Some of USC’s most accomplished practitioners of curriculum diversity are awarded $10,000 scholarships for graduate study through the Renaissance Scholars program each May, but the university encourages all students to become masters of many disciplines – with or without the prize. Here’s a look at eight exceptionally well-rounded scholars.

Kristin Codiga ’08 knows about unrealized childhood fantasies. She used to imagine having a baby dinosaur as a pet, one that was a little bigger than a Labrador puppy, a fantastical creature that could walk on a leash, refrain from biting and preferably not bust up the house.

“Now you can actually have one life-sized!” she declares. The solution? Ceramics.

Upon arrival at USC, Codiga enrolled in a two-unit ceramics class, and ever since she’s been tapping into the realm of her memories to create whimsical figurative sculptures ranging from Mesozoic reptiles to a replica of her grandfather sitting in a beach chair.

“In life, all you really have are your memories to look back on, and you should really harp on the beautiful things in life – that whole idea of ‘don’t sweat the small stuff and enjoy those small moments,’” says Codiga, whose work is influenced by sculptor Robert Arneson and painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt.

Her artistic philosophy was put to the test when her independent study project – a two-foot-tall man holding a balloon – met an untimely demise the day before it was supposed to be fired in the kiln.

“Someone knocked it over, and it shattered into millions of pieces,” she recalls. “So I ended up taking it and making a memorial piece about it. I had my friend write up a newspaper article about the death of our dear friend Chip in the art room. And then I photo-documented the murder scene. I put caution tape everywhere, I did chalk outlines, and then I took him to the coroner, and I buried him in the sculpture yard. It actually came out as a pretty successful piece after the tragedy.”

If Codiga occasionally sounds like a saleswoman when she enthuses about her art, it may be because the Alameda, Calif., native has one foot firmly planted in the business world.

A double major in the USC Roski School of Fine Arts and the USC Marshall School of Business with a concentration in marketing, Codiga started a nonprofit called Give Teen, which feeds children through a click-to-donate Facebook application similar to The Hunger Site. Not the type to sit in an art studio glazing sculptures all day, she hopes to go into advertising account planning in the short term and eventually to open a gallery.

“What appeals to me is being able to use my practical side as well as my creative side,” she explains. “I’m a real idea generator.”

Last year, Nathan Go ’09, who was studying Mandarin in Beijing as part of his USC experience, boarded a bus in the Chinese capital. Ten hours later, he arrived in Inner Mongolia, where he saw snow for the first time and spent the night freezing in a traditional Mongol tent. Then he reboarded the bus for what ended up being a 20-hour return trip.

The traffic gridlock bothered Go, but it was his confused feelings about nationality that caused him some real soul-searching on the trip. “Even though I’m Chinese by ancestry, I sometimes felt out of place when I went there,” he says. “And what’s surprising is that everybody treats you as if you were Chinese. They expect you to speak Chinese. And it’s so funny, because if I was with other people who looked traditionally white with blond hair, and we went to the store, whenever the Chinese shopkeeper talked to them, he looked at me like I was some sort of a translator for them, even though some of my friends speak better Chinese than I do.”

Go, who grew up in Davao City in the Philippines, says that while he identifies himself as both Filipino and Chinese, there were plenty of people there who saw him only as Chinese. “In almost all of Asia, there’s a lot of discrimination and almost a hierarchy of sorts among races,” he says. “They have terms for Chinese people. Sometimes I got heckled when I was a kid.”

To this day, Go’s parents, who were also born and raised entirely in the Philippines, consider themselves more Chinese than Filipino. As a result of these varied roots, Go was raised speaking five languages – Taiwanese, Mandarin, English, Tagalog and his town’s local language of Cebuano or Visayan.

His lifelong struggles with ethnicity, nationality and identity inspired him to explore these issues by majoring in three disciplines at USC. He has a major in the screenwriting program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts together with majors in linguistics and political science from USC College.

His screenwriting thesis is a feature-length coming-of-age story about a Filipino-Chinese person growing up in the United States who is torn between his two heritages.

But there’s at least one way in which Go feels profoundly American. “As somebody from the Philippines, I never knew that you could major in screenwriting,” he says. “When I try to describe my major to my family or my friends back in the Philippines, they just don’t understand the concept of writing for movies. They know nobody who does that. But I knew that in the U.S. I had more latitude to do what I want to do.”

Two dollars and thirty-five cents didn’t feel like a big deal to Jennifer L. Bennett ’09 until she did an alternative spring break project at Johns Hopkins University. She worked in a community clinic in Baltimore, where she met a senior citizen with diabetes who altered her perspective on pocket change forever.

“The doctor asked her if she’d been checking her blood sugar,” Bennett recalls, “and she hadn’t, because she ran out of the strips for her monitor and she couldn’t afford to buy any more.

