The UCI Ethics Center selects a few promising students for a mentoring program each summer. Open to qualified college, graduate, and high school students worldwide.

As a student participant, I discussed generational trauma, victimhood, perpetration, and collective memory. Together, we asked how violence was remembered and processed in a community and examined the politics surrounding and informing those processes. The module explored broad theories while developing writing skills, critical thinking, and engagement with texts in context. The topic exposed me to essential research skills such as hypothesis development, synthesizing theories, and putting ideas into dialogue. We also discussed inference, research design, and the strengths of various methodologies in answering our big idea questions. The readings were interdisciplinary across the social sciences and humanities, providing a sampling of how various traditions research, define, and unpack these questions. Most importantly, we looked not just at the nature of violence, or violence as a “natural” phenomenon, but at the actual impacts of conflict on people’s lives and the long-term legacies they carry forward.