Daniel Sweat
Features Editor
If you’re like me, you’re probably going to have to write an I.S. during your senior year. Perhaps your I.S. will be really interesting and require you to travel to do research. “But Daniel,” I can hear you saying, “traveling costs money!” That’s very true, imaginary student I’ve made up for rhetorical purposes, but you might not even have to pay for it out of pocket. In fact, with the help of the Copeland Fund, you too can make your I.S. dreams come true.
In 1995, Wooster’s Board of Trustees established The Henry J. Copeland Fund for Independent Study in honor of Copeland’s presidency. Every year, the fund awards grants, totalling roughly $90,000, to fund trips helping students complete research and enrich their I.S. in ways that might not be possible otherwise. That’s exactly what seniors Elizabeth Brewington ’17 and Chrissy O’Grady ’17 did over fall break.
While studying abroad in Denmark last year, Brewington took a class called “Gang Crimes in Scandinavia.” Having previously taken a deviance and criminology course at Wooster, she was interested in the Danish prison system, and luckily, she was able to visit a Danish open prison with the help of her professor.
“When I started thinking about I.S., I knew I wanted to combine my experiences in the U.S. and Denmark.” So for her senior I.S. she chose to write about the influence of Protestantism on the Danish prison system. Thankfully, her application to the Copeland Fund was accepted, and she got to travel back to Denmark to conduct in-person research. Throughout the week, she conducted interviews with prison chaplains and non governmental organizations (NGO) to better understand the church’s role in the formation and ideology in the prisons.
By talking with those prison chaplains and NGOs she learned that the Danes do not consider themselves a particularly religious people. Rather, they hold certain Lutheran values as general Danish values. Her return trip to Copenhagen allowed her a more nuanced perspective that other forms of research could not have offered. When asked to reflect on the value of her trip, Brewington said, “Being able to be here and talk to chaplains and others who work closely with the prison system will give me much more insight than articles could give me.”
O’Grady’s experience with the Copeland Fund didn’t take her all the way to Denmark, but it did take her back through her family’s history.
In her I.S., O’Grady uses her own family as a case study through which to look at the push and pull factors behind migration and the development of life in America. Over fall break, she traveled all the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia to conduct research on her own family history at the Nova Scotia Archives. By helping her gain access to primary sources, the Copeland Fund allowed her “to have a broader scope of place specific migration and the regional motivations to migrate based on nationality.”
Moreover, because she could go to the archives in Nova Scotia, O’Grady now has direct documentation of the cable company that sparked her ancestors’ migration. In fact, she was able to find the obituary of her great, great grandfather, uncovering valuable information about his place within in the cable company. Without access to those records and newspapers, this dimension of her I.S. would have been lost.
To close out the trip, O’Grady visited the only remaining building from the telegraph cable company. Though now defunct, people in the nearby town have been keeping it from being demolished, citing its historical significance.
O’Grady plans to take a similar trip during Thanksgiving Break, this time going to the Regional History Center at Northen Illinois University.