My name is Kelly Kendro, and I am an undergraduate student working on the “From Africa to Patagonia” project. I would like to voice my gratitude and support for the Humanities Collaboratory at Michigan.
In my four years at Michigan, I have received a total of two fellowships, taught two classes over three semesters, volunteered as a mentor in two programs over three years, sat on four leadership boards, and worked in two labs. Throughout it all, I have never been a part of a team as energetic, enthusiastic, and tireless as the team at the Humanities Collaboratory.
As I’m sure you’ve heard (and read!), our team on the “From Africa to Patagonia” team is quite large and robust, something we’re proud of— undergrads here are creating corpora of cultural information, transcribing and analyzing Afrikaans (despite not speaking the language), and finding new ways to connect the pieces in this puzzle. I am a more-recent addition to the Collaboratory; I have been working with Nick and Lorenzo for more than a year and a half on their project in the Speech Production Lab investigating hesitation production in second language speech, and they were very hesitant to let me work on the Collaboratory project lest I get engrossed in the data like so many others. I am now both a member of the social media team (and helped orchestrate the LSA Instagram-takeover) and an editor for the papers we are now furiously writing. My first authorship is on a Collaboratory-driven piece (ironically, about the value of collaborative work), which is being submitted this month.
It’s easy to say that all work is important, but as we’re all working together on Thursdays, I can feel how important the work we’re doing is. The room is alive with people—undergrads, grad students, professors, lab managers— all flinging ideas back and forth because we know that each word makes a difference. This is the power, and the importance, of the Collaboratory. Thank you for fostering such a space.
Sincerely,
Kelly Kendro
University of Michigan, Class of 2019 | Residential College
Romance Languages and Literatures | Cognitive Science, Language and Cognition
Research Assistant, University of Michigan Psycholinguistics Lab | University of Michigan Speech Lab