Bass Connections is an excellent opportunity to work on a project that required collaboration across a variety of disciplines.

There’s an energy amongst the faculty, the graduate students, and the undergraduate students that’s probably not paralleled by any other project I’ve participated in at Duke.

Throughout the project, my team and I met some incredible people who made the experience all the more valuable to me. It was one of the most impactful summers of my life.

As this was my first field research experience, I learned a ton, but the most important lesson was that you have to be flexible and adjust to changes.

I learned that involving the community and collaborating with its members are cornerstones to improve public health. I also learned that one of the pillars of community health work is community empowerment.

When I complete my dissertation, I plan to disseminate the findings to policymakers. I hope the evidence will provide important insights for policy design in rapidly urbanizing areas in the Global South.

I entered into this project with a good-willed but egotistic perspective that my expertise and technical training in the U.S. can be equally applied to Sarawak, Malaysia. I think it’s okay to admit that there are limits to our knowledge in unfamiliar places and that is the purpose of research.

Working with a tight-knit team of motivated individuals and a professor who is at the forefront of the global value chain framework development allowed me to gain insights into North Carolina’s economic position that I would never have been able to grasp.

Bass Connections projects foster genuine collaboration among undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and community members. Those relationships have and will continue to benefit my intellectual growth.

I consider my Bass Connections experiences invaluable in making me confident, creative and open to change.

I learned the value of a diverse team, which enabled us to think more broadly about the question at hand.

My participation in this Bass Connections project is one of the most meaningful and rewarding Duke experiences I have had. 

Bass Connections allowed me to practice my “problem solving” skills in a real life setting, rather than a problem set on paper. It gave me the liberty to design a protocol myself rather than having one given to me.

Bass Connections is a program that has the audacity to take on the big, “so complex they’re scary” problems in society, while maintaining the flexibility to find solutions creatively.

Bass Connections at its core is a mission by Duke University to overcome the issues that our society faces by encouraging different disciplines to collaborate. This collaboration allows teams to look at problems from several angles and pull from multiple skill sets.

I’m constantly reminded of this first experience working on an interdisciplinary team in my role at the Energy Initiative, where I am almost always the only historian (or, indeed, the only humanist) at the table. Thanks to Bass Connections, I can navigate conversations about interdisciplinary research with the confidence not only that history matters, but also that I have been able to make it matter in similar situations in the past.

The strong interdisciplinary nature of the project helped frame the issue of climate change through a number of perspectives: science, law, philosophy, engineering, policy, ethics. The project also provided the opportunity to have intimate discussions with leaders of the field.

My time in this program has provided me with the knowledge I need to continue to pursue the research questions I am passionate about, and I look forward to being able to employ the interpersonal and research skills I’ve learned in future interdisciplinary research projects.

In Bass Connections I have been fortunate enough to work with exceptional students and faculty across the Duke community as we dig into the topic of the history and future of ocean energy.