Research Symposium Winners Announced

Students in design and public administration took top honors in the graduate student research symposium on March 18 at the McKimmon Center.

Alberto Rigau, a graduate student in graphic design, took first place. He says his study, “attempts to describe the consumer relationship to the credit card in its broader context in this financial landscape – in its ecology – to design a product to fit its content. The study evaluates some of the ways in which design can address consumption induced behaviors and proposes tools to help consumers manage, control and personalize fiscal activities.”

Roxana Toma, who is working on her Ph.D. in public administration, took second place. She says her project, “investigates perceptions of corruption in the Romanian civil service and the factors that facilitate these perceptions.” And, she notes, “While most of the literature treats administrative corruption as a principal-agent problem between the state and government employees, this study employs social capital theory in the context of cultural factors that exist in post-communist states and are associated with dysfunctional social capital, of which administrative corruption is a type.”