When University of Southern Maine junior Katie Zema showed up for her first training with Sexual Assault Response Services of Southern Maine, she figured the training would largely involve the ins and outs of working the phone lines. As a crisis and support line advocate, she knew that she would be on call for roughly four eight-hour shifts per month. What she didn’t yet know was the way in which this work would change her life.

At Sexual Assault Response Services, Katie began to understand the realities of the sex trafficking industry in southern Maine. Working the phones, she learned a lot about how to engage with callers. She began to learn what it meant to really listen.

She became comfortable with silence, as the person on the other end of the line figured out what to say next. This phone work also made Katie think a lot about language: How could she respectfully express empathy? How could she speak in ways that empowered the individuals on the other end of the line?

This attention to language at the level of discourse inspired Katie to think more deeply about her volunteer work with Sexual Assault Response Services, and to ask how this work fit into a larger project underway in Maine.

How do advocates, themselves, think about sex work and sex trafficking? How do they talk about these issues, with each other and the public? How do we talk about sex, coercion and commerce in southern Maine? And, importantly, Katie began to ask: Can we shape this discourse so that we no longer rely on the same tired tropes of victimhood and criminality?

Answering these questions became the focus of Katie’s studies at USM, where she is double-majoring in sociology and women and gender studies. Ultimately, this exploration became the foundation of her undergraduate honors thesis. On Friday, she will present her work at Thinking Matters, USM’s annual student research symposium.

She won’t be alone. This year, we have 150 undergraduate and graduate students presenting independent, innovative and creative work. Many of these students have stories that are just like Katie’s: Each of them pursued an interest and worked with a faculty mentor to create work that matters.

What microbes are you inadvertently growing in your kitchen sink? How does autobiographical storytelling benefit people with early-stage Alzheimer’s? How can we better support Maine veterans in our public education and health care systems? What health care practices best serve transgender older adults? These are just a few of the real-world questions that our students are tackling at Thinking Matters.

Research shows that to foster long-term student success, we need to give students opportunities to use their learning in real-world contexts. At USM, our students learn with their communities in ways that shape their careers and broaden their horizons.

Importantly, they have the support of dedicated faculty members, who work with students to shepherd projects from that initial spark of an idea through to its completion and public presentation. Sharing our work with our colleagues and the Portland-area community is central to our mission as Maine’s metropolitan university.

As chair of Thinking Matters and director of the Honors Program at USM, I am proud to showcase all the deeply engaged, rigorous and applied learning experiences we offer our students.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out in his 2014 op-ed “It takes a mentor,” there are two things that colleges and universities can do to help ensure their graduates become “engaged employees on fulfilling career tracks”: Place real value upon student-faculty mentoring relationships, and provide students with opportunities to use their classroom-based learning in internships and community service projects.

The Gallup poll Friedman cites has profound implications: Where you get your college education doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you get it.

At the University of Southern Maine, our students have the best of both worlds. The individual attention of caring professors here rivals that of any elite small liberal arts colleges (I know, because I attended one). And the hands-on, real-world learning opportunities that we have here in the Portland area match – and even surpass – those opportunities available at other comprehensive research universities.

Join us Friday and you’ll see what I mean: At USM, thinking matters.