From the field, the lab and the classroom

Field Voices has grown into a monthly newsletter from the MSU Department of Anthropology, and student stories still come first. This month, a doctoral student looks back on a summer at a federal identification lab in Omaha, a senior shares what she found in soil samples from the Ohio Valley and Michael Singler writes about the course that introduced him to the field. You'll also find new faculty research, three spring courses worth a look and what's on the calendar.

Michael Singler took his first anthropology course at a community college at the suggestion of someone he grew up with, who pointed out that he would "always talk about that stuff."

"I simply did not know it was an actual field of study until I took the course," he wrote.

As a fellow in the NUFP program, Singler researched the retention of Black students in tutoring centers at a predominantly white institution. He recorded data, interviewed professionals and presented his findings to a student affairs board. He credits anthropology with giving him the language to name what he had felt as a first-year student in those spaces.