Student Spotlight: Darryl Ricketts
Darryl Ricketts was on top of the world in 1999. With an associate’s degree in computer science, he was running a local computer store and had just opened South Bend’s first internet café with two other partners. That all changed when he was seriously injured in a car accident that left him in the hospital for two years and in rehab for an additional two years. He lost everything—business, home, life. He realized he was done with computers and it was time to find something new to do with his life. He came back to school. He chose IU South Bend because he knew he would get more attention from faculty and he found it easy to get around the campus. He majored in Psychology as a career change. And then it happened. In Spring 2007, he signed up for Jay VanderVeen’s course on forsensic anthropology and something clicked.
Since taking that first course, Ricketts’ life as an anthropologist has blossomed. In Summer 2007, he went with VanderVeen to the Dominican Republic for a field school. He returned to the Dominican in December 2007 to continue independent work on a project and was back there in 2008 working with the IU team recovering artifacts from the William Kidd vessel, Quedagh Merchant. In 2007-08 alone, he presented papers to the Indiana Academy of Science and the Butler Undergraduate Research conference, and gave a talk in the Dominican Republic. He received a SMART research grant in 2007 and a Summer Fellowship in 2008. In 2008, he also received the student excellence award for Anthropology. He has co-authored a paper on Taino pottery design with Jay VanderVeen and had his own work published in the Undergraduate Research Journal (URJ). For 2008-09, Darryl is the editor of the URJ as well as the student member of the SMART committee that awards funds to undergraduate students to support their research activities. He will graduate in May 2009 and plans to continue in a doctoral program in forensic anthropology.
