One of the most important lessons Jesse Saffeir ’20 of Pownal, Maine, has learned at �ֲ���ý is the importance of applying what she learns in class to her own life in the world.

“What impact do we have on other people, and how can we move through spaces in ways that make people feel comfortable and included?” she says.

An environmental studies major, Saffeir began to think about how she moves through one type of space in particular: Maine’s power line corridors. The corridors, cut through fields and forests to make way for tall towers and wires, are juxtapositions of what we think of as manmade and natural — if we think about power lines at all.

“We all, for the most part, rely on electricity to live, and we never really encounter the spaces where that energy is produced and transported,” Saffeir says.

Video by Theophil Syslo.

So last summer, Saffeir walked along the corridors, funded by a �ֲ���ý Otis Fellowship, which supports students investigating relationships between humans and nature. She defined the experience more as bushwhacking than hiking — since there are no trails, she had to make her own maps and plan where to get her food.

“I think we often forget just how much we rely on the spaces around us for our well-being and our sanity,” she says.

Saffeir wrote a poem each day as she walked, later collecting them into a book called Transmission: Poems from Maine’s Powerline Corridors.

Jesse Bull Saffeir ’20 of Pownal, Maine, displays her book of original poetry about Maine’s power line corridors, written during an Otis Fellowship sojourn. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Walking the lines, Saffeir says, has reinforced and given deeper meaning to what she has learned in her classes: that the environment isn’t just the wilderness, that there’s no clear binary between “human” and “nature.”

“I want to think a little bit broadly about our environments as being the places where we live, where we work, where we play, and also the environments that we rely on but don’t really spent a lot of time in,” she says.

“Being able to apply the things that we’re learning about in a very direct way to our own lives is so important to just becoming humans in this world.”

Here is one of the poems from��Transmission:

“T�����Բ������������Dz�”

I step into the lake to fill
an empty jug with cool clear water.
I cannot trust my senses
so I heat it to a boil.

I am learning to shelter
my body
to only drink upstream
of the runoff —

pass by the green water
the brown water
the turquoise water pooling
near the mines

sooner or later everyone
gets thirsty

the world is not a disease
that I know of.
it is an inheritance beyond
my wildest dreams.

at night the space between my eyes crawls
with deer ticks, vectors that will burrow
their bodies into me transmitting
a fear I cannot see.

I walk along transmission
lines. the air grows charged
condenses to a static spark
each time I touch a finger to metal

and what that spark contains
has travelled a long way to get here
and will keep traveling
long after it passes

Here’s what it is like to spend the summer on a �ֲ���ý-funded project to record oral histories of the fishing community on Grand Manan in New Brunswick, Canada.

In the waters off Grand Manan Island, Kate McNally ’17 bands lobsters on the fishing boat “Island Bound”��in this photo taken by boat captain Russell Ingalls.

Name: Kate McNally ’17

Hometown: Deep River, Conn.

Major: Anthropology

Internship Sponsor: Otis Fellowship, providing grants of up to $6,000 for self-designed, innovative, and imaginative summer projects that address a student’s personal concern or interest in the natural world. In the fall, each fellow makes a public presentation to the campus community about the experience.

1. What was your project?

On the island of Grand Manan, in New Brunswick, I recorded oral histories of a fishing community that is in a state of cultural and economic flux.

The recordings of those interviews will contribute to community memory archived in the Grand Manan Museum and will form the basis for my own writing, in which I will reflect upon Grand Manan and its connection with the ocean.

2. Where did you live?

I lived and worked at Swallowtail Lighthouse. I also joined a lobster boat, which meant waking up very early to band lobsters

“On Grand Manan, I was everybody’s student.”

I did lighthouse repair and helped dulsers, people who gather dulse, a kind of seaweed, in the intertidal zone.

3. What have you learned?

First, you can do a lot when you put your mind to it. Second, strangers can be very kind, and quickly are strangers no longer — two very good things to learn if you hope to be a citizen of the world!

4. How did you use your anthropology major in this project?

In anthropology, you gain understanding of a place and a culture by finding people who can teach you about their lives and their perspectives.

