The 2026 SOCKS undergraduate summer intern cohort concluded their program with an exciting symposium sharing their research projects on July 23 and 24, 2026 on the University of Vermont (UVM) campus. Each of the eleven undergraduate interns presented their summer research to peers, faculty advisors, and staff over the two-day event.
Undergraduate interns arrived on UVM's campus on May 25th. The symposium represented the culmination of their summer research, providing each intern the experience of presenting their scientific findings to peers and fielding robust questions from the audience. The internship period culminates on July 31st. This year, a special opportunity was offered to attend the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science in Burlington, Vermont.
Each undergraduate intern worked with a SOCKS faculty mentor during the summer, developing a project of their choosing. This year's topics included:
- Rural–Urban Differences in Student Journalism Performance Metrics, Kallen Zhou
- Can College Newspapers Save the Day? A Topic Model Analysis of Critical Information and Community Cohesion, Bella Olinger
- Idioms are a Hard Nut to Crack: An Evaluation of NMT and LLM Performance in Idiom Translation, Simone Carmody
- Mental Health Linguistic Context Trends, Iris Buckley
- Are You Tú, Usted, or Vos: Geographic Bias in Second-Person Pronoun Translation, Elena Gibbons
- Digital Natives: Virality, Identity, and Reporting of Environmental Issues, Nathan Klonel
- Connectional Silence in Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy, Victoria Trainor
- Identifying Levels of Indigenous Inclusion in Environmental Policy Documents Through Machine Learning Classification, Adele Ramirez
- Estimating the Impact of Ambiguity on Contextual Word Embedding Trajectory, Grayson Storer
- The Social Impact of Stories, Frank Gallo
- Keyword Analysis on the Prominence of Wall Street Conservation through UN Conventions on Biological Diversity, Snow Boyd-Vigil