Sidney Lyytikainen ’22

Why UNE

One thing I really appreciate [UNE] is just how close and personal the professors are.

I love how small and intimate the classes are. At a bigger school, it's a lot harder when you have four or five hundred people in one class. It's very difficult to get in touch with your professors, and a lot of times they don't even know your name.

Having these real relationships with these professors is awesome. I think that holds true for pretty much all the programs here and that's really valuable in order to get letters of recommendations for your future.

Experiential learning

I've been a part of [one of my professor’s] research labs since my sophomore year. I've been a volunteer research assistant as well as an intern.

We've been analyzing humpback whale song acoustics as well as song delineation. I've been picking apart the different bands and tracking how many bands are in each song played and how often those songs are played. I also did some sifting between different recordings, seeing which ones are quality, which ones are not, which ones we can carry on through research, which ones we can just discard.

I co-authored our abstract on anthropogenic noise impacting the humpback whale song. And when it got published, it got accepted to the Acoustical Society of America conference in Seattle. So I got to travel with my professor and accompany her on her presentation of the abstracts. That was awesome.