Kate McNally ’17 photographed Bowlin Gaskill, a lifelong resident of the village of North Head on Grand Manan, as he participated in an oral history.

I find it inspiring to have teachers from every conceivable walk of life.

And on Grand Manan, I was everybody’s student.

I’ve also done biology coursework, so I was able to use my knowledge of the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy ecosystem to ask the question as an anthropologist: “What does this mean to the people who live here?

5. During this project, how did you manage your own privilege as someone who can enter and leave this community at will?

I researched the history and culture of Grand Manan before my arrival, but that told me nothing about the lives of people living there now.��I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t romantic, presumptive, insensitive, or ill-informed — but I simultaneously feared that all those words described me precisely.

Like many small, beautiful communities, Grand Manan is an incredibly tight year-round community and a tourist destination, too, so I was aware that I was treading an awkward line between the community and the tourists.

“Good things will happen that you didn’t expect — let them take you places!”

I dealt with that challenge in two ways. First, in oral history interviews I tried to listen honestly and wholeheartedly. Second, when I share my experience with the wider �ֲ���ý community in the fall, I will emphasize the complexity of this place that tourists so often and simply call “whimsical.”

I think that these strategies are a reciprocal response to the respect and kindness that was paid to me here.

6. What would you tell a younger �ֲ���ý student about the process of applying for a fellowship like this?

First, plan ahead. I started working getting information about the Otis Fellowship over a year before I applied, and every conversation helped me write my application.

The crew of the fishing boat “Island Bound” go about their work. (Kate McNally ’17)

Talk to members of the committee and previous fellows. Learn about the history and culture of the place you hope to go to, and don’t be afraid to email strangers!

Be comfortable with changing your plans. My fellowship was ever-evolving, right up until the last week.

Good things will happen that you didn’t expect — let them take you places! Frustrating things will happen that you didn’t expect. Think on them long enough to learn and reflect, but keep going.

��

Kate Paladin ’15 has seen first-hand how the mismanagement of industrial pollutants can exacerbate issues around community health.

She points to the residents of Bayview Hunters Point, a neighborhood in San Francisco burdened by high crime rates, lack of medical care and an overdose of toxic waste.

San Francisco’s two major freeways, I-280 and U.S. 101, merge over Bayview Hunters Point. Residents struggle with the confluence of poverty, crime and disease exacerbated by harsh pollutants and industrial development. Photograph by Kate Paladin ’15.

With Greenaction, Paladin explored the effects of Bayview’s two Superfund sites, industrial facilities identified by the Environmental Protection Agency as potentially hazardous polluters. One is the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard; the other the Yosemite Creek sediment site.

Kate Paladin ’15 speaks about her experience as Otis Fellow during an EnviroLunch in New Commons on Jan. 17, 2013. Photograph by Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Picking up on a Greenaction community survey project, she noted that the reported rates of health problems among Bayview’s residents were well above the national averages.

Despite Bayview’s long history of pollutant-related health issues — particularly asbestos poisoning��— Paladin says the government and corporations have been slow to act. She believes that for Bayview and other impoverished communities, change will come when activists partner with an empowered citizenry.

The Otis Internship and Fellowship, funded in honor of Phil Otis ’95 by Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, is awarded to students of any major who demonstrate an interest in the ethical stewardship of the environment.

As an environmental studies major, Paladin says that her experience in Bayview has inspired her to “keep fighting for those whose voices tend to be ignored.”

Moving forward, Paladin is interested in sustainable development and reducing consumption.

“If we use less power, plastics and other ‘stuff’ in general, we will prevent future communities from becoming the next Bayview Hunters Point,” she says.

Anna Skarstad ’11 wants to be a farmer, but she’s not willing to hoe that row until she understands why. And she knows that farming is hard. “It’s deeper, too,” she says. “It’s a life.”

Which is the reason Skarstad lived amidst Norwegian farmers last summer, hoping to learn a little about their lives and more about her own. Supporting her travel was an Otis Fellowship, a competitive �ֲ���ý grant program designed to help students explore their relationship with nature.

Skarstad, of Pleasantville, N.Y., wasn’t raised to farm. Her father is a noted violinmaker, and her mother is a composer. In fact, her father’s Norwegian grandparents abandoned a family farm to come to the U.S.

