Min Kim – International Fellow
A portion of the following story was reported by the Office of International Programs.
Min Kim, a second year graduate student who also received her B.A. in communication studies from CSU in 2008, was recently named a Colorado State University International Presidential Fellow for the 2015-16 academic year.
Kim’s area of interest is in organizational communication and intercultural communication, primarily focusing on the organizational members’ emotional experiences and the role of communication in their organizations. She hopes to become a communication broker among different organizations in Korea. “As a native of Korea, I’ve always been fascinated by the differences in cultures especially in organizational settings,” Kim says.
During her first year as a graduate student, Kim served as a communication liaison between Korea Water Resources Corporation (K-Water) and Colorado State University at the seventh World Water Forum held in South Korea from April 12-17, 2015.
This year she is working on thesis research about South Korean social workers; how they communicate their emotions and how this influences their communication and organizational experiences. Through this research she hopes to encourage more open dialogue about emotions in organizations to ensure employees’ emotional well-being as well as acknowledging the importance of communication.
Min is also an undergraduate public speaking instructor at CSU. Teaching and public speaking are her life passions and she loves interacting with students on campus as well as immersing herself in various research that many seminal scholars have conducted.
Kaylie McMonagle – A Great Mind in Research
On November 11, 2015, second year graduate student Kalie McMonagle was awarded first place in the “Great Minds in Research” category at the 2015 Colorado State University Graduate Student Showcase for “Duct Taping Mental Health – Maladaptive Simulacrum in the ManTherapy Campaign.”
“Duct Taping Mental Health” is a rhetorical analysis of Colorado’s 2012 “ManTherapy” campaign, which was an attempt to reach the most suicidal of men. “The campaign told men that they couldn’t fix their mental health with duct tape and that grilling animal meat was just aromatherapy,” McMonagle wrote in her project abstract. She says the campaign failed to address the way in which creating a separate branding of therapy for men “exerted stigma, power, and control over the way that women, queer, and people of color experience mental health problems.”
The Great Minds in Research category included research, scholarship, and entrepreneurship from candidates in business, engineering, agriculture, liberal arts, health and human sciences, veterinary medicine, and natural resources.
“Over and over again the judges asked me, ‘But what data did you use?’” McMonagle says. “I didn’t input my findings into SPSS, collect survey data, or complete ethnographic interviews with guys who had visited the [web]site. My work performed a rhetorical analysis of the messages available to men within the campaign in order to discover how we’re constructing mental illness. I explained this to to individuals from the oncology to meteorology departments by saying, ‘I study how the way we talk about things impacts how we experience them.’ When I received the award, it spoke to me about the relevance this had for individuals across disciplines. Communication matters.”
Scholarship Honorees
Ryan Allred and Seth Willden are this year’s winners of the prestigious Gordon F. Hostettler Memorial Scholarship. This scholarship is bestowed upon two second-year graduate students of outstanding scholarly achievement as voted by the faculty.
Hailey Otis, first-year graduate student, was selected as this year’s academic recipient of the Bill and Linda Haskins Scholarship for Graduate Teaching Assistantships.
Learn more about graduate scholarship recipients here.