We’re back for the 2025–26 school year after taking a hiatus last spring. Today, Ocean shares his thesis experience with us which was focused on studying writers from the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, especially Édouard Glissant, and tells us why he thinks poetry and art is important.
Ace Lackey ’27, our new student producer, produced this episode for us. Welcome to the podcast Ace!
Reed community members can read Ocean’s thesis, “ rhizophora” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Juno Kerelis ’24 was the third student podcast producer on Burn Your Draft, and we’re so happy to get to speak to them on the other side of their time at Reed. If you’ve been listening since Juno hosted the podcast, you may have noticed little musical interludes during some of the episodes. Most of those were composed by Juno! Thank you for your work on the podcast, and for coming to talk to us about your year studying the Invisible Man.
Reed community members can read Juno’s thesis, “Yams Extending Infinitely Across Time: A Blues Philology of Ellison’s Invisible Man” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Josie wrote a pharmaceutical development thesis about looking for a new way to develop antibiotics. She also tells us about her interest in biology and chemistry and looking for bridges between the disciplines, and how chemistry can be used to do things like examine snake poop to learn about snake evolution.
Reed community members can read Josie’s thesis, “A Codrug for Resistant Coinfection: The First Clinically Relevant Antimicrobial-Antiviral Ionic Cocrystal” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Jordan spent a year writing an analytical thesis on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Jordan calls a “psychosexual gothic romance novel” in the introduction of her thesis. She also talks to Avis about the surprising amount of time she spent learning about British estate taxes while studying this novel.
Reed community members can read Jordan’s thesis, “Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: The Poetics, Places, and Gender Politics of the Lesbian Gothic” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Aroon tells us a bit about airline economics under potential carbon taxes, wanting to become an entrepreneur, and deciding to come to Reed because it seemed mysterious.
Reed community members can read Aroon’s thesis, “Airline Profitability & Fleet Strategies in a Carbon-Tax Environment” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Courtland talks about her thesis work on the federal law called the National American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the controversies surrounding it, and the new regulatory changes to the law that just went into effect in 2024. She also tells us how a high school teacher helped her find Reed.
Reed community members can read Courtland’s thesis, “Returning to Repatriation: An Examination of the Evolving Forces Behind the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
He Bai ’24 tells us about how she chose math and statistics as her fields at Reed, what drew her to Reed in the first place, and how the Squidward Constant came to be in her thesis.
Reed community members can read He’s thesis, “Extending Targeted Function Balancing to Models without Linear Representations,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Burn Your Draft is back from summer break! Check out this interview with Nina Gopaldas ’24, whose thesis involved translating poetry by a Russian refugee named Olga Skopichenko who lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines for a short time after World War II. Nina also tells Avis about her journey to Reed as a transfer student and about how she started college as an applied math major specializing in mathematical finance and became a comparative literature major at Reed.
Reed community members can read Nina’s thesis, “‘Take a Hundred Lines for the Memory of Those who Lived on Tubabao’: The Poetics of Exile and Displacement in Olga Skopichenko’s Verse,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
We’ve got one last interview for summer and then we take a break until school starts back up in the fall. Check in with Tina about corporate ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and unwinding with rock climbing.
Reed community members can read Tina’s thesis, “ESG Beyond Investing: Spillover Effects in Sustainability Signaling,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Do you want to listen to this episode? Or do you want to want to listen to this episode? Ashley tells us a bit about first and second order desires in her thesis studying moral responsibility. She also shares with us how she selected her major and shares some of her own struggles with mental illness in her time at Reed.
Reed community members can read Ashley’s thesis, “How Mental Illness Impacts Moral Responsibility,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.