But the urge to work the land apparently didn’t leave the Skarstad genome. When she was 10, Skarstad saw a documentary about Norwegian farming. She saw men, tethered by ropes, descending a Norwegian hillside to harvest hay. “I couldn’t believe that was a reality,” she says. “I wanted to go to Norway to see how the farmers survive.”

Through , Skarstad found Norwegian hosts Anders Braanaas and Hilde Buer. Each had been widowed several years ago, and, to skip a lot of details, “the two sheep farmers fell in love,” explains Skarstad. As the pair still maintain their separate farms, Skarstad helped them both during her visit, often driving a banged-up Czech car between the two farms.

At first, the experience felt helter-skelter: painting a barn here, putting up a fence there. “All the tasks seemed unrelated, like pods of work,” she says. Slowly, Skarstad saw unity in all the farm duties. “It all had so much of a point,” she says now. “We were working to keep pace with the earth.”

Anna Skarstad '11

Anna Skarstad ’11 wants to be a farmer, but she’s not willing to hoe that row until she understands why. And she knows that farming is hard. “It’s deeper, too,” she says. “It’s a life.”

Which is the reason Skarstad lived amidst Norwegian farmers last summer, hoping to learn a little about their lives and more about her own. Supporting her travel was an Otis Fellowship, a competitive �ֲ���ý grant program designed to help students explore their relationship with nature.

Skarstad, of Pleasantville, N.Y., wasn’t raised to farm. Her father is a noted violinmaker, and her mother is a composer. In fact, her father’s Norwegian grandparents abandoned a family farm to come to the U.S.

But the urge to work the land apparently didn’t leave the Skarstad genome. When she was 10, Skarstad saw a documentary about Norwegian farming. She saw men, tethered by ropes, descending a Norwegian hillside to harvest hay. “I couldn’t believe that was a reality,” she says. “I wanted to go to Norway to see how the farmers survive.”

Through , Skarstad found Norwegian hosts Anders Braanaas and Hilde Buer. Each had been widowed several years ago, and, to skip a lot of details, “the two sheep farmers fell in love,” explains Skarstad. As the pair��still maintain their��separate farms, Skarstad helped them both during her visit, often driving a banged-up Czech car between the two farms.

At first, the experience��felt helter-skelter: painting a barn here, putting up a fence there. “All the tasks seemed unrelated, like pods of work,” she says. Slowly, Skarstad saw unity in all the farm duties. “It all had so much of a point,” she says now. “We were working to keep pace with the earth.”

Skarstad worked for Norwegian sheep farmers Anders Braanaas and Hilde Buer, seen here walking hand in hand on an island adjacent to Grøneng Island, where Buer has her farm.

Last summer, Anna Skarstad ’11 lived amidst Norwegian farmers, hoping to learn a little about their lives and more about her own.

Skarstad, you see, wants to be a farmer, but she’s not willing to hoe that row until she understands why. A quote from Thoreau’s Walden is one of her favorites: “As long as possible live��free and uncommitted. It��makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”

Skarstad, of Pleasantville, N.Y., wasn’t raised to farm. Her father is a noted violinmaker, and her mother is a composer who also handles press coverage for the Tokyo Quartet. In fact, there’s a break with farming in the family tree: To immigrate to the U.S., her father’s Norwegian grandparents left a family farm.

But farming apparently didn’t leave the Skarstad genome. When she was 10, Skarstad saw a documentary about Norwegian farming. She saw men, tethered by ropes, descending a Norwegian hillside to harvest hay. “I couldn’t believe that was a reality,” she says.

Last spring, she won an Otis Fellowship, a �ֲ���ý grant program designed to help students explore their relationship with nature.
“I wanted to go to Norway to see how the farmers survive,” she says. “I knew that farming was much harder than I thought. It’s deeper, too — it’s a life.”

She found hosts in Norway through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms: Anders Braanaas, whose inland farm was in Førde, and Hilde Buer, whose coastal farm was on Grøneng Island. Each had been widowed several years ago, and, to skip a lot of details, “the two sheep farmers fell in love,” explains Skarstad.

She recalls a moment: the couple working together in a sheep pen filled with noise, manure, and confusion. “But Anders and Hilde were happy and laughing together. That’s where their relationship was: with the earth, nature, and especially their animals.”

Skarstad helped both farmers, often driving a banged-up Czech car between the two farms. At first, it all felt helter-skelter: painting a barn here, putting up a fence there. “All the tasks seemed unrelated, like pods of work,” she says. Slowly, she saw unity in all the farm duties. “It all had so much of a point,” she says now. “We were working to keep pace with the earth.”

By H. Jay Burns

With topics including the effects of ethnic Chinese migration on Tibet and the outlook for farming in Norway, �ֲ���ý College students who have conducted projects abroad supported by the college’s Otis and Phillips fellowships will discuss their findings in evening presentations throughout October.

These events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-753-6952.

Two Otis Fellows talk about their projects starting at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 6, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

A presentation by Ellen Sabina, a senior from Newcastle, is titled To Kill a Whale: Exploring the Ties that Bind the Faeroes to the Sea.

Sabina traveled to the Faeroe Islands (also spelled Faroe), in the North Atlantic, where she explored the relationship between the Faroese people and the sea. Isolated and fiercely proud of their heritage, the Faroese depend almost entirely on the sea, yet find this relationship changing dramatically in the face of globalization.

Anna Skarstad, a sophomore from Pleasantville, N.Y., offers a talk called Farming in the Western Fjords of Norway: An Endangered Life?

Skarstad visited two traditional sheep farms in Norway’s western fjord region, one farm located high in the mountains, the other on a remote, mostly abandoned island. Exploring how these farms manage to thrive despite nature’s extreme impacts, she questioned the strength and profundity of the farmers’ relationship with their land.

Also in Skelton Lounge, three Phillips Fellows will describe their projects starting at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 8.

Seniors Anne Sheldon of Brookline, Mass., and Ilana Adler-Bell of Canton, Conn., present Empowerment Through Education: 10,000 Girls Program, Kaolack, Senegal.

As participants in the 10,000 Girls Program in Kaolack, the pair worked with seventh- and eighth-grade girls, focusing on English-language practice and a mapping project with the goal of expanding opportunities and understandings of the power of women’s voice, place and actions in the local-global communities.

Also a senior, Corey Pattison of Dedham gives a talk called Toward Autonomy or Assimilation: Addressing Tibetan Sinicization in a Global Era. Specifically analyzing the socioeconomic implications of the recently constructed Qinghai-Lhasa railway, this presentation examines the increasingly marginal status held by Tibetans within their own society, a status directly resulting from widespread immigration ethnic Han Chinese into the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

Two more Phillips Fellows present their fellowship-funded projects starting at 7 p.m., Monday, Oct. 13, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

A senior from Katonah, N.Y., Jacob Lewis gives a talk titled The Power of Pilgrimage: Finding Meaning on El Camino de Santiago.

He examined why people undertake the grueling pilgrimage on this network of roads that since medieval times has brought travelers from all over Europe to the Christian shrine of Santiago de Compostela. Covering more than 500 miles across most of northern Spain, the Camino leaves a pilgrim plenty of time to ask, “Why do people still do this? And what am I doing here?”

Clyde Bango, a sophomore from Harare, Zimbabwe, gives a talk titled Preserving Art and Culture at Taller Portobelo. Bango undertook a residency at the Spelman College Summer Art Colony at the Panamanian arts workshop called Taller Portobelo.

He looked specifically at the Congo people in Panama, African descendants who are working to document their language, music and other cultural practices. This year, under Arturo Lindsay, a Panamanian artist and art professor at Spelman, students explored bio-safe ways of constructing sustainable architectural structures.

Lina Kong, a sophomore from Rose Hill, Mauritius, presents her Phillips-funded research in a talk titled Crosscultural Study of Mauritian and Chinese Cultures through the Hakka Linkage at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 29, in Skelton Lounge.

