At the Emory Libraries’ Undergraduate Research Awards Ceremony on May 1, Gillian Hecht, History major in the Class of 2018, received an Honorable Mention from the 2017 Elizabeth Long Atwood Undergraduate Research Award judges for her “History 488RW: The Professions in America” paper entitled, “The Rise and Fall of the Emory Dental School.”
In her Research Strategy Essay, Gillian reflected, “This research taught me that our libraries put a wealth of information at our disposal and that if we utilize the resources made easily available to us, we can immerse ourselves in our education, rather than just letting it happen to us.” Gillian’s sources included materials from the Dental School Archives at the Woodruff Health Sciences Library, the Rose Manuscripts and Rare Books Library, the American Dental Association, the Medical University of South Carolina Archives, the Dental College of Georgia Archives, and the Atlanta area newspaper archives. Through the research process, Gillian discovered that, “research can be carefully planned, but…all discoveries are serendipitous…a dedicated researcher must approach a source expecting to find the truth, regardless of what that may be.”
Gillian’s faculty sponsor, Jonathan Prude of the History Department, stated that Gillian had “crafted among the fullest and most thoughtful presentations of the Dental School chapter at Emory.” According to Dr. Prude, what made Gillian’s paper outstanding was how she “laid out a narrative that’s by now fairly familiar but located it within an especially rich and informative context” due to her excellent and thorough research.
Related Links: