Four Innovative Projects from the College of Arts & Sciences

JWU professors go beyond traditional lectures to get creative with assignments and bring their industry experience and connections into the classroom. This spring, College of Arts & Sciences students had some unique assignments. From investigating cold police cases to brand consulting for the YMCA, here’s just a small sample of what was accomplished during the spring semester. 

Criminal Justice Students Revisited Cold Cases to Find New Clues 

Criminal Justice faculty who have spent years in the field often bring real cases from their career into their courses. This is true for Instructor Joseph Richardson, who is also a private investigator. He comes with decades of experience working in multiple areas of public safety, including fire service, law enforcement, corrections and school psychology. As an active private investigator, he has also spent years working on cold cases. 

While investigating a local case in Rhode Island with police and the RI Attorney General Cold Case Unit, Richardson had an idea. “The case was consistently cold with no new leads on the horizon,” he says. “I discussed with Professors Paul Sylvestre and Barbara Frazier the possibility of an internship to try and develop new ideas with a new set of eyes. JWU Criminal Justice majors seemed to be the perfect fit.” 

The internship has become an annual offering for students. This spring, four students took on the role of investigators, reviewing several of Richardson’s cold cases. They analyzed police reports, interviews, evidence collection, phone records, autopsy reports and social media   

“The students identified possible new leads and additional witnesses, then compiled their findings and recommendations in a comprehensive report,” Richardson says. “They learned about the various investigative search tools available to locate witnesses and mastered basic criminal investigation skills and techniques, including report writing and interviewing.” 

Though they weren’t able to solve the cases, the new potential leads will be incredibly valuable to continuing the investigations. 

Pre-Calculus Lessons Got a Fun Twist with Bessie the Cow 

For those who don’t always enjoy math, pre-calculus can be a little overwhelming. That’s exactly why Assistant Professor Jerelyn Pimentel, Ph.D. introduced an adorable way for students to explore mathematical concepts: a series of assignments that involved caring for a fictional calf named Bessie.  

Over the course of three assignments, students applied core pre-calculus concepts to real-world problems in veterinary care, farm management and animal nutrition. With many of the students in the class being Animal Science majors, it was all the more relevant to their studies in other classes. But that was not the only inspiration for creating the project — Pimentel also grew on up a dairy farm herself and is very familiar with the day-to-day problems that can arise. 

Each project built on the last, starting with caring for a two-week old Bessie and treating her respiratory infection. This covered the key concepts of dosage functions, exponential decay (half-life), logarithmic equations and solution dilution that animal science professionals use every day. 

In the second project, a now six-month old Bessie needed help with some problems in her environment. Using different trigonometric functions, students had to calculate angles to solve problems related to accessing the farm’s hay loft storage, watering the pasture so Bessie had access to grass and making sure Bessie’s automatic feeder would drop the food into her trough properly. 

In the third and final assignment, Bessie was a fully grown dairy cow, and students were tasked with tracking and projecting the production of milk from Bessie and two other cows using matrix addition and multiplication. 

The entire project encouraged students to engage with a continuous narrative that mirrors real professional practice and authentic veterinary and agricultural problems. Students were required to reflect on each part of the project to connect mathematical skills to professional practice.   

Counseling Students Discussed First Responder Therapy with Panel of Firefighters 

Graduate students in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program met with a panel of five Cranston, Rhode Island, firefighters to learn more about the specialized field of first-responder counseling. The panel took place in Jennifer Weaver’s Advanced Career Counseling course, a class designed to explore career-related counseling practices and theories. Weaver, an adjunct faculty member and licensed mental health counselor, works closely with the Cranston Fire Department and others across Rhode Island for all of their mental health training. 

“I work with about 20 fire departments, and part of that is through immersion, says Weaver. “So, I'm at the station, going on ride-alongs, doing crisis debriefs, trainings and burns with them. I had some firefighters who I have worked closely enough with in Cranston that I was able to convince some of them to come talk to my graduate students.” 

The class asked the firefighters a variety of questions, such as what they look for in a therapist and what a therapist who wants to work with first responders should know about this unique population.  

“My hope is that when my students graduate from the program and go into counseling, they understand that not every patient is the same — not every population is the same,” Weaver explains. “I also want to expose them to patients and populations that they may not have even thought of working with. Rhode Island sometimes lacks in clinicians who truly specialize in first responders, so I want to increase my students’ awareness that it exists.” 

In addition to bringing firefighters to the class, Weaver also uses her counseling practice as an internship site for her students. They often attend the fire department trainings with her for real-world experience.  

Digital Marketing & Social Media Students Consulted for the YMCA 

The YMCA is one of the world’s largest nonprofit organizations, and they also became the client for Digital Marketing & Social Media students in their senior capstone course this spring. 

“Our goal was to help the YMCA develop stronger brand strategies to make their social media presence more effective and cohesive,” says Jordan Millette ’26. “Throughout the project, we created social media mockups, strategy recommendations, best practices and short-form video content that we captured during our site visit to the Kent County YMCA.” 

Acting as an “agency,” student teams spent the semester collaborating closely on creating recommendations and deliverables for the YMCA's Greater Providence branches. “One of the biggest opportunities we identified was that the YMCA was not consistently implementing a unified social strategy across branches,” Millette shares. “I used both my classroom knowledge and professional experience as the social media student assistant at JWU to help develop a strategy that was realistic, easy to follow and adaptable for the different YMCA locations.” 

Working with such a large organization comprised of so many different branches presented an interesting challenge in how to manage multiple social media accounts that maintained a cohesive brand experience. But this proved to be an excellent learning experience for Millette and the rest of the students in the course. 

“This project taught me the importance of creating strategies that are not only creative, but also practical and sustainable for a team to implement long-term,” Millette says. “It was rewarding to work with a real client and see how the skills I developed at JWU could make a meaningful impact.” 

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