Kong wanted to learn more about the Hakka culture, a subgroup of China’s dominant Han people, and compare the influence of that culture in a city of the new China and in Mauritius, with the ultimate goal of better understanding her own identity as a Hakka. She wants to raise awareness about the danger of culture loss due to acculturalism, where new immigrants tend to integrate the surrounding culture as quickly as possible.

The Philip J. Otis Endowment was established in 1996 by Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele to memorialize their son, Philip, a member of the �ֲ���ý graduating class of 1995, who died while trying to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier. The purpose of the program is to encourage among �ֲ���ý students the same concern for nature that Otis demonstrated. The student projects selected for this endowment are generally concerned with the relationship between humans and the environment.

The Phillips Student Fellowships were begun in 1999 by Charles F. Phillips, the fourth president of �ֲ���ý, and his wife Evelyn Minard Phillips, with a $9 million endowment gift. These fellowships are granted to students who create exceptionally good international or cross-cultural projects that focus on research, service-learning or career exploration.

Three students have received Philip J. Otis Fellowships to support research into the relationships among individuals, societies and nature.

Six have been awarded Phillips Student Fellowships, providing funding for summer projects involving meaningful immersion in different cultures.

The 2005 Otis recipients are:

Lindsy Blazej, a junior from Dixmont, Maine. She will go to Europe to investigate “ecovillages,” settlements designed to support a full range of human activities with the least impact on the natural environment.

Carlos Challen Willemsen, a sophomore from Guatemala City, Guatemala. He will travel to the Peruvian Andes to visit the native Quechua people and study their relationships to the plant life around them and their traditional uses of plants as medicine and food.

Andrea Wolf, a junior from Nashville, Tenn. She will visit the Central Andes to study the traditional weavings of the Aymara indigenous group, examining how woven textiles symbolize Aymara cosmology and express the wider relationship of communities with the environment.

The 2005 Phillips recipients are:

Ainur Begim, a sophomore from Aktobe City, Kazakhstan, who will visit Britain and Greece to research the Panathenaic Festival, the most important religious festival in ancient Athens.

Jacob Bluestone, a sophomore from Huntington, N.Y. In Bolivia, he will teach and work with disadvantaged children, and he hopes to supply his students with disposable cameras to record life in their neighborhoods.

Arda Gucler, a sophomore from Istanbul, Turkey, who will investigate aspects of the World War I battle of Gallipoli through interviews with the families of Gallipoli veterans in Australia and New Zealand.

Tyler Paul, a junior from Great Falls, Mont. Paul will travel to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to study the economic progress and national identity of these former Soviet republics.

Vanni Thach, a junior from Camden, N.J. She will go to Cambodia to explore her personal heritage and the history of Cambodia, especially its recent past and legacy of genocide.

Chelsea Tryder, a junior from Fryeburg, Maine. She will spend the summer at an orphanage for girls in Santiago, Chile, assisting with the day-to-day activities of the orphanage, teaching dance to the girls and working with them to create a mural.

Established in 1996 by Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele, the Philip J. Otis Endowment commemorates their son, Philip, a member of the �ֲ���ý class of 1995. A park ranger, Otis died attempting to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier.

Otis was deeply concerned with nurturing a sense of responsibility for the natural environment. The Otis Endowment sponsors opportunities for study, exploration and reflection by students, faculty and other members of the �ֲ���ý community. Each year a small number of students are selected as Otis Fellows to receive grants between $2,000 and $5,000 to support off-campus projects that explore an environmental and/or eco-spiritual topic.

Phillips Student Fellowships support students who design exceptional international or cross-cultural projects focusing on research, service-learning, career exploration or a combination of the three. The Phillips Student Fellowships, Phillips Faculty Fellowships and Phillips Professorships at �ֲ���ý are part of the Phillips Endowment Program, an initiative of awards, honors and opportunities funded by a $9 million endowment bequest made to the college in 1999 by Charles F. Phillips, fourth president of �ֲ���ý, and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips.

The 2005 Otis recipients are Lindsy Blazej, a junior from Dixmont, Maine, who will investigate “ecovillages” in Europe; Carlos Challen Willemsen, a sophomore from Guatemala City, who will research traditional uses of plants by indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes; and Andrea Wolf, a junior from Nashville, who will examine the cultural significance of textiles made by the Aymara people of the Central Andes.

