Hiram students 'master' graduate interdisciplinary studies maze

The three adult learners did not know what to expect from Hiram College's new master's program or what was expected of them when they became the first Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) students. And neither, frankly, did those who would teach them, mentor them and become their intellectual guides and friends.

In the fall of 2004, Hiram's Center for Adult Studies was a grad school program with the intent of moving from concept to individual capstone projects in two years.

The faculty dubbed this the Guinea Pig Experiment, and these three students and their cohorts were the guinea pigs.

On the recent day when Karen Donley-Hayes of West Farmington, Karey Finn of Garrettsville, and Melinda Kapalin of Jefferson stood before a room filled with Hiram faculty, staff, family, friends and fellow master's students to present the capstone projects of their academic careers, Carol Donley reminded the three of them of their unique status.

Donley, the Herbert L. and Pauline Wentz Andrews Professor in Biomedical Humanities, co-director of the Center for Literature and Medicine and, not coincidentally, mother of Karen Donley-Hayes and advisor of Melinda Kapalin, had put together a summation presentation illustrated by – you guessed it – guinea pigs.

"The first graduate students," Donley pointed out, "were subjected to trials of overload, surprise, unpredictable change, fatigue, weird food, suspense, comedy, etcetera, without giving their informed consent, because no one was informed about how MAIS would evolve."

As it turned out, the guinea pigs survived – even prospered. The three will graduate during Hiram College’s 156th commencement at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 13, on the College Green. Others who started the program of alternate weekend classes with the three will take more time to complete their work.

"I feel I should write a book," Kapalin said of her MAIS experience.

Instead of "Tuesdays with Morrie," the bestselling memoir of Mitch Albom that detailed his visits to a former professor, Kapalin said she might title her book "Wednesdays with Carol." That's when she and Donley met each week to discuss the research that led to Kapalin's capstone paper: "Gifts of Grace from Terminally Ill Children: The benefits of children writing their own life stories."

Kapalin said she would sometimes become so engrossed in an aspect of the children's stories or in the supporting research material she uncovered that she would veer off on a tangent not germane to her hypothesis.

That's when Carol Donley would gently nudge Kapalin back on track, encouraging her to cut through the chaff to get to the intellectual kernels she sought.

"You are in good hands at Hiram," Kapalin said of Donley and the other faculty members who have been a part of the College's first graduate program.

The curricular breadth of the program appealed to the first MAIS students.

"I had been frustrated by other graduate program descriptions that limited what I could study," said Kapalin. "I wanted a program that would allow me to explore many different options for a future career."

When Hiram started the MAIS program, the College may not have known where this intellectual road would take faculty and students, said Jane Rose, dean of Hiram's Center for Adult Studies, but it did understand the starting point and the destination.

"We wanted to extend Hiram's exemplary undergraduate liberal arts curriculum," Rose said. "The MAIS degree allows students to study complex topics from multiple perspectives, which reflects the approach successful professionals adapt in business, healthcare and education."

The MAIS students addressed, usually in team-taught courses, such questions as: What is Normal? What is Knowledge? What is a Just War?

"I found something stimulating in every research project," Karey Finn said. "I have loved the idea of making different disciplines work together, especially if they had not done so before."

Finn, who works for Middlefield Bank in Mantua, explored in her capstone project "Veiling Skin: How the Veil Informs Personal, Social, and Biological Identity" at a time when western and other cultures find themselves in conflict around the world over many such distinctions.

The three MAIS graduates have had, as Karen Donley-Hayes puts it, the "opportunity to knock the cobwebs out of the gray matter" in specific areas of interest. For Donley-Hayes, who is a senior editor at Dermatology Times, the area was medical.

In examining "Eating Impulses as Understood by Bariatric Patients and Their Medical Providers," Donley-Hayes found that surgery to reduce the size of a person's stomach did not always address the emotional challenges of the change in eating habits and without that element sustaining the benefits of the surgery were not guaranteed.

"The newness of the program was a little anxiety provoking," Donley-Hayes said, "but the graduate office not only created a good, competitive program but also one that, I think, the established 'big-wig' programs may envy because of Hiram's ability to accommodate 'customization' by students.

"I wish the college had a Ph.D. in the same program."