Student Stories
Global Health, Psychology
My time with this team was spent building meaningful relationships and developing a strong foundation in social justice, history and research methods. This team pushed me to work relentlessly as a critical thinker and advocate.
Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Being on a long-running Bass Connections team has allowed me to connect with amazing professors from multiple disciplines, learn how to pace my work throughout the year and gain confidence as a researcher in my own right while simultaneously having a positive impact on the Durham community.
Neuroscience
The overall flexibility and diversity of ideas in [my Bass Connections] project have allowed me to delve into these various fields and find the topics that excite me the most while working towards an end product with real-world implications.
Global Health, Public Policy
After helping to set up testing and vaccination sites and publishing calls to action for providers to remove identification requirements and expand access to multilingual health resources, I felt proud to be able to see the tangible impact our team had on Durham’s health disparities.
Biology
My experience on this team helped me adopt a more comprehensive view of medicine and convinced me that doctors have the ability (and moreover the responsibility) to focus on not only a patient’s physical ailments, but also their personal preferences for care and overall psychosocial well-being.
Public Policy
My team members are so different and so smart. I’ve found myself having extremely deep housing and planning policy debates. We’ve gone back and forth on what our utopia would look like, talking deeply about what we liked and disliked about our hometowns.
Biomedical Engineering, Global Health
I have already learned a great deal about the process for obtaining regulatory approval for medical devices. My teammates and I have begun to rigorously document the assembly and testing of the prototype in preparation for submission to the FDA.
Computer Science, Mathematics
I was able to analyze a pressing policy issue using data. We spoke to jail administrators, social scientists and lawyers, but one of the most valuable experiences through my project was speaking to someone on death row.
Global Health
My time on the team has had a huge impact on my future plans to work in health and medicine. My interest in health communication has also grown, and this next year I hope to integrate my skills in videography and photography along with my background in science to share valuable messages and communicate science information effectively.
Environmental Management
I am pursuing the GIS Analysis certificate at the Nicholas School, but this allows me to take the skills that I’ve learned from classes and apply them in a real-world scenario. I really like that aspect of the course and it has allowed me to become more comfortable in my GIS skills.
Biomedical Engineering
This experience truly opened my eyes to the breadth of experimentation that occurs in research outside of a laboratory setting.
Psychology & Neuroscience
The diverse knowledge and thought on the team helped me build on my own questions within this project, which inspired what I’m planning to do for my future dissertation project and what I’ve presented for my thesis.
Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience
With this team, I’m the first person to design the technology on the ground floor. Eventually, people with neurodegenerative conditions can use this therapy to improve their quality of life.
Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry
This experience made me realize that [in the future] I don’t just want to be a bench engineer — I want to work in an interdisciplinary team and lead projects like this one.
Neuroscience
Digital health communities make a huge difference in community members’ disease outcomes. Hopefully as a future physician, I’m able to give suggestions to patients about what communities exist out there.
Economics, Statistical Science
Bass Connections helped me seek an intersection between my multidisciplinary interests, spurred my curiosity and engrained a deep appreciation for research.
Mechanical Engineering
This project combined many of the fields I am interested in: mechanical engineering, energy and the environment, and innovation and entrepreneurship. This was also my first time working on a mechanical engineering project from concept to implementation, so it was a great learning process.
Biology
This experience deepened my understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship for global health by teaching me what it takes to actually bring a potentially life-saving device to the hands of a patient.
Neuroscience
I learned about writing’s beneficial effects on patients and healthcare providers and its usefulness as a part of the practice of personal wellness. As an aspiring physician, I hope to continue writing in the future as a means of centering and reflection.
Biology
My lab introduced me to a realm of science that I hadn’t previously considered: manipulating molecular biology to counter human and environmental health hazards.
Computer Science
Conducting team-based environment research through my computer science background has helped me think about different career options. I gained technical and soft skills, networked with industry professionals and gained insight on my professional future.