Blazej’s project is titled Searching for Sustainability: An Exploration of European Ecovillages. are settlements designed to support a full range of human activities with the least impact on the natural environment. Blazej will stay at six of these intentional communities throughout Europe to explore what makes them sustainable (or not), what motivates their inhabitants and how different cultures have adapted the concept of sustainability. Finally, she will evaluate how effectively these villages serve as a model for global sustainability.

Titled Quechua Ethnobotany in the Peruvian Andes, Willemsen’s project will take him to Cuzco, in the Peruvian Andes. There he will visit villages of the native Quechua people and conduct ethnobotanical observations, studying their relationships to the plant life around them and their traditional uses of plants as medicine and food.

For a project called Aymara Culture: Textiles and the Environment, Wolf will travel in the vast, high Central Andean plateau called the “altiplano.” She will use interviews, photography and observation to study the traditional weavings of the Aymara indigenous group. Wolf will examine how woven textiles symbolize Andean cosmology and express the wider relationship of communities with the environment; current changes in Aymara culture; and the impacts of tourism and globalization on textile design and production.

Established in 1996 by Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele, the Philip J. Otis Endowment commemorates their son, Philip, a member of the �ֲ���ý class of 1995. A park ranger, Otis died attempting to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier.

Otis was deeply concerned with nurturing a sense of responsibility for the natural environment. The Otis Endowment sponsors opportunities for study, exploration and reflection by students, faculty and other members of the �ֲ���ý community. The endowment also supports an annual lectureship on environmental issues and the spiritual and moral dimensions of ecology.

Each year a small number of students, usually two to five, are selected as Otis Fellows to receive grants between $2,000 and $5,000 to support off-campus projects that explore an environmental and/or eco-spiritual topic. Otis projects typically involve substantial off-campus research or reflection, usually accomplished during the summer or a Short Term leave.

The five are Colin Hollister, a sophomore from Pittsfield, Mass.; Peter Keays, a sophomore from Madison, N.J.; Nicholas Martin, a junior economics major from Hopkinton, N.H.; Khoabane Phoofolo, a sophomore from Maseru, Lesotho; and Brian Wilmot, a junior political science major from Bellingham, Wash.

For their project “The Appalachian Trial and a Sense of Self,” Hollister and Keays will hike the entire Appalachian Trial to better understand why individuals become through-hikers and how the experience influences one’s sense of self and relationship with the natural world. Through interviews, photography and personal experiences, they will investigate the AT’s “through-hiking culture.”

Martin, for a project titled “Mining in Mongolia: How Do the Herders Fit In?”, will explore the effects of the Ivanhoe mines in Mongolia on the traditional nomadic people of the area around the mines currently under development. He will speak and interact with the herders to learn more about the place of Mongolian culture in a changing world.

For his project “Lesotho’s White Gold,” Phoofolo will take part in a grassroots project to bring water security and improved sanitation to Lesotho. He will also explore the human impact of four major dams constructed as one of Africa’s most ambitious engineering schemes, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project.

Wilmot’s project is titled “How Individuals, Governments and NGOs Balance Environmental Preservation and Economic Growth.” He will spend the summer in the region of Russia around Lake Baikal, an enormous freshwater lake of great environmental, economic and spiritual importance to Russians, Siberians and Mongolians.

Established in 1996 by Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele, the Philip J. Otis Endowment commemorates their son, Philip, a member of the �ֲ���ý class of 1995. A park ranger, Otis died attempting to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier.

Otis was deeply concerned with nurturing a sense of responsibility for the natural environment. The Otis Endowment sponsors opportunities for study, exploration and reflection by students, faculty and other members of the �ֲ���ý community. The endowment also supports an annual lectureship on environmental issues and the spiritual and moral dimensions of ecology.

Each year a small number of students, usually two to five, are selected as Otis Fellows to receive grants between $2,000 and $5,000 to support off-campus projects that explore an environmental and/or eco-spiritual topic. Otis projects typically involve substantial off-campus research or reflection, usually accomplished during the summer or a Short Term leave.