Randolph student develops business plan for local food hub

Tu Nguyen ’15 is developing a plan to help grow business for a local nonprofit that grows organic food.

Two days a week, Nguyen bikes about five miles from the Randolph campus to Lynchburg Grows, an urban farm that provides education programs and grows produce to sell in the region. He became acquainted with Lynchburg Grows last semester while taking “Economics of Food and Sustainability,” a class which studies the economic and social factors related to food production and distribution. Impressed by the operation, Nguyen sought an opportunity to work with the organization. “I sent an e-mail to Lynchburg Grows and asked if they had some internships I could do,” he said.

It turned out that there was an opportunity. The nonprofit needs a business plan for establishing a local food hub that would help local farmers sell produce to large customers such as hospitals and schools. “It would be a cross between a farmer’s market and a wholesale distributor,” explained Nate Foust-Meyer, the Lynchburg Grows farm manager and Nguyen’s supervisor. “It’s a model for bringing local farmers together.”

Having Nguyen handle the economic analysis and write the business plan will allow the project to move forward faster while allowing Foust-Meyer and other staff to focus on the farm operations. “It plays to his strengths and what he’s happy doing,” Foust-Meyer said.

Most of Nguyen’s time is spent crunching numbers, such as the cost of growing produce and the wholesale prices that the target market would be willing to pay. But he occasionally takes a break from the business plan to pull weeds and plant seeds in the Lynchburg Grows greenhouses.

Nguyen also is working in another internship, doing marketing work for a local financial planning office which he discovered through Randolph’s Experiential Learning Center. The two internships together are teaching him lessons that he would like to apply someday in a career as a financial advisor. “I am learning how a real business works,” said Nguyen, who is majoring in economics, mathematics, and physics. “This will be a really good experience for me.”

Student looks to the skies in astronomy research project

If scientists ever discover a giant asteroid on a collision course with our planet, they will owe a lot of their information on the asteroid to the observations of amateur astronomers such as Hart Gillespie ’15.

Gillespie is conducting a Summer Research project at Winfree Observatory, Randolph College’s 90-year-old observatory with a 14-inch telescope. He hopes to record an asteroid occultation and submit the data to an international database that helps scientists track asteroids.

An asteroid occultation is an instance when an asteroid passes between the earth and a star, blocking part or all of the light. An astronomer can observe that part or all of the star disappears momentarily, ranging from a split second to as long as 20 seconds. This can provide valuable information on an asteroid that is otherwise invisible.

“All you need is one occultation to see that the asteroid was there, but you would know where it was in only one instance in time,” said Gillespie, a physics major. “You would have no idea where it’s going, or how fast it is going, and you would not know the shape of the asteroid.” Those additional details can be pieced together as astronomers from many locations track occultations and send their data to the International Occultation Timing Association.

Gillespie’s plan is to pay attention to asteroid occultation predictions, usually published about a week in advance of a potential occultation, to schedule time to work in the observatory in hopes of viewing an occultation.

Observing occultations has been more difficult than Gillespie had anticipated, mainly because of weather conditions over the past several weeks. “I’ve learned it's cloudy a lot, so maybe I should go into radio astronomy,” he said.

While waiting for clear skies, Gillespie has been working with the College’s facilities staff on plans to improve the observatory facility with an electrical upgrade, scaffolding that will make the telescope easier to use, and a first-floor classroom area. He hopes the changes will make Randolph College Star Parties, held about once a month, more enjoyable for amateur astronomers in Lynchburg and more useful for physics education at Randolph.

Megan Wheatley ’13 continues pursuing master's degree in nursing

Megan Wheatley ’13 graduated from Randolph less than a month ago, but she already is halfway done with her master's degree in nursing.

Megan took advantage of Randolph College's dual degree program with Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. This program allows students to attend Randolph for three years and Vanderbilt for two. After the first year at Vanderbilt, students receive a bachelor of arts in health services from Randolph, after which they study for one more year to earn a master of science in nursing degree from Vanderbilt.

As a participant in Randolph's Davenport Leadership Program and a member of the volleyball team, Megan is one example of a student who applied herself and found great opportunities at Randolph. Over the next several weeks, we will introduce you to more members of the Class of 2013 who exemplify our motto Vita abundantior, the life more abundant. Return to the blog regularly to meet them.

Randolph College community mourns the loss of Joe Marotta

Joe Marotta addresses the Class of 2013
at Baccalaureate.

A Statement from Randolph College President John E. Klein


The Randolph College community is both shocked and saddened to learn of the tragic death of Joe Marotta. Joe was a much-loved member of the Randolph community and will be missed. He had been with the College since February 2012 and was an excellent controller, bringing strong experience and skills to his job. In a short time, he improved our audit, our control of student accounts, our control of assets and many other aspects of his position.

Joe most often could be seen on campus with a smile on his face, and we were extremely proud of him in the fall when he was ordained as a Permanent Deacon for Holy Cross Catholic Church after years of preparation. He was a fine person and respected and loved by many in our community. In his new role of deacon, Joe performed with joy and grace the College's Baccalaureate service at graduation in May. The Randolph community is grieved by Joe's loss and extends its thoughts and prayers to Joe's family and friends, especially his wife, Katie, and their five young children.

John E. Klein
President

Update:

Services for Joe Marotta will be held at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Lynchburg, VA as follows:

• Prayer service - Sunday 7-8:30pm
• Funeral Mass - Monday 2:00 with a reception and burial to follow

More information can be found at http://www.holycrosslynchburg.org/

Sending Order Through Chaos: Student examines "Rule 30" math problem

A Randolph College student is using his math and computer programming skills to help solve a puzzling mathematical problem.

