By: Andrew Coen
When Anastasia's sister, a sixth-grader at Woodmere Middle School, expressed her concern about things being said about her at school, Anastasia decided to attack the problem and investigate whether teachers were as aware of the different forms of bullying as their students.
The Hewlett High School senior was rewarded for her hours of research on the subject of bullying by being named a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search competition, considered the nation's most prestigious high school science contest. Hewlett High produced three of the six Intel semifinalists from the Five Towns. Two of Milgramm's classmates, Adam Dix and Jennifer Cohen, were also among the 300 honorees nationwide.
The other Five Towns students honored by Intel were Shara Yurkiewicz and Sarah Mallik, from Lawrence High, and Michael Shapiro, from the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway (HAFTR) High School in Cedarhurst.
Among the results of Milgramm's project, titled "An Explosion of the Many Faces of Bullying as Perceived by Students and Teachers," is the finding that teachers are much more likely than students to pick up on instances of bullying - particularly indirect forms, such as when a student leaves a lunchroom table when a certain fellow student tries to sit with him or her. Milgramm also discovered that teachers and students who were victims of bullying themselves were more likely to pick up on indirect forms of bullying.
Milgramm interviewed 90 teachers and 200 students from sixth through 10th grades in the Hewlett-Woodmere School District and surrounding areas, and also researched bullying awareness in European schools compared with the U.S. "The data collection was definitely the toughest part," she said.
Milgramm is hoping that her study will be used by schools to implement more training programs for teachers and students on bullying, such as the Brave program at Woodmere Middle School.
Dix's project, titled "My Country Tis of Me: Does Patriotism Have a Hidden Agenda?" examined how patriotism is interpreted differently by different people across the country. Dix said he got the idea from the 2004 presidential election, after controversial TV commercials aired last summer featuring former Swift boat veterans who served with Sen. John Kerry in Vietnam and were questioning his service and patriotism.
"It became clear to me during the election that people had different definitions of patriotism," said Dix. "It bothered me that people were using patriotism so loosely."
Taking a random survey of people in New York, Dix applied 16 probable determinants of patriotism, with his results showing that the strongest predictors of patriotism were political involvement, ethnic attachment and percentage of life lived in America. Region of residence, military service and gender ranked lowest for predicting one's level of patriotism, according to Dix's survey.
Cohen got the idea for her project, "Stepmothers Speak Out: A Cross-Ethnic Study of How Societal Myths Have Influenced Their Perceptions and Experiences," after reading a magazine article about the growing number of stepmothers that predicted that in three to five years there would be more step-families than traditional households. Cohen decided to see whether societal myths about stepmothers, such as the "wicked" stepmother, were true. She surveyed a diverse mix of 96 stepmothers to see if such myths had any effects on their relationships with their stepchildren. Cohen's research showed that minority stepmothers were less affected by societal myths than Caucasian stepmothers.
Cohen located stepmothers by contacting local counseling centers, churches and synagogues. "The topic was so interesting to me that I enjoyed every moment of research on it," said Cohen. "It was a great learning experience."
The students were assisted in their projects by the school's social science advisor, Pat Nardi. "I really enjoyed working with the students this year," said Nardi. "They were Renaissance men and women."
"The work [the students did] is at an extraordinary level of sophistication," said Hewlett High School Principal Dr. Joyce Bisso.
Lawrence semifinalists
Lawrence senior Mallik's project was titled "Beyond the 9/11 Question: Factors Influencing Religious and Social Conservatism Among Muslim-American Girls." It examined the attitudes of young Muslim women toward modern society in the U.S. just over three years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The subject appealed to Mallik, who is Muslim, since many people of her faith faced discrimination after the attacks. But she said she did not face much intolerance in the Five Towns.
"I didn't feel discriminated [against] as much as I thought I would, but I wanted to see what other Muslims went through after 9/11," Mallik said.
She read several articles and studies that have been conducted by Muslims all over the world, and handed out studies to people at local mosques as part of her research. She then examined Muslim girls' views on cultural issues such as veiling, arranged marriage and divorce. One of Mallik's findings was that in addition to her religious observance, a Muslim girl's family's education and wealth also have a major effect on her attitudes about social issues. Girls from families that were more educated and wealthy were more likely to be liberal on cultural topics.
Yurkiewicz, Mallik's senior classmate and longtime friend, explored ways to help cure Alzheimer's disease with her project, "Lovastatin as an Anti Inflammatory Agent Against Alzheimer's Disease." Alzheimer's struck Yurkiewicz's grandmother, who eventually died of the disease when Yurkiewicz was in eighth grade.
"I was able to see the destruction first-hand, and that was what got me interested in it," said Yurkiewicz.
She began her work on the project during her sophomore year at Lawrence by contacting scientists and conducting research at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. "The thing that is remarkable about their work is how personal it was to them," Lawrence Principal Geoffrey Touretz said of Mallik and Yurkiewicz. "These are issues that are really important to them."
"Our students have put a lot of effort into their work and they earned it," said Jennifer Lagnado, Lawrence's science advisor. "They are such great students and such great people."
HAFTR semifinalist
Shapiro got the motivation for his project, "Novel Polyacrylonitrile/Single Walled Carbon Nanotube Composite Film Synthesis and Infrared Spectroscopic Analysis," from last year's summer hit movie "Spiderman 2," since the superhero was able to create his own webs. It spurred the Cedarhurst resident to think about researching other theories for how polymers, substances made of repeating chemical units or molecules, could be pushed further.
Shapiro, who is an officer in HAFTR's science institute, conducted his research at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, sometimes putting in 12- to 16-hour days. "I would sleep in the lab and lock myself in there," he said.
Shapiro, whose first choice of colleges is the University of Pennsylvania, was so motivated by the project that he has applied for a special grant to continue the research in college. He is also applying to Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Cornell.
The semifinalists all win $1,000 college scholarships, with their schools also receiving $1,000 to be dedicated to math and science programs. On March 15, the 300 finalists will be narrowed to 40 finalists, who will compete in Washington, D.C., for the top awards, including a first-place prize of $100,000.
More than half of the 300 semifinalists of the contest, known as the "junior Nobel Prize," are from New York, and 83 are from Long Island schools. The contest, which was originally sponsored by the Westinghouse Corp., is now funded by Intel, a California-based maker of computer chips.
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