Alpha Chi Students Garner National Academic Awards

At the Alpha Chi National Convention this past week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, two Alpha Chi students received national scholarships. Tessa Stutzman, a crop science and agronomy major from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, won a regional fellowship and also a national fellowship for her paper “Diet Diversity in East Africa – Diets, Factors, and Solutions.” Jasmin Buffenn, a crop science and agronomy major from Waterloo, Indiana, won a regional scholarship and also a national scholarship for her paper “Variation Analyses of Carotenoid Metabolites and Gene Expression Across Multiple Tomato Accessions,” competed as a collaborative research project at Cornell University over the summer.

Karis Scobey, an animation major from Lake Odessa, Michigan, was chosen as an alternate for a regional scholarship for her work “The Process and Complexities of 3D Modeling.”

Four additional students presented their scholarship at the national level. Mica Allen, a biology pre-med major from Spencerville, Indiana, presented “The Hidden Dilemma of Cryosleep”; Breanna Bildner, a marketing, business management, and economics and finance major from Hillsdale, Michigan, presented “The Difficulty of Recent Graduates to Find Satisfactory Employment”; Carrie Runyan, an animation major from Huntington, Indiana, presented “How Does an Animation Student Experience the Animation Pipeline?”; and Rachel Scobey, an animation major from Lake Odessa, Michigan, presented on “3D Generalist: Specialize in Nothing.”

The students were accompanied to the Convention by Dr. Ruth Nalliah, and were also mentored by additional Alpha Chi faculty sponsors Dr. Tanner Babb and Dr. Ann McPherren as well as their faculty advisors and professors.

Student election to Alpha Chi is the highest academic honor at Huntington University.