WISE RP x UROP

WISE RP members, Katrina Yeomans (left) and Marivi Sifuentes (right), display their blue ribbons at the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Spring Symposium on April 18th at the Michigan Union. ​​Many WISE RP members participated in UROP this year and were recognized for their excellence at the event.

Katrina shared her experience with us below:

Katrina Yeomans

Major: Biomedical Engineering (Pre-med)

Graduation Year: 2020

UROP Experience: I was originally on a behavioral psychology project during the first semester. However, my research mentor left the University in January and I had to find another project.  I tried to find another project but it is hard to start working in a wet lab when there are 2 months left of school. Marivi reached out to her research mentor and she agreed to left me join the project.  To be honest, I actually enjoyed this second project more than the first one.  The new project involved the humanities and I was learning valuable history about the civil rights period.  I have enjoyed my time in UROP and I wouldn't have found Professor Cotera's project without it. Marivi and I will continue working on the archival project over the summer.

Project Description/Goal: Civil rights movements require collaboration among various social identity groups; however, most of the narratives that currently exist about these movements detail the accomplishments of the male leaders.  Due to this fact, Associate Professor Maria Cotera in the American Culture and Women Studies department began a project focused on recognizing the contributions made by the female activists, specifically those who participated in the Chicano Movement.  These new female-led narratives of the Chicano Movement are captured through oral histories and artifacts (pictures and documents) that are catalogued and uploaded to the Chicana Por Mi Raza Memory Digital Archive. The goal of the Chicana Por Mi Raza Archive is for this information to be accessible to professionals and the public in the hopes that this newfound information on the feminist contributions to the Chicano Movement may be incorporated into lectures, books, classroom curriculums, and personal projects.

Role on the Project:  Catalogue, tag, organize, and upload donated pictures and documents to the Chicana Por Mi Raza Archive. Specifically for each picture donated, Marivi and I had to figure out who was in the picture, what they were doing, and where the picture was taken. This process involved a lot of outside research into the prominent people who might have been present at whatever event was captured in the photo. Then we had to look captioned pictures on the internet and compare the faces with those in the donated photos.