Hello everyone! My name is Thomas Howard, I am the current CURCA Graduate Assistant, it's nice to meet you all. If you are reading this right now, you are either interested in research at WSU or are at the very least just trying to find a start to your research journey. Although I am a Grad Student now, I was also an undergrad at Westfield just trying to pass my classes. I didn't even know what CURCA was or how to actually conduct scholarly research, all I knew about was that I had to present at the Celebration and make a poster for a class I was in. I really liked the idea of presenting to my school work to my peers and was happy at the opportunity to do so. Despite my enthusiasm, looking back at how my poster turned out when I was a First-Year, I'm glad I stuck with CURCA to keep improving my research, it gave me a great first start. Little did I know that I would come back every semester to present some sort of work, through class, an independent study, or an undergrad thesis until I realized that I was filling out an application for the CURCA SSuRF Summer Research Fellowship and attending a Graduate and Doctoral level History research conference. It's strange how one class room requirement quickly snowballed into an undergrad degree full of research opportunities. Upon returning to WSU for my Masters, my experiences with CURCA gave me the continued confidence to be able to complete any research assignments (and soon, my Capstone) that is required of my degree. I look forward to seeing all of your fabulous and intriguing research projects come this Spring Celebration!
-Tom Howard
