Cultural and Social Cognitive Predictors of Academic Satisfaction in Southeast Asian American College Students

This study examined the predictive utility of Lent’s (2004) social cognitive model of well-being in the context of academic satisfaction with a sample of Southeast Asian American college students using a cross-sectional design. Path analysis was used to examine the role of perceived parental trauma, perceived parental acculturative stress, intergenerational family conflict, and social cognitive predictors to academic satisfaction. Participants were 111 Southeast Asian American and 111 East Asian American college students who completed online measures. Contrary to expectations, none of the contextual cultural variables were significant predictors of academic satisfaction. Also contrary to expectations, academic support and self-efficacy were not directly linked to academic satisfaction and outcome expectation was not linked to goal progress. Other social cognitive predictors were related directly and indirectly to academic satisfaction, consistent with prior research. Limitations and implications for future research and practice are addressed.

IRANIAN EMBASSY AND AYANDEH CULTURAL CENTER ( EMBASSY OF THE FUTURE)

This thesis began with the assertion that future embassies will differ significantly from past and current embassies. Embassy of the Future is a place where people of two (or more) countries come together to learn and share their ideologies, perspectives, dictions and ultimately their humanity. Unlike the traditional embassy model where the focus is on representing the foreign country’s political and legal standing, this thesis asserts that future embassies will focus on representing cultural exchanges while promoting economic and cultural cooperation. In this new embassy model political and security matters should not dominate the cultural and humanitarian matters. This thesis is exploring a proposal for the establishment of an Iranian Embassy in Washington D.C. The goal is to promote the Embassy of the Future concept through an attempt at utilizing an architectural structure to be the convening place for reconnecting and resolving conflicts between Iran and the U.S. It has been 36 years since both countries closed their embassies in one another’s countries.

Reclaiming the Fall Zone: Mediating Physical and Cultural Exchange in Richmond, VA

This thesis will address cultural and physical place reclamation, at the ambiguous intersection of ‘city’ and nature.’ By creating a juxtaposed sequence of multi-scalar interventions, which challenge the conventional boundaries of architecture, and landscape architecture; in order to make commonplace a new dynamic threshold condition in Richmond, Virginia. At its core, this thesis is an attempt at place-making on a site which has become ‘no place.’ This concept will be manifest via a landscape park on Mayo Island in Richmond, anchored by a community retreat center, and architectural follies along a constructed path. The interventions will coincide with value of place in historical Richmond: an integrated, socially desegregated waterfront hinge; a social nexus of inherent change, at the point which the river itself changes at the fall line.