During winter break 2022 Victoria Aguado ’24 worked with Cecilia Cornejo on her project Home and Belonging. Victoria shared her experience as an SRP with the Humanities Center.
“My experience as a student research partner this past Winter Break was one of the more valuable experiences I’ve had at Carleton thus far. To retrace my steps, I worked with Cecilia this past summer on her ongoing project on Home and Belonging. This summer, we dove headfirst into hundreds of audio testimonies she has collected over the past few years to produce a sound-mapping archive of small river towns in Southeastern Minnesota. Cecilia and I flowed into a groove over the summer that led to some solid deliverables. The work that we continued into the Winter was centered more around refining, adjusting, and augmenting the work already done to ensure that the material and data was being handled and presented in respectful and compelling fashions. My responsibility this Winter involved sorting through testimonials that I had worked with over the summer to organize the data and identify patterns across the data.
Working with Cecilia Cornejo again has taught me how to feel the weight of personal and professional accountability. When investing in a professional relationship, especially with a professor, one begins to feel the mentorship element become less pertinent. Collaboration then becomes the center of your relationship, which is where the real magic happens.”