“So the doctor had to help her get a new machine so she could check that. The doctor also went out of her way and gave her the $2.35 co-pay just to make sure she would come in again.”

Helping other people is what makes Bennett tick. She came from Minneapolis to USC as a premed biology major in USC College, and after taking a freshman seminar on Los Angeles architecture, she declared a minor in that school. “It was just interesting to see how much the people have an impact on the architecture,” she says. “I liked the people part of it.”

Bennett has studied the ways in which architectural details such as an abundance of windows, private rooms and the use of soothing colors decrease patient recovery time in hospitals. While at Johns Hopkins, she noticed several of these principles incorporated into the recently remodeled Kimmel Cancer Center, which includes a large atrium/foyer done in comforting hues such as sage.

But Bennett – who also does research at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center and works at St. John’s Well Child Care Center through Trojan Health Volunteers – knows that the shade of the wall paint is a secondary concern when many Americans can’t access healthcare in the first place.

“I do want to work in an underserved community, having gone to school at USC where it’s a low-income neighborhood and realizing the need for healthcare,” she says.

“I grew up in a nice household, and so healthcare was never an issue. It’s just something I assumed that everyone got, because I went to the doctor when I was sick. And now, going to the clinics and seeing that, for a lot of these people, it’s even hard to pay the small co-pay to come see a doctor when they’re borderline desperate – that was a turning point for me in realizing that healthcare isn’t so easily accessible for everyone. I’ve realized that it’s more of a privilege in the United States than I thought it was.”

Bennett is headed to medical school. Although she will be immersed in science, she is grateful to have studied architecture.

“It’s interesting to be around a different student population and learn to think in other ways,” she says.

“Evaluating buildings is a separate skill from writing lab reports.”

R. Clement Darling ’09 is the kind of person who can find meaning in a hangnail. A double major in philosophy and cinematic arts critical studies, Darling used a cutaneous catastrophe to inspire his screenplay The Deadening, which was chosen as a thesis film his sophomore year and garnered him $12,000 in funding.

“One day when I was walking to school, there was just all this stuff going on around me that my friend was telling me was happening, and I was too preoccupied with looking at this cut on my finger to notice,” he recalls. One of the events he failed to notice, Darling admits, was a car crashing right next to him.

“That’s pretty much exactly what happens with the guy in my short film,” he says. “He’s too preoccupied with the cut on his finger and how to get to the hospital to notice that everyone around him is turning into a zombie. It’s a ‘write what you know’ type of thing.”

The philosophic cinema student from upstate New York had another run-in with the undead during a directed research class in philosophy in which he focused on zombie films. Though he loves screenwriting, he finds the occasional escape into the abstractions of philosophy to be a refreshing change of pace. “I can’t completely immerse myself in something,” he explains. “I need breathing room from time to time.”

Striking a balance between the two seems to be working well. He charmed the thesis jury again during his senior year and received an additional $12,000 in funding for Alien Conspiracy, a screenplay about a skeptical talk-show host who gets abducted by creatures from outer space. As with The Deadening, he found inspiration in a mundane incident from his own life – watching a television show about alien abductees with his roommate.

“I was just like, ‘This is completely insane, completely crazy.’ Until I actually become abducted by aliens,” he says, he will be locked into the skepticism his character feels at the beginning of his screenplay.

Although he doesn’t believe in aliens, Darling does believe that his philosophy major helps him maintain an open mind when surrounded by some of the naysayers of the film industry.

“If there’s one thing I notice in the film industry that I don’t really appreciate, it’s narrow-mindedness aboutwhat’s good and what’s bad and what’ll sell and what won’t sell,” he says. “To me, anything’s possible.” Darling says that openness to ideas is the biggest contribution his philosophy studies have brought to his cinema sensibilities.

And, he notes, in philosophy and in film, abstract concepts are brought to life.

When Magda Stawikowska ’09 was a little girl growing up in Szczecin, Poland, her parents had a knack for tracking down obscure records, cassettes and CDs. So when she moved to Livonia, Michigan – a place where she reports that “there are not a lot of necessarily great things to do when you’re 16, 17” – she got into the habit of attending live shows and concerts with her friends.

“I was always wondering, ‘How does the whole backstage area of it work? Behind the scenes, what goes on?’ ” she says.

But when Stawikowska wasn’t rocking out to her favorite band, Guns ‘N’ Roses, she was geeking out over her biology textbooks. She knew from a young age that she wanted to go to medical school, because of both a strong desire to help people and a fascination with how the human body works.

Upon her arrival at USC, she took advantage of the school’s focus on breadth with depth and declared a double major in USC College’s neuroscience department and the USC Thornton School’s music industry program. “The reason I chose USC was that they would let you major in two completely different areas, ”she says, adding that other schools won’t readily let you do two majors from different fields.

