The Beacon Option

On June 3, 2011, Lehigh Carbon Community College will be hosting Beacon 2011, a scholarly conference for community college students in the Northeast region, held every year on the first Friday in June. The conference invites students to enter papers that are evaluated by faculty members from a variety of participating community colleges, who then select three finalists for each of the approximately eighteen subject panels. The finalists present their papers at the Beacon Conference, where a winner is selected in each category and where each finalist is recognized for his or her accomplishment.
Research papers presented at recent Beacon Conferences include:

• PCB Pollution and the Hudson River
• Minimize Me: Eating Disorders as a Global Phenomenon
• The Koran and the Rights of Women
• Quality of Life in the Down Syndrome Community
• The American Chocolate Industry
• One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure: A Look at Compulsive Hoarding
• Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: A Study of Child Abuse
• Small-scale Tolerance is Anti-Hate: Violence Prevention in the Lesbian & Gay Community
• No Woman, No Cry - Pushing Past the Tears: The Experience of the Caribbean Immigrant Woman

The authors of these papers are all community college students. A number of Beacon students are enrolled in Honors Programs, but many are not.
If you are writing a research paper this semester and you feel you have a strong topic, consider developing it, in consultation with a mentor, for submission to the Beacon Conference. Speak with your instructor if you are interested, and he or she can advise you how to proceed. The criteria by which submissions will be evaluated are the quality and originality of research, written work, and oral presentation.