Student Profiles

Mher Arutyunyan is a fourth–year Political Science major and Russian Studies minor. He is currently working on a senior thesis as part of the Political Science Departmental Honors Program under the guidance of Professor Richard Anderson. His work investigates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy strategy with particular emphasis placed on the relationship between his decision–making and his domestic political goals. The research also devotes close attention to the Russian Orthodox Church, scrutinizing its role as a key support system for the incumbent regime. He hopes that his research conclusions will contribute to a better understanding of the Putin regime by US academics and policymakers, offering key insights which can be generalizable to other contexts. Mher is also heavily active in the Armenian–American student community at UCLA and in the broader Los Angeles area, serving as the Executive Chair of the All–Armenian Student Association and the Political Committee Chair of the UCLA Armenian Students’ Association.

Yarin Heffes is a fourth-year student majoring in philosophy and physics. His creative inquiry project is a long-form written work entitled “Circular Botany.” The project experiments with literary style toward a work that feels deeply philosophical as well as emotional and captivating, except without presenting or imposing philosophical ideas or tracking a plot of any sort. The project in its completion will serve as a dense and rich, yet passive, extension of reality through which a reader may contemplate and arrive at ideas about the world from within themself. The work is not meant to teach or to persuade, and it is not meant to distract. Instead, it will simply be there for you to read in the same way that a trail in a forest is there for you to walk upon.

Cyrus is a fourth–year student from Hong Kong who studies Economics with a minor in History. He is primarily interested in the urban–rural relationship and economic growth in the PRC. For his history senior honors thesis, he is studying the interactions between the little–known ‘Small Third Front’ defense program in Hebei province and the local rural economy from the 1960s to the 70s. Using historical data and local gazetteers, he demonstrates that the establishment of heavy industry and supporting infrastructure in the countryside in the ‘Small Third Front’ create a special case of economic transfer from the city to the countryside in a period when urban and rural areas were socially and institutionally divided. He investigates what the implications of that transfer were for the growth of rural township–village enterprises, which expanded exponentially in the following decade. After he graduates, he wishes to pursue graduate studies in economic history.