One image. Six words.
“I’m turning into my grandma,” graduate student Sophie Rizzo captioned her entry. The photo showed Rizzo, knitting, with curlers in her hair.
Rizzo’s poster was one of over 50 entries in Lehigh’s “Say it in Six” competition, a program hosted by the Office of Graduate Student Life that allows students to display a meaningful photograph accompanied by a six-word memoir to capture an aspect of their Lehigh graduate experience. The posters are on display until June in the Fairchild-Martindale Library.
“I took up knitting recently, over quarantine, and I remember I was sitting on my bed, and I was hunched over knitting something,” said Rizzo, who is working on her Ph.D. in chemistry at Lehigh. “And I’m wearing this full tracksuit, that's in the picture, that, for sure, a grandmother must have owned before me, and it was just a very harsh realization for me.”
Rizzo entered her poster in the “New Skills, New Hobbies” category, winning first place in that category. Chosen by graduate students, the other two categories for the competition were “Who Inspires You” and “Distant but Connected.”
The Office of Graduate Student Life has hosted the poster competition the past two years. Members of the Lehigh community were able to vote online for their favorite posters.
Kathleen Hutnik, associate dean for graduate student life, says the idea was borrowed from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which also asked graduate students to describe some aspect of their graduate experience using just one image and six words.
“It's a great thing to use a different part of your brain and the grad students are working so hard, their left brains are bulging,” said Hutnik. “[The competition] is a little artistic, it's a little creative, it gets you outside of yourself a little bit.”
Hutnik said the theme of last year’s competition leaned more toward academics. This year, given the challenges posed by the pandemic, the program focused on more personal categories.
Hutnik said her students and colleagues have voiced that they feel a loss of purpose as a result of the pandemic. She said the students likely picked the categories because they were the areas they wanted to think about.
One goal of the project was to help nourish the graduate student community.
Ugochinyere (Nancy) Obioha Oloyede, who is working toward her Ph.D. in chemistry, felt the competition was a good way for graduate students to connect while they are still taking classes remotely. She said she appreciated how easily she could relate to the other students’ submissions.
Oloyede’s image, captioned “Working, but hearts across the sea” in the “Distant but Connected” category, showed a collage of photographs from her traditional wedding ceremony in Nigeria positioned beside a laptop that displays her research work in the chemistry department.
Oloyede said she first chose to participate in the competition so she could help her friends understand more about her culture. Oloyede said she also missed her family, who were happy to see the pictures she put together. Oloyede said she hasn’t seen her husband and family, who live in Nigeria, for the past two years. She plans to go home sometime before this fall.
Oloyede said she first learned about Lehigh when she read a professor’s published research and loved the concept. She discovered that the professor was from Lehigh and decided to apply to Lehigh to pursue her studies.
“I can say that has been one of the very best decisions of my life. I really love it here, especially our community of graduate students,” Oloyede said.
Oloyede said one thing she really appreciates are the resources the graduate school has to offer.
Hutnik said the competition helps bring more visibility to the Office of Graduate Student Life.
“Obviously everybody has to push through with their academics and with their jobs, but I feel like this kind of reconnects us to our humanity,” Hutnik said.
The competition was taken to a popular vote and split into highest votes overall, who received $500, the highest votes in each category, who received $100 each, and additionally, runners up in each category who received $50 each.
The winning posters are:
Overall Winner: Ana Ferariu, "Catch waves or do your homework"
New Skills and Hobbies Winner: Sophie Rizzo, “I’m turning into my grandma”
Distant But Connected Winner: Meghdad Razizadeh, “Feel apart but close at heart”
Who Inspires You? Winner: Sajedeh Yazdanparast, “Scientists whose endeavors enable family reunion”
— Story by Jessica Post ’21