistently drawing us back. What is drawing teachers back can certainly have its own set of
drawbacks. I know this because I worked as a 7-12th grade agricultural science teacher for five
years. During those five years, my personal well-being was at its best and worst.

Students carry stories and experiences of success, resilience, and laughter. At the same time,
those same students share stories that make our hearts and minds hurt. This bibliography drew
upon literature in education, and school-based agricultural education and identified that burnout
and stress were no stranger to the profession. At the same time, the primary contributors to
stress mentioned rarely acknowledged how the unsettling stories and experiences of students
can weigh on their teachers. Their teachers are the ones who are more likely to notice, to
complete a mandated report, or to be the first to provide a sense of stability and caring. Bearing
witness to these realities can manifest in secondary traumatic stress, and overtime when paired
with workplace environmental resource depletion or lack of support, it can further evolve into
compassion fatigue. The reality of compassion fatigue pierces the center of caring and leaves
those afflicted unable to extend compassion. Compassion fatigued teachers are irritable,
dispassionate sources of stress and re-traumatization for their students.

I chose to visualize my bibliography through a time-lapse illustration of both citations from
literature, and personal and interpretative vignettes from my own experiences. The picture is in
constant development, much like the nature of compassion fatigue; it is gradual. Additionally, as
the image becomes clearer, the series of experiences pile up, adding to both the visual and
psychological weight of carrying these ideas around in one's mind across a single day or entire
school year. The orange papers represent the inner dialogue of a teacher, while blue represents
administrative responses, purple represents the experiences of students, and white summarizes
scholarship. I’ve often heard that “Ph.D. work is ‘me’ work”, and while this didn’t emerge into my
current Ph.D. work, this bibliography was the foundation for my master’s thesis, and more
importantly my own philosophy for developing and caring for new teachers before they too lose
their spark. Compassion fatigue is part of my own story as a teacher, but it doesn’t have to be
for the next generation.

-Kirby Schmidt

Agricultural Education

2nd Place

In the United States, there is close to 450,000 undocumented students enrolled in a college or university. More specifically, the undocumented student population consists of 46% Latinx students, 25% Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students, 15% Black student, 12 % White students and 2% other. For many undocumented students, their legal status is often tied with financial insecurity, fear of deportation, and discrimination. These factors have a negative effect on their mental health. However, these effects can be lessened by being a DACA recipient, receiving social support, and institutional support. Thus, it is important for student affairs professionals that aim to help and advocate for undocumented students to be educated about relevant laws and policies and to connect them to necessary resources.

As I was writing this research project, I noticed that many of my sources had powerful phrases in their title that encapsulated the experiences of undocumented students. It is for this reason, that I chose to incorporate these phrases into the monarch butterfly. The monarch butterfly has become the symbol for undocumented students, sometimes referred to as “dreamers”.  These words represent their experiences that they carry with them wherever they go.  I also decided to have one side of the butterfly transparent because it is up to the undocumented individual to decide to disclose or not disclose their status. This means that there will be individuals who you may not know are undocumented, but they may still resonate with the phrases included in the wing. Lastly, the phrase “spoken but invisible” is the only phrase not included in the titles of my references. I chose to add this because conversations about immigration and undocumented students are common in our political environment. These words such as “undocumented” are often spoken yet this community is invisible. Their experiences or challenges are easily overlooked because they are not “American”. In higher education specifically, they rarely encounter professionals that are trained and equipped to support them. I spent my first term in the College Student Services Administration program researching undocumented students’ issues in an effort to become one more person that can support this community. To show that they are not invisible to me.

-Elena Contreras

College Student Services Administration

3rd Place

Ghost shrimp are burrowing organisms found in Oregon, where their burrows play important ecological roles in shaping marine ecosystems. They are commonly found in estuary habitats. My Ph.D. research is looking at the effects that offshore ghost shrimp populations have on the surrounding benthic (i.e., bottom of the ocean) invertebrate communities and productivity. Additionally, I aim to conduct laboratory experiments assessing how their burrow structure and behavior varies between estuary and offshore populations, and what their tolerance is to climate change stressors. I am currently writing a literature review which will form the basis of my thesis and have chosen references from here for the Visualize Your Bibliography contest.

Growing up with videogames, these provided an interactive pleasure and method to help destress from academic demands. My entry into this contest combines my academic passion for research with my personal passion for videogames. I have created a poster titled: ‘Ready Player Scientist’ (a play on the cult classic novel and film ‘Ready Player One’). In this poster I have chosen to match my bibliography to the game case covers of various videogame console systems, spanning different videogame generations. I have created reimagined research videogames - where each individual object depicts a videogame case cover with a title and figure taken from a paper that matches the release date of that videogame console. In homage to Oregon State University, several of these reimagined research videogames feature papers that include affiliated Oregon State University researchers.

-Matthew Vaughan

Integrative Biology