Name: Elyse Cianfarano
Class year: 2015
Hometown: Fulton, NY
Major: Sociology
Minor: Creative Writing
Campus Activities: Leader of the Disaster Response Team, Writer for the Maroon News, Gamma Phi Beta
As a senior AMS Scholar, Elyse Cainfarano ’15 has established herself on campus as an active and socially-conscious member of the Colgate Community. Her AMS research topic, inspired by her interest in documentary filmmaking, focused initially on postindustrial cities and postindustrial value systems. However, over the course of her process of interviewing, her inquiries transitioned into an exploration of “how people in our age bracket decide what’s important to them,” as well as “how people like you and I balance caring about the bigger picture, and also caring about making our own paths.”
In search of answers to these questions, Elyse traveled to Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, interviewing people and filming those interviews, asking questions about the background of the people she met. She focused on uncovering what matters most to the young people she encountered, and often befriended. “Think globally, act locally came up a lot,” Elyse observed. “I think that a lot of times the bigger issues that we are all dealing with can really bog a person down. But many of the people I spoke with also touched upon the concept of taking action within your means as a valid way of dealing with those bigger issues.”
Elyse is now writing a senior thesis in sociology, which has stemmed in part from her AMS project. She is concerned with “the relationship between individual values, and the impressions of individuals.” Elyse described her thesis as an opportunity to contribute in some way to the Colgate community. Therefore, she targeted her research on the idea of a typical Colgate student.
This focus stems in part from her personal experiences on campus, observing whether or not individual people perceive their own identities as a part of the larger Colgate identity, and the reasons behind those perceptions. Elyse has a theory, that Colgate students may have an idea of the typical Colgate student, “when in reality there is a lot more variety than we all believe.”
Elyse described how her experiences on campus have informed her perspective on all that Colgate has to offer. She spoke about how, as a senior, she has become “more confident in things that mattered” to her, and was able to find people who shared the values she found important. “I think that there are a lot of people who don’t know initially how to navigate Colgate, and through my own experiences I have seen that the Colgate community has so much potential. Colgate has given me a great college experience, and I want to help other people have the same great experience that I have.”
By Jessica Spero Li ‘15