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Dan Restucia



"Once I got into it, it ended up being one of the most fulfilling projects I did. We ended up throwing our whole selves into it - and Latin in general doesn't give you assignments you can throw yourself into. At the time I was doing the project, I felt that I was totally on top of the landmines issue." Dan Restucia, who has been teaching tennis through the "Tenacity" program this summer, will be a sophomore at Brown University in the fall, an "intended major in Applied Math and Urban Studies - maybe one, maybe both, "but I don't know- I haven't gotten that far yet." Before he did his Seevak project, he knew little about the issue of landmines, other than that it was in the press frequently. He feels that through the project, he gained an incredible amount of knowledge about his topic, about international affairs, and about the processes of research. ". . . most of the research I had done was dead issues - book-based - and this project was something unfolding as we did [it]. There was some book research, but a lot of it was keeping up with the newspapers - to make sure things didn't change on us . . . The way I was doing research was entirely new for me and much more relevant to how people really research [contemporary issues] . . . based on newspapers, interviews, and web research . . . beyond what you can find in the library. A lot of my comprehension of foreign affairs . . . the way I understand any sort of foreign relations debate - particularly arms control - is through landmines . . . so that when I hear about stuff, I relate it back and find out how it parallels." He also gained a new perspective on who the people are who make a difference ". . . one of the key players lived down the street from me, and I went down the street and interviewed her." The impact of such individuals changed how he thought about activism . . . "you see what a relatively small group of people did to make a huge difference . . . maybe a dozen groups put the whole campaign together. "