Social Sciences

According to the U.S. Health Resources and Service Administration, Lancaster, is a medically underserved area with 11% of residents under 65 years old living without health insurance and 22,000 children are without health insurance, the highest in Pennsylvania. For these families, obtaining adequate healthcare is extremely difficult, especially if they do not consistently see their provider. Consequently, patient's information is not maintained in the Electronic Health Records system, leading providers to make diagnoses with incomplete information. Medical preparedness bags offer an alternative and practical way for patients to store their health care records, medications, and other necessities. Health care providers will have a single area of consolidated information that they can then use to make informed decisions for their patients, leading to better clinical healthcare experiences.

Our research builds a comprehensive database of indicators for processes of gentrification in Lancaster City, PA. We define gentrification as forms of urban reinvestment that increase residential inequalities. Using a web scraper written in python, we collect decades of data on property value, home ownership, and sales history from the Lancaster County Property Assessor’s website. By pairing property-level data with building permits, code violations, and census demographic data, we visualize how multiple neighborhoods within Lancaster City have changed over the past 15 years. Preliminary findings suggest that the southwest area of the city has experienced a significant increase in the concentration of residential properties owned by a small number of individuals, and that investors in the southwest increasingly do not reside within Lancaster City.

This project is an investigation of the factors that are most crucial in helping lower class and first-generation students develop the cultural capital necessary to succeed in higher education. Cultural capital is a sociological term referring to the behaviors, knowledge, and expectations an individual possesses, which they employ to navigate the world around them. This set of tools is strongly linked to class upbringing, as parents tend to imbue their children with particular kinds of cultural capital. Academia is latent with implicit rules and expectations, and possessing the right forms of cultural capital is thus crucial to a student’s success. Through a series of interviews with F&M seniors, this research explores the processes by which lower class and first-generation students acquire and internalize cultural capital throughout their college experiences, paying particular attention to the role of the institution in facilitating these processes.

The Ukrainian government sponsors around 85,000 spots for higher education for high school students that pass the state exams for an acceptable score. However, most of those spots are mainly taken by those who can afford them. In addition, most high school students choose their universities based on advice from friends and family, meaning that the wealthier and more connected the family is, the higher are the chances to make a well-educated choice. DecidEd is a Ukrainian NGO that strives to bridge these inequities and give Ukrainian high school students equal chances for a better future. With $4000 from the Marshall Grant, I explored different ways to grow a grassroots NGO and will be sharing the main lessons I learned from that experience.

While contemporary institutionalism is advanced in its analysis of the status quo and pushes against the idea of an "iron cage" of bureaucracy where people are inert rule followers, it has not done enough to explain change which could have a tremendous influence on organizational structure. People are full of emotions, ideas, diverse experiences and we see dynamic relationships between people and rules/regulations. Some people willingly couple with the policy while others unwillingly decouple from it. Behind the "iron cage" of bureaucracy are not only much more diverse responses to the policy in place but also people with thoughts and passion. The retirement policy is no different. By looking at the on the ground decision making around retirement, we recognize the multifaceted and complicated nature of human lives, and therefore, provides us with a new perspective to the interaction between people and policies.