arts
Yang (Louis) Zheng
"Asians are good at math": An analysis of the correlation between stereotyping and academic performance. High academic performance is considered especially necessary for students in post-secondary education by researchers. Thus, understanding different influences upon academic performance would help students to study more efficiently. Current studies show that stereotyping, often based on gender and ethnicity (Hively & El-Alayli., 2014; Johnson-Ahorlu., 2013), is an unpreventable psychological phenomenon that affects people’s perceptions of others (Martiny., Roth., Jelenec., Steffens., & Croizet, 2012). Students who are stereotyped are likely to underachieve even if they have strong abilities (Appel & Kronberger, 2012). My research takes a unique perspective by analyzing the people who are stereotyping others. I assess how their stereotypical beliefs affect their choices of study partners which is an essential component of their academic studies. I used an inductive approach by conducting open-ended interviews with five UBC students. The results indicate that stereotyping impacts academic performances critically, since pre-judgements narrow the choices of study partners. However, it is relatively informative for students to choose with limited understanding of their partners such as gender and nationalities. My finding directs students to balance the impacts of stereotyping to achieve their academic goals more efficiently as well as raises the importance of stereotyping for future research studies. |
MANAGEMENT
Liming (Ann) Huang and Yaxin (Morgan) Wang
Short-term Stress Coping: The Preference of Social Support among Vantage College Students As previous research studies drive the attention to the importance of stress management for employees and students, this study explores stress coping strategy in workplace by incorporating concepts from psychology and sociology and analyzing patterns in seeking social support among Vantage College students. To further investigate international students’ preferences on social support from peers, family members, and instructors or professors during final exam period, 55 online surveys concerning with cultural and gender factors were collected along with 4 interviews with currently registered students. While most students show preference for informational support, which is normally provided by instructors and professors, they tend to reduce stress with emotional support from peers. Interestingly, the results imply that most students with Asian cultural background are more likely to follow norms and keep larger distance with authority, which might lead to ineffective stress management. Thinking in relation to Hofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions, the more effective means to cope with stress is to ensure approachable distance with others to access informational support whenever necessary. |
SCIENCEFiona Zhang and Beyond Zhang
The Effect of Key Length on the Difficulty of Public Key Decryption. In cryptography, public keys with more digits are harder to be decrypted than one-digit key. This study quantitatively compares the difficulty of decrypting one-bit public key and n-bits public keys, in terms of program run times. It is hypothesized that the difficulty level will increase exponentially as the key length increase. The results have shown a double exponential relationship between the number of bits and program run times, which were measured by the defined time primitive in Dr. Racket. |
ENGINEERING
At the 2nd annual Vantage One Capstone Conference students in the Vantage College engineering stream will showcase their final design projects which address the theme "Harnessing Clean and Renewable Energy". The theme was carefully chosen to encapsulate essential features of sustainable engineering practices, a topic which was broadly studied in two engineering design courses. In addition to the sustainability, engineering student teams successfully demonstrate their approach to the engineering design process from concept generation to final design, technical communication skills, project management and teamwork.
The project assignment is about designing a device that will utilise some form of energy source (e.g. solar, wind, hydro, biofuel or geothermal) and convert it into some form of useful work (mechanical thermal or electrical). In this process, design teams have to pay particular attention to 3 important features: 1) Detection and tracking of energy source; 2) Capturing energy; 3) Energy conversion into work.
Thirty two engineering students, divided in 7 design teams compete for the best design. Each team was provided with a budget of $300, and tools to build the device. In this process, they were given an opportunity to learn about and utilise various manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, laser cutting or CNC machining, and to use various hand tools.
All design teams will display their designs and demonstrate how they work in front of the audience and a judging panel on July 19, from 9:30 to 11:30 am.
The project assignment is about designing a device that will utilise some form of energy source (e.g. solar, wind, hydro, biofuel or geothermal) and convert it into some form of useful work (mechanical thermal or electrical). In this process, design teams have to pay particular attention to 3 important features: 1) Detection and tracking of energy source; 2) Capturing energy; 3) Energy conversion into work.
Thirty two engineering students, divided in 7 design teams compete for the best design. Each team was provided with a budget of $300, and tools to build the device. In this process, they were given an opportunity to learn about and utilise various manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, laser cutting or CNC machining, and to use various hand tools.
All design teams will display their designs and demonstrate how they work in front of the audience and a judging panel on July 19, from 9:30 to 11:30 am.