Nam Hoang ’15, an engineering physics major, and Marc Ordower, a mathematics professor, are working with Stephen Wolfram’s “Rule 30” to explore ways to keep chaos from disrupting a pattern. When Hoang expressed interest in the Summer Research Program, Ordower suggested working on this problem because it has fascinated him for several years.

This computer simulation demonstrates how Rule 30 can be
applied to a pattern. After enough rows, the pattern (the alternating
on-and-off straight lines) disappears into chaos.

Wolfram’s Rule 30 demonstrates entropy—the move toward chaos. To apply the rule, mathematicians define a pattern in a row of cells that can be either alive or dead. On the next row, the status of each cell depends on the pattern of cells immediately above it. After a few rows, the entire system begins to demonstrate chaos.

Ordower wanted to find out if there is a way to create a pattern that can remain constant over an infinite number of new rows, even as chaos grows around the pattern. If such a pattern does exist, it could have implications for numerous situations, such as sending data electronically. “We transmit data all the time, and some of that data is lost,” Ordower said. “There are lots of people working on how robust you can make a message, and how many resources you need to make a message robust so it arrives correctly.”

Ordower and Hoang are spending most of their research time with pencil and paper trying to devise an algorithm and mathematical proof that would show that there is a pattern that could continue indefinitely. Hoang also has been writing computer programs to help dig deeper into the question. “At first it looked like it was so simple. We were trying to prove that we could send information through chaos,” Hoang said. “It turned out that it was very complicated. I’ve learned to analyze it and understand it.”

Hoang’s efforts have yielded some insight. His computer program discovered a pattern that disappears into chaos, but parts of the pattern emerge again.

Solving a complex problem like this is much larger than a summer project, so Ordower expects he and Hoang will continue seeking an answer even after the Summer Research program completes. He said it is great experience for Hoang, who hopes to become a computer engineer, in working with a mathematics problem that has never been solved, which is the real work of mathematics.

“The bigger mathematics gets, the more open problems there are,” Ordower said. “There are thousands of mathematicians working on millions of open problems around the world.”

Classics professor going to Iliad seminar

Amy R. Cohen, a classics professor at Randolph College, looks forward to spending time delving into the details of the Iliad this summer. She is one of 20 professors nationwide chosen to participate in a seminar on the Greek epic poem about the Trojan War in July.

The Council of Independent Colleges and the Center for Hellenic Studies is hosting the conference in July as part of the “Ancient Greece in the Modern Classroom” seminar series. Cohen and other professors at the conference will read and analyze the Iliad and discuss numerous issues related to teaching the literature to today’s college students.

Cohen, director of the Greek Play at Randolph, teaches students about the Iliad in one form or another in most of her classes, so she expects to bring many insights back to her classroom. She also expects to enjoy spending significant time studying the work of Homer, the Greek poet who helped inspire her interest in the classics.

“I have come to love the clear and complicated expression of Greek heroism in the Iliad,” Cohen said. “Homer’s men, women, and gods are fallible and frightening but redeemable and worth getting to know. The seminar will give me the opportunity to spend intensive time with these characters, to see them from new perspectives, and to learn about them from some of the leading scholars in the field.”

Cohen also is the director of the Randolph College Center for Ancient Drama. In addition to producing the Greek Play, the center publishes Didaskalia, a journal on ancient drama performance, and hosts a conference on that topic every two years.

Research Rocks: Randolph student and high school assistants making discoveries in Randolph's geological collection

A Randolph College senior and two E.C. Glass High School students are spending this summer transforming a geological collection with thousands of rocks and minerals.

They are cleaning, sorting, identifying, and labeling items in Randolph’s collection to make them more useful for education and research. Mimansha Joshi ’14, a Randolph student from Nepal, is leading the project.

“If we clean, identify, and archive them, they will be accessible not only for students and professors here, but also for other researchers in the region,” Joshi said.

The College’s collection of rocks and minerals is part of a larger natural history collection that includes bird, mammal, and insect specimens, many of which date to the late 1800s. Students started updating the collection and repairing specimens over the past couple of years, led by Emily Smith ’12, who now serves as a curatorial coordinator for the collection.

There are more than 1,000 pieces in the geological collection. “Some of the specimens are likely very rare, since some are from regions where mining and collecting are now restricted,” Smith said. “It is far too valuable an asset not to be catalogued and stored carefully.”

Galen Shen and Annemarie Taheny, rising juniors at E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, are assisting Joshi in cleaning and organizing the rocks and minerals.

Shen said that with her mother, Karin Warren, and stepfather, Marc Ordower, teaching at Randolph and working with the College’s Summer Research Program nearly every year, she has always wanted to participate. But they always told her she was too young. This year, her mother, the Herzog Family Chair of Environmental Studies, became the faculty sponsor for Joshi’s project and asked Shen if she would like to help.

Shen hopes to someday turn her research toward the skies as an astronomer, but she was happy to have the opportunity to start with researching rocks. “I’ve always had an interest in research in general,” she said.

Shen invited Taheny, a friend of hers, to participate in the project as well. “I’ve never done a research project before, but I’m interested in going into science,” she said.

Shen said this project has helped expand on what they have been learning in school. “We both had earth science, so we know in general about different types of rocks, but this is much more in depth,” she said.

The project began with a mystery this summer: Many of the rocks and minerals in the collection have stickers with numbers written on them, but no one knows what the numbers mean. Joshi believes there must be a list somewhere. The research team has combed the attic of Martin Science Building and the archives of Lipscomb Library without luck yet, but they plan to keep looking. “Our mission is also to find the key to all those labels,” Joshi said. As they organize and identify the rocks, Joshi will enter them into an electronic database for the natural history collection.

Joshi is sharing stories and photos related to the research here on the Randolph College Natural History Collection blog.