In one of her music industry classes, Stawikowska invoked her understanding of neuroscience to design her own music-related product line. “My project was on how to teach kids with learning disabilities how to play music, a better method for them,” she recalls. “It was music publishing, so there were printed products and instructional DVDs.”

Since then, she has interned at the independent record label Liquor and Poker Music and at the Internet music company Indie Media, and she may take some time off after graduation to explore other opportunities in the music industry.

But while Stawikowska is still the kid from Livonia who wants to know what’s going on backstage, she has every intention of going to medical school and eventually becoming a doctor.

“A lot of people would ask me, ‘How do you want to combine them?’ and I didn’t really care for these two majors to be combined,” she says. “I don’t really mind if I don’t use both of them in one career later on. They were just two interests that I had. I enjoy knowing about how things work.”

Imagine a white marble building flanked by looming Corinthian columns. Staircases ascend from tier to tier until they reach the roof, where life-sized sculptures of the goddess Victoria cast their stony gazes on a panoramic view of Rome. Beneath this classical edifice lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a nameless victim of World War I.

Visiting the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, the first president of a unified Italy, was a defining moment for Betsy D. Avila ‘09 of Glendale, Calif. “They spent years just carving out every little flower,” says Avila, who spent her sophomore year abroad in the small Tuscan town of Cortona, Italy.

“Every little part of the pillars, every statue was different. They were very serious about their work, and they were very precise about what they were doing and what they were doing it for. That’s what spoke to me.”

The prospect of art serving a political function intrigued her. “Every time I saw a building or a statue, I had to equate it to how this artist affected the politics of the time,” she recalls. Upon her return to USC, Avila, who was already enrolled in the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, immediately declared a second major in political science in USC College.

When the presidential primaries were in full swing, she decided to create some political art of her own. But instead of carving her statements in marble, she delved into a more contemporary medium, the political cartoon, while blogging for a writing class. She also brought her new consciousness to her primary medium, oil painting.

She worked on a small canvas with Barack Obama’s face on it, with text from one of his speeches coming out of his mouth, and notes that Obama and Joe Biden used art effectively during the election cycle.

A current project is an oil painting depicting a woman and a laptop – “a commentary on the romanticism found in modern times within the invention of technology,” she says.

Ever since her encounter with the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, Avila has attempted to make all of her art political. Still, she realizes that art and politics don’t have the same relationship in contemporary America that they did in the Rome of yesteryear. 

“It was a different time,” she says. “People couldn’t read, so it was important to make something visual.” Today, she adds, the visual wins out over what we read or listen to: “Our eyes, we tend to trust those more.”

Matthew D. Lee ’09, a double major in aerospace engineering and theatre, is one of the few living people who can claim to have constructed a Renaissance dome.

The edifice, which is titled Rivenscryr, or “broken reading,” exists entirely within the world of Linden Lab’s Second Life – an Internet-based platform that enables users to interact with each other as avatars in a metaverse.

Designed as Lee’s honors thesis for the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML), a research unit founded by USC School of Cinematic Arts dean Elizabeth Daley in conjunction with filmmaker George Lucas ’66, the dome functions as a visual interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Outside, an overgrown garden represents the initial, often baffling encounter with Shakespearean English. But upon entering the dome’s misty interior, visitors discover a descending staircase leading to a contemplative space with links to Lee’s essays about the play as seen through the eyes of the character Sycorax.

Those who linger might stumble upon a butterfly garden located on the roof of the structure, where they can enjoy Tempest-themed poetry fragments, which Lee programmed using algorithms and a bank of verses, as well as other interactive features.

Lee built his thesis project “out of a belief that theatre cannot be explored simply by text. For the average person to best understand a play, he or she has to watch it or at least experience it to some degree.”

Based on Lee’s work on Rivenscryr, Susan Metros, deputy chief information officer and associate vice provost for technology-enhanced learning, hired him to build USC’s Second Life island. He’s also done work in Second Life for the IML and the USC Annenberg School for Communication, and he’s designed and programmed sets for virtual productions of ACT UP’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Globe Theatre’s Hamlet.

Lee, who grew up in Cerritos, Calif., has always been drawn to other worlds.

“I like my ability to define my purpose in that world and to pretty much generate content without having to tie into someone else’s pre-set quest structure as in most MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games),” he says.

“For instance, if you’re dealing with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s a lot easier to create a dreamlike atmosphere in space. You can seat the audience in the trees or in the air and have them watch from all these different angles.

“It’s an interesting medium where I can create things that are not possible in real life, things that would defy physics.”

To take an online tour of Rivenscryr, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVOf1zeNPeg

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

Cristy Lytal is a freelance writer and aspiring Renaissance woman living in Los Angeles. This is her first feature for USC Trojan Family Magazine.