Month: December 2016

PwC Challenge tests students’ analytical thinking, decision making, collaboration

At Bryant, case competitions like the PwC Challenge, held on campus Oct. 26, require students to apply analytical thinking, fact-based decision making, and collaboration to actual business scenarios.

This year’s case competition, held on campus Oct. 26, concerned the illegal dumping of hazardous materials by a corporation and ways to restore the company’s public image after the news of environmental harm went public.

As part of the challenge, team members were required to work independently to review the business case, develop a solution, and create a presentation. Each team delivered a solution to a panel of high-level PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) professionals, who offered feedback after each presentation. Team success was measured using three criteria: critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills.

“Students gained valuable insight into our profession, our firm, and the issues faced by global business leaders,” says PwC Tax Partner and Bryant Trustee Bob Calabro ’88, who served as one of the judges.

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Mulcahy: Chemistry department, students to prosper from 1st NSF grant

Dr. Seann Mulcahy, associate professor of chemistry, takes an outside view when analyzing the value of his initial National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. 

The first faculty member in the Providence College Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry to earn an individual NSF grant, Mulcahy is thrilled by what the honor means to his department and the research students he mentors.

The $191,371 award from the NSF’s Chemical Synthesis Program will fund collaborative research on Mulcahy’s project, “RUI: Synthesis of Isomeric Carbolines by Tandem Palladium Catalysis.” The three-year grant, which runs through August 2019, is the most significant research award Mulcahy has received to date. It builds on previous awards from the National Institutes of Health’s Rhode Island IDeA Network for Excellence in Biomedical Research program, the American Chemical Society, and the Rhode Island Foundation.

“We are collaborative scientists in chemistry,” he said. “We necessarily involve undergraduates in our scholarship. It is important to provide funding for them to conduct research in our labs.” He emphasized that colleagues in his department “are passionate about what we do” and that awards like the NSF grant are integral to faculty research and undergraduate opportunities.

Mulcahy explained that the NSF’s focus is on “high-impact science” that carries broad applicability for other researchers, students, and for society. NSF grants provide “a training mechanism for students. Research fits into a larger set of goals. Liberal arts institutions like Providence College are positioned for that.”

Mulcahy’s project currently involves five students, who receive credit during the academic year. Funding also will cover research by two students each summer.

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The Big Picture

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Senior Suzanne Alward 17 CR uses a model to consider how best to present her work in a gallery setting.

As every RISD student knows, there’s a lot more to earning a degree in the arts than mastering technical skills and developing a strong aesthetic point of view. Ceramics majors and MFAs enrolled in a fall seminar co-taught by thriving Brooklyn-based sculptor Nicole Cherubini 93 CR and historian/curator/studio potter Sequoia Miller are developing strategies for cultivating ideas in the studio and presenting their work to the wider world.

The seminar has two principal goals, says Miller. The first is to teach students research methods and provide other tools for advancing their studio practice. The second is to build a greater awareness of the context in which artists operate – to consider ways of shaping the public’s experience of their work by writing a meaningful artist’s statement, for example, or thoughtfully presenting their work in a gallery setting.

“It’s challenging to translate abstract ideas into a known language without narrowing them down too much,” Cherubini explains. She organized field trips to NYC and Boston, where students toured clay-based exhibitions, garnered ideas and discussed real-world practices with gallerists and museum curators at the Museum of Art + Design in NYC and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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