History
The central ethos of Bass Connections is the value of project-based pedagogy, and working on Mapping History has provided the most effective crash course in this teaching approach.
Environmental Sciences & Policy
By participating in Bass Connections, I was able to work not only with people in my doctoral energy team, but with undergrads, master’s students and postdocs. Many of my most fruitful experiences at Duke have been working with them.
Political Science, Public Policy
One thing I’ve learned is how to lead a team while very much being a part of it, instead of just being on top of it. That’s been a novel experience and I think entirely related to the core of an interdisciplinary collaborative project.
African & African-American Studies, Psychology
As a member of a Bass Connections team, I was able to get more invested in research, propelling me to complete a senior thesis project and search for ways to continue building research skills before applying to graduate schools.
Psychology
Health equity describes the intersection of two pieces of my identity that are critical to defining who I am – a Black woman with a passion for medicine. Ending my Duke undergraduate career by being a member of this Bass Connections team has been an immensely rewarding culminating experience.
I had no idea what to expect for my first year of college, with COVID impacting what I believed college classes, academic research and a general college atmosphere was supposed to look like. My Bass Connections project team has been the most personally impactful and academically stimulating experience of my time so far, and I will continue to remember the work and collaboration our team has done for the rest of my life.
Public Policy
My Bass Connections project got me interested in seeing how social media advertising affects the political process and how media plays a role in elections. When I took the Fall 2020 semester off to work on a Congressional campaign, I found it interesting to compare the ads I examined for Bass Connections and the digital ads that we ran ourselves.
Global Health, Public Policy
A recurring theme in my global health and public policy studies has been the difficulty of translations between research, policy and implementation. The work of this Bass Connections team has made me hopeful about the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration to address complex healthcare delivery problems.
Biomedical Engineering
The work I’ve done in Bass Connections over the past semester has been one of the most fulfilling, eye-opening experiences I’ve had at Duke so far. Through my project, I was able to get first-hand experience working with students from a multitude of disciplines and academic levels to understand what it takes to implement an effective community interventional study.
Neuroscience
My passion and commitment to this team extends far beyond our team meetings and the Duke University academic year. My involvement with Bass Connections has inspired me to pursue my interests in child and family policy, health policy and educational policy alongside an MD degree.
Psychology
While my project and its members taught me invaluable lessons about the capacity of self-expression to change and influenced me to start pursuing a more humanity-oriented form of medicine, it was the storytelling aspect that has stuck with me most.
African & African-American Studies
I take so much pride in my team. The partnership between the universities is one of the best things about the project because I get to interact with students from a different university and get different perspectives.
Computer Science, Mathematics
Education inequality across the country became immediately apparent to me after hearing about the more affluent high schools that many of my peers at Duke had attended. I saw a Facebook post for CSbyUs post during my sophomore year and felt like it would be a great way to begin acting on what was at the time a burgeoning passion.
Global Health, Public Policy
The longevity of my involvement in this project is part of what has made it so rewarding. Each year on the team has brought something entirely new.
Cultural Anthropology
Learning about the current East African surgical capacity helped me contextualize the American healthcare system in a broader scheme and gave me a better sense of how important surgical development is to the health and life expectancy of populations.
Political Science, Religious Studies
We created a framework for an effective message as being one that was enthusiastic but primarily information-centered, conceptualizing non-voting behavior as being more due to structural barriers than apathy. We then tried to produce media that would bring that concept to life.
Law
I think the most valuable part of Bass Connections has been the partnerships with the faculty and community. I’ve grown really close with all of the faculty leadership, but in particular, with two faculty members from the Law School.
Neuroscience
This experience has allowed me to focus my research interests for the future, dealing with how to assess and manage physical injuries, such as a concussion or head injury.
History, Mathematics
This has been by far the most rewarding experience I've had at Duke because it has provided me with a bridge between the classroom and the real world. It has also provided me with the most rewarding leadership opportunity I've had.