2025 Ford Scholars: Examining Everything from NBA Contracts to 16th-Century Spanish Texts

This year, 15 students and faculty members took part in the Ford Scholars Program, overseen by Associate Professor of Economics Alicia Atwood. Atwood, who also oversaw the program last year, said she has been consistently impressed with the rigorous scholarship that takes place every summer. “All of the students astound me with how fast they pick up the subject matter and how engaged they are,” she said. “It’s a different experience from being in class where everyone knows the outcome of the material that is studied. Ford Scholars learn that research is messy and requires figuring out how to overcome roadblocks. It’s a valuable skill for their post-Vassar lives.”

The Ford Scholars Program is currently supported by more than a dozen endowed funds. The students showcased their work at the annual Ford Scholars Symposium, held on September 17 in the Thompson Library.

Here is a look at two of this summer’s Ford Scholars projects.

The Oviedo Project: Translating a 500-year-old Text About Life in the Americas

Launched in 2019 by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Professor of Hispanic Studies on the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair, this ambitious project has involved translating more than 6,000 pages of text written by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557), commonly known as Oviedo, a Spanish soldier, historian, writer, botanist, and colonist. More than 200 Vassar students have taken part in the project, including five Ford Scholars. The first volume of the translated text will be published in time to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the completion of Oviedo’s work. The Spanish version of the text, acquired by Vassar’s Special Collections Library in 2019, had never been fully translated into English until Paravisini-Gebert undertook the project in collaboration with Michael Aronna, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies.

Oviedo arrived in the West Indies in 1492 with Christopher Columbus and his exploration party. In the four-volume text, La Natural Hystoria de las Indias, Oviedo describes the lives of the colonized people of the region and the flora and fauna he found on the islands. He introduced Europeans to the hammock, the pineapple, and tobacco that was grown there. The first volume was published in 1526, and the four volumes chronicle the history of the region from 1526 to 1558.

The Ford Scholar who took part in the project this year was Lilli Palmer ’27, a Latin American and Latinx Studies and Women, Feminist and Queer Studies double major from Falmouth, MA. Palmer said she learned about the project from Nicolas Vivalda, Associate Professor and Chair of Hispanic Studies, but was already familiar with several of the students involved in the project. “It’s been an amazing experience seeing all the work that went into it before me, and it’s great seeing [Paravisini-Gebert’s] excitement at finally getting the first volume published,” she said. “The best part of my project was getting to know Lisa.”

Palmer’s tasks this summer involved editing and annotating the first volume before it was sent to the publisher in its final version. “It’s been a challenging project because we are really working with three languages—16th-century Spanish, modern Spanish, and modern English,” she said.

Paravisini-Gebert said 16th-century Spanish was roughly equivalent to Shakespearean English, containing many idioms and phrases that are no longer common in modern Spanish. She said she is grateful to the Ford Scholars program for providing a scholar every summer to take part in the project.

Paravisini-Gebert said Oviedo arrived in the “New World” two years after Christopher Columbus and was later appointed Inspector of Mines by King Charles V of Spain, granting him the authority to ask questions of all the colonists and Indigenous people in the region. She said the project has been a labor of love for dozens of Vassar students. “Oviedo brought the first pineapple from the New World back to Spain, so that’s become a symbol of sorts for our project,” she said. “I’ve even had some T-shirts made up with a pineapple on them for the students who have worked on the project with me.”

Analyzing NBA Player Contracts

Every year, dozens of players in the National Basketball Association decide to opt out of their existing contracts in search of a better deal or a deal with a team more likely to win a championship. How often do such gambles pay off? That was the task Ford Scholar Aneesh Koppolu ’27 and Associate Professor of Economics Qi Ge set out to explore this summer.

“We planned to develop an overview of how successful these contract buyouts have been,” Ge explained, “but information on these outcomes is not available anywhere. There is data on every player’s salary, but no information on the outcome of player movement from team to team.”

Koppolu, a Mathematics and Statistics major from Franklin Park, NJ, said the Ford Scholar project caught his eye because he had played basketball and been an avid NBA fan for most of his life. He said he had done some statistical modeling while he was in high school, “so this project aligned well with my interests and background.”

Ge and Koppolu finished the Ford Scholars project with a comprehensive data set on players’ salaries and team-level transactions. Now that he and Ge have gathered and catalogued all of the data, Koppolu said he planned to continue the project in the fall, analyzing actual outcomes of the players’ gambles.

Koppolu said the project had taught him a lot about how to gather and process large volumes of data. “I’d only taken one economics class, but working with Professor Ge this summer has been a great experience, learning how to go after data from different perspectives. I plan to take another economics class in the fall to advance my knowledge.”

Koppolu said collaborating on a single project with a faculty mentor was an enlightening experience. “It was like I was at one end of a maze and he was at the other, and while he tried to guide me, I had to make a lot of decisions on my own because he couldn’t see what I was seeing.”

Koppolu said he did hit some significant roadblocks along the way. “There were times when I was doing some scraping (gathering information from websites) and had written about 500 lines of code before I realized it was the wrong data, and I had to do it all over again,” he said.

Ge said he was impressed with how quickly Koppolu learned to attack this puzzle and how well he was able to discuss his work. “Aneesh is particularly strong in communicating and explaining his work,” he said. “The information we were trying to gather doesn’t exist anywhere, so a lot of problem-solving and spotting of patterns was required.”

He said Koppolu had presented some initial findings of his research at a gathering of economics faculty about halfway through the summer. “He did an excellent job,” Ge said. “This was truly a collaborative effort and his liberal arts training helped him deal with the challenges he faced independently and iron out most issues himself. His communication skills will serve him well in his post-Vassar life.”