The best part of the job is watching a student's question become research.

Well... every mentor remembers their first. Jasmine Tamang was the first student I mentored through the SURF program, and she set a high bar for everyone who follows. An international student from Kathmandu, Nepal, she arrived with something you cannot teach — a question she could not stop asking — and the willingness to chase it into the field. She is now a student in a program I direct on the Brooklyn campus, which means I get the rare pleasure of watching a researcher I mentored keep growing.

What made Jasmine a joy to mentor was not that she needed less guidance, but that she used it so well. Give her a theoretical frame and she'd return with three field observations that complicated it. To the extent that mentorship is the art of staying out of a good student's way while keeping them honest, Jasmine made the job easy.

Jasmine's SURF 2025 project began with a deceptively simple question: what makes a place sacred to someone, even when nothing marks it as such — and does that bond shape how fiercely they protect it? She had felt the answer before she could name it. In 2023, volunteering on a reforestation program in Nepal's Annapurna Conservation Area, she watched villagers relate to land as something they were responsible to, not merely something they used. Later, in the forest of Shingla in the Ruby Valley, she found a different kind of conservation altogether — certain trees left untouched with no fences and no rules, protected by belief and memory rather than policy.

The startling move in her thinking was to ask whether that reverence really lived only in remote, traditional places. Researching urban green space for a class, she found Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of Manhattan — home to New York City's last natural salt marsh and to deep Lenape history — and felt the same quiet bond she'd felt in the Himalayas. Her project turns the usual conservation question on its head: rather than starting with conservation and asking how to inspire care, it starts with care and asks how that feeling might already be conservation.

Theoretically, she grounded the work in place attachment — the multidimensional emotional, cognitive, and behavioral bond people form with meaningful places (Scannell & Gifford, 2010) — alongside research on urban parks as sites of memory and belonging (Low, Taplin, & Scheld, 2005), emotional geography (Anderson & Smith, 2001), and Indigenous, relational understandings of land as kin (Kimmerer, 2013; Whyte, 2018). Methodologically, she did what good field researchers do: she went and looked. Across a ten-week summer, she ran a survey, conducted interviews, and observed the park's quiet rituals firsthand.

Across the themes Jasmine measured, cultural-historical attachment rated highest: respondents valued Inwood Hill Park's Native American history and its deeper meaning, not just its lawns and trails. The single strongest item in the survey was telling — “Being in Inwood Hill Park helps me feel calm or less stressed” drew a mean of 4.47 on a five-point scale, with “I feel emotionally connected to Inwood Hill Park” close behind at 4.15. As Jasmine put it, the place is not merely functional; it is restorative, affective — somewhere people go to emotionally exhale.

Indeed, story mattered as much as scenery. Fifty-six of eighty respondents agreed or strongly agreed that knowing the land's Native American history shaped how they saw the park, and forty-nine of seventy-seven said the more they learned about its past, the more it came to matter. Places, her data suggest, become more meaningful precisely when their stories are understood — a finding with real stakes for how cities remember, and forget.

And then there was the woman Jasmine met on a park path who framed none of it through history or ecology. She framed it personally: the park was part of her life, part of who she had been across time. That single conversation captures the thesis better than any statistic, which is exactly the kind of thing a good researcher learns to notice.

People sometimes treat undergraduate research as a dress rehearsal — practice for the real thing later. I don't see it that way. Jasmine's project produced a genuine contribution: it took a feeling that rarely survives the trip into a policy memo — the quiet, emotional attachment people form with land — and made it visible, measurable, and worth protecting. That is real scholarship, done by an undergraduate, in a single summer.

Mentoring work like this is among the most meaningful things I do at St. Joseph's. The goal is never to produce a smaller version of my own research; it is to help a student trust that their lens, their questions, and their story belong in the conversation. Jasmine did the hard part. I just made sure the door was open. To future SURF students wondering whether their question is “academic enough” — Jasmine's answer, and mine, is the same: bring it, and let's find out.