The Dream Sociology Team

There are great teams in sports, superhero comics and, perhaps unexpectedly, even sociology conferences.

Lincoln Cutler '23, assistant teaching professor Damien Contessa, Eric Lugo '24, Kaylee Burbank '24 and Christina Fast '24 pose for a team photo shortly after their record-breaking win. Photo courtesy of Christina Fast

UT applied sociology students Kaylee Burbank ’24, Eric Lugo ’24, Christina Fast ’24 and Lincoln Cutler ’23 brought home a record-breaking third-consecutive win at the annual Client Problem-Solving Competition at the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology Conference in late fall.

Each year at the conference, a nonprofit client asks teams to present solutions to real-world issues in a 20-minute pitch competition.

This time, teams representing universities from Texas to Tampa were asked by the Florida American Civil Liberties Union to present a strategy to engage with young adults on civil liberty issues.

Months before the competition, Assistant Teaching Professor Damien Contessa put up the Bat Signal for the brightest, most hard-working, top students in sociology to form a team.

Some people were referred; some felt like they missed out on participating in the previous years; some felt like it was their last opportunity as a senior to impress before applying to jobs.

The team size would be small, and hours of collaborative work were needed before the three-day conference. Smooth cooperation between the teammates would be vital, yet Cutler, Burbank, Lugo and Fast didn’t know each other, apart from their reputations. Only Cutler had competed at the conference before.

“I had a bit of imposter syndrome after the first FaceTime,” Fast said. “Everybody had a strength in something.”

The team grew closer on FaceTime and Zoom, often late at night, solidifying initial solutions and a creative flow.

They leaned on their cohesiveness after a failed mock presentation in front of the sociology department. Faculty liked their ideas but were critical of their delivery. “I was very glad we had that session,” Burbank said.

“We were very scripted. Our presentation was like a class presentation. When you’re assigned a presentation in class, you do your research on it, and you have your little speech. But when you’re, like, presenting to a client … it needs to be a little bit more engaging. It needs to be a little bit more natural instead of us like reading and memorizing something, you know?”

So the students went back to work.

They developed roles for each person. Cutler, as “team leader,” inspired the group’s presentation style and focus points. Fast concentrated on social media engagement and marketing. Lugo researched the history of the American Civil Liberties Union to personalize the presentation, and Burbank collected data to corroborate the group’s examples.

At the conference, though, the entire game plan flipped again.

As they watched their competition, the UT team saw other groups presenting many of the same strategies, especially when it came to using social media.

The Spartans huddled as the clock was ticking down — in the mock trial, their strengths had been the quality of the ideas, not the presentation. Should they scramble for new ideas, or present the same solutions in a different way?

The team took a risk and chose the latter.

They started the presentation by passing out flyers and offered improvements on common solutions with hyper-specific examples, like Cutler’s own experience starting a special-issue club, contact information for local partners on the flyers and cost analysis on each example.

“It was that professional aspect of: You have a problem. I'm going to tell you exactly how you can solve it. And I'm going to give you the resources to do so,” Burbank explained.

By the time Fast wrapped up her closing statements, the team knew they were going to win.

“It was almost, like, surprising how well it just kind of happened. Everyone just showed up in the best way,” said Burbank.

“Coming out of it, I now have confidence in my ability to use what I learned in this competition in the actual professional world. I've already gone in front of a client who needs something from me, and I gave them exactly what they wanted; I can do the same thing again.”

Fast, for her part, was mostly relieved.

“I was just really proud of everyone, 'cause at the end, we all pulled it together.”

“We were just all super happy. It just felt amazing to know that all this, all these four years of education, that I’m going to be okay, and that I’m actually going to help out.

“It was like pushing a baby bird out of the nest and saying, ‘Go fly.’ And fly we did.”

Story by Lena Malpeli '25