Dance Company performs and blogs its way through the Dominican Republic.

Students unleash their creativity at the annual Lego Robot Talent Show!

Midd football players spend time each week with local school kids.

Students collected photos and interviews for a Vermont Folklife Center exhibition.

Check out the blog for students, by students.

As senior Alexa Warburton opens the door to the cephalopod lab, a pungent smell escapes into the third-floor hallway of Middlebury College’s McCardell Bicentennial Hall. “It smells like the ocean,” she comments. And it should. Warburton, a senior biology major from Hopkinton, N.H., is spending her summer studying a member of the cephalopod family, Octopus bimaculoides . Her goal is to study the way these saltwater creatures learn, thereby furthering the already-extensive body of research on invertebrate intelligence.

Aaron Smith, Class of 2009 and a Film & Media Culture major, has posted online a discussable version of his senior thesis, "Transmedia Storytelling in Television 2.0," in which he explores how contemporary television has embraced new narrative strategies and digital media to encourage participation in expansive storyworlds. In this online version, he invites readers to comment in the margins of his project to further the dialogue about these new developments.

Students in Helen Young's plant biology class participate in community service projects, ranging from providing information about produce for the Middlebury Natural Food Coop, creating a species list of the plants at Sycamore Park for the Conservation Commission of the town of Bristol, surveying the plants on the green-roof of Atwater Dining Hall to determine which species survive best under these conditions, assessing the health of trees on campus to assist the College horticulturist, plan pruning schedules, assisting a local vintner in harvesting grapes, and doing a forest assessment of T

Helen Young (Biology) and her students have recently been exploring the effects of landscape on pollinator: How does the presence of forest around a field affect the number and diversity of bee pollinators? What about corn fields? Or roads and rivers and cities? This work has strong relevance in Addison County, an area heavily reliant on agriculture for its well-being.

The College Choir embarked on a highly successful tour of Connecticut, Boston and New York City over spring break, April 21-26, 2009. The tour included concerts at the phenomenal Trinity Church in the City of Boston, St. Michael's Church on 99th Street in Manhattan, and the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park. The choir sang contemporary choral music, madrigals, and folk music, and a short choral drama featured several Middlebury student soloists.

Andrew Throdahl, Class of 2009, studied piano with Music Department affiliate artist Diana Fanning, an internationally renowned musician. Throdahl has played the piano for more than a dozen years, and recently gave his senior recital in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Concert Hall. He has a special perspective on playing in Concert Hall, having worked as page-turner for many of the chamber musicians who visit as part of Middlebury’s Performing Arts Series.

Dance professor Penny Campbell reports:

The Web site SouthChinaSea.org was started in 1998 by David Rosenberg, a professor of Political Science at Middlebury, as a student-faculty collaborative research project. It has developed into a five-star online resource for students, scholars and policy-makers interested in South China Sea regional economic, environmental, and security issues.

Middlebury's Stuck in the Middle men's a cappella group traveled to Japan this spring. They sang at a number of Japanese schools as part of a tour of Tokyo. You'll find stories and photos about the trip on the SIMnews blog.

This academic year, Middelbury math students triumphed in the annual Green Chicken mathematics contest with Williams College, ending a five-year drought. A history of the competition, including the origins of the curious piece of ceramic ware for which the contest is named, was featured in a Boston Globe article.

Middlebury student Kate Macfarlane '10 appears in a South American newspaper Web site, El Diario Austral de Valdivia, as part of a panel discussion, "Ciencia Con Nombre de Mujer" on the International Day of the Woman as part of her for-credit internship experience during her time studying at the School Abroad in Chile. See link below. Kate is seated at center.

Since 2001, Bettina Matthias (German) has worked with German students, from first-semester to graduating senior, in Middlebury's German Theater Group. What started as an alternative to the typical final paper in late 2001 has grown into a very successful staple in the German Department and on campus, a steady group with at least 10 members at any given time, that has won the German Theater Competition at Mt. Holyoke College five times and has performed nine full-length plays in German. In fall, we will celebrate our tenth production together.

“I have lived a kind of life which is not so much easy,” Bonny says, dropping his eyes to finger a thin, golden scar in the rock’s face. He presses it gently and looks upward to meet my gaze.

Three Middlebury College seniors have received recognition for their research projects from the Center for Research on Vermont at the University of Vermont. Elizabeth Kelley is the recipient of the 2009 Andrew E. Nuquist Award for Outstanding Student Research on a Vermont Topic. Gregory McDermott received the 2009 George B. Bryan Award for Excellence in Vermont Research. Benjamin Robins received special mention from the Nuquist Award committee.

Thirty-three Middlebury College undergraduates were selected from more than 131 applicants to receive Middlebury funding for unpaid internships with national and international organizations and companies this summer.