FROM HOMER TO BIOETHICS: AN ARHU GRADUATE EXPLORES IT ALL

ARHU’s Teresa Rostkowski embraces the versatility of her degree by interning at the EPA.

ARHU’s Teresa Rostkowski embraces the versatility of her degree by interning at the EPA.

Classics department alumna Rostkowski’s interests can be described eclectic. In her last semester at Maryland, she read much of Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek and worked as an Undergraduate Technology Assistant to Dr. Lillian Doherty, composing online quizzes for first-year Greek students.
 Moving on, Rostkowski now has a summer internship at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where she works with the Program in Human Research Ethics. 
 “I spent the first three weeks doing research on the ethics of conducting exposure studies on human volunteers,” said Rostkowski. “From this research I compiled a list of ethical considerations for exposure studies that the Human Subjects Research Review Official in the program could use to write a paper on the issue.”
 The exposure studies Rostkowski analyzed for her ethical assessment involve exposing participants in controlled chambers to different air qualities, pesticides, and other environmental agents that the volunteers would normally be exposed to in their daily lives.
 Rostkowski now plans to use concepts from philosophy, science, anthropology, and classics to write a paper on determining human responsibilities toward the environment, combining information from both her degree and her internship."When it came to writing my own paper, my years as a humanities major gave me the inspiration to do a interdisciplinary paper, since ARHU encompasses so many aspects of the human experience," Rostkowski said. "Environmental studies are not usually labeled as under the Humanities, but I used my background to offer a different argument that is rarely studied."
 While attending UMD Rostkowski was president of the campus chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, the national Classics honor society, 2010-2011, and won the 2011 De Luca Award of the Italian Cultural Society of Washington, D.C. for excellence in the study of Latin and Greek. 
 In the fall, Rostkowski will be moving to Chicago to start work on an M.A. in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, expanding on her worldwise skills attained at ARHU.