Alexandria Schweikle

An article that the College of DuPage published about me for achieving high academic success in accounting, participating in the honors program and the job shadow program, and for being an Outstanding Graduate finalist.

An article published by the College of DuPage in May of 2021 that affirms my status as a Presidential Scholar, honors transfer scholarship recipient, Honors Council of the Illinois Region Student Symposium presenter, and the only student from the college that was selected to present my research at the Upper Midwest Honors Conference in 2021.

For my project, I conducted research to investigate how the change in presidency from Hugo Chávez to Nicolás Maduro affected the current economic crisis in Venezuela. My major goals were to build on the skills I have learned in my past honors classes and to examine the economic and political actions that have led to the worsening economic situation in Venezuela. To complete my project, I first formulated a research question about my desired topic that was broad enough to find articles but narrow enough so that there were only a few articles containing the information I wanted. Next, I found four academic, peer-reviewed articles written in both Spanish and English. After that, I read each article thoroughly and completed a document called a Learning Experience Organizer (LEO) for each one. LEOs have five sections: Credibility of Author/Authors, Summary of Text, Evaluation of Text, Reflection on Usefulness to your Research Question, and Extra Notes. Once I finished all four of my LEOs, I juxtaposed them to use only the most important and universal information from my articles. Finally, I put this information into a PowerPoint presentation that I presented in Spanish to my class. I drew two major conclusions from this project. My first major takeaway is that the change in presidency did not cause the economic crisis; it began with Chávez back in 2010. Additionally, I concluded that even though Maduro did not cause the economic crisis, he perpetuated it by not changing the policies that were in place.

This article mentions my experience in the College of DuPage's virtual Job Shadow Program.