The University of Texas Libraries announced the winners of the 2019 Signature Course Information Literacy Award at the Undergraduate Research and Writing Award Ceremony on April 4, 2019.
The Signature Course Information Literacy Award recognizes exemplary student work that achieves the learning outcomes of the Signature Course information literacy requirement. Winning students have demonstrated the ability to create and execute a research strategy, critically evaluate information and navigate the scholarly conversation. The award judges are librarians and staff from The School of Undergraduate Studies and The Sanger Learning Center.
Winning projects are placed in the open access repository Texas ScholarWorks where they are available for review.
First place was awarded to Grace Nguyen, a Plan II and business freshman, for her paper “The Water Isn’t Safe: The Dismal State of Texas Drinking Water Regulation.” The paper was nominated by Jane Cohen from the School of Law and was submitted in her Fall 2018 Signature Course “Water, Ethics, Law, and Policy.” The project was chosen for its exceptional use of sources from government documents to journalism to build a compelling argument.
Cohen supported this project by saying "Grace began this project innocent of all knowledge about this situation, other than her rural Texan grandmother's sadness over the brief longevity of her pets. She built a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the regulatory environment literally hand-over-hand, with a superb research effort all her own.”
Mohit Gupta, an Engineering Honors sophomore, earned second place for his self-nominated paper “Jerusalem in Israeli Politics, 1947-1967,” submitted in Jonathan Kaplan’s (Department of Middle Eastern Studies) Fall 2018 Signature Course “Jerusalem.” His project was recognized for its iterative search strategy and ability to articulate the conversation between his sources.
“...I commend Mohit for being able to adjust his research once he realized that his first set of articles were not specific enough” said Sigrid K. Kjær, Gupta’s teaching assistant. “His final paper and annotated bibliography reflect his acquired knowledge of the topic and through his research and willingness to seek advice he came up with some excellent articles to use for this assignment.”
Tanvi Ingle, a Biochemistry sophomore, earned third place for her paper “The Relationship between Social and Economic Marginalization and Alcohol Abuse within the African Racial Group” nominated by Arturo De Lozanne from the Department of Molecular Biosciences. This paper was submitted in the Fall 2018 Signature Course “Originality in the Arts and Sciences.” Ingle’s paper was chosen for her ability to analyze two works of art in the context of a broad array of interdisciplinary sources.
In his nomination, De Lozanne said of this paper “Ms. Ingle adeptly brought in research from the fields of art history, sociology, civil rights history, economics, health care, and government policy to demonstrate how these varied and complex factors and their effects on alcoholism in marginalized communities have been communicated to the public through visual means."
Congratulations to all of our student winners.
