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Academics at Middlebury 2026
Join five Middlebury professors to hear about their approach to teaching, the benefits of a small college, and the power of interdisciplinary work. Featuring Therese Banks (French and Francophone Studies), Chris Keathley (Film and Media Culture), McKinley Brumback (Physics), Steve Abbot (Mathematics & Statistics), and Tanya Byker (Economics).
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: All right. Hello, everyone. As the participants are coming in, welcome. If you are looking for the Academics at Middlebury session, congratulations, you have found yourself to the right place.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: My name is Shannon Palmer, I’m one of the Associate Directors of Admissions in the office, and I have the joy and the pleasure of getting to… get to hang out with some of our awesome faculty tonight.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: to talk to you all a little bit about what it looks like to study at Middlebury, to be engaged in classes, to dive into a world of academics that are really going to push you and challenge you and help you develop in ways that we’re all really excited to see.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: So a couple kind of housekeeping notes before we dig into our actual event tonight.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: First up, we are running this webinar style, which means that if you have questions, we would love to see those come in through the Q&A or the chat feature, and that’ll give us a chance to really make sure that we’re seeing those and keep an eye on them. We’re trying to keep this at a high-level conversation, so what I will ask is that if you have very specific questions about a particular major.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: A particular academic track, a particular area of interest.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: that you maybe either shoot your admissions counselor an email with those, and we can help connect you to a faculty member or a current student, or you do some research on the website and find somebody that’s going to be able to respond to those. You can always ask your admissions counselor for help with that.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: But tonight is really going to be kind of a larger-scale conversation about what it looks like to be in the classroom at Middlebury and to kind of hear from these different professors.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: So, with that, I am going to turn it over to our panelists.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Maybe we start with, I don’t know, Steve, you’re underneath me, so we’ll start with you, and then kind of popcorn around, just a quick introduction about, your name, your discipline, how long you’ve been at Middlebury, and maybe one of the classes you’re teaching this semester to give everybody an idea of what some of the classes that are available are?
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Hi, everybody. It’s a pleasure. I don’t see any faces except me and my panelists, but I’ll assume you’re out there. My name’s Steve Abbott.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I am a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and Statistics is a new addition to our department. It’s a new major that we started about 3 years ago.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I’ve been here… I might be the senior member of the panel.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I think I am. I got here in…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: 93, maybe? What is that, 30?
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: something? I don’t like thinking about that. It’s going very fast. And this semester, I’m teaching a lot of
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Calculus at all levels,
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Calculus 2, which is sort of where a lot of students start. If you’re doing some sort of AP course, honors, calculus, this might be the place where you land, and then a couple semesters later, you would take
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Multivariable calculus, and that’s my other course this spring. And that’s really fun, so…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Welcome. Nice to see everybody, and congratulations.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Should I… should I call on somebody? How are we doing this?
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Yeah, go for it, call on one of your fellow professors. Give us some nostalgia for the class.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: There’s the… I’ll pick up my friend Tonya down there.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Hello, everyone. Again, I echo Steve’s congratulations,
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): My name is Tanya Biker, I’m a professor in the economics department.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): I have been at Middlebury, this is my 12th year.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): So not quite as long as Steve. But I’m actually in the same building. Economics and math are in the same building. And I, this semester, am teaching, a class called Introduction to Regression Analysis. It’s kind of an intermediate-level statistics class.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): But specifically focused in the economics department, so all of the examples that we use
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): are, based in economics. It’s a required course for the economics major.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): I think sometimes people think intermediate level statistics class regression analysis, that sounds pretty boring. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the most exciting classes at the college, so I can talk more about it later if we have more questions, but that’s what I’m teaching right now.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Chris, Keith Lee.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Hello, welcome everybody. I’m Chris Keithley, I am in the Film and Media Culture Department, and I have been here for 24 years. Used to live in Steve Abbott’s house, once upon a time, when I first got here.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: This semester, I’m teaching two, upper-level courses in our major, both electives. I’m teaching a course on the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: And I’m also teaching a course on videographic film criticism, which is learning how to present your scholarship, your argument, in an audio-visual rather than a written form. It’s a class that is great fun.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Alright, Therese.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Hi, welcome everyone, and echoing everyone’s congratulations, my name is Teresa Ortez, either way. Banks, I teach in the French department. It’s actually the French and Francophone Studies Department, which means that we offer classes on the larger French-speaking world, not just necessarily on France itself.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): This is my third year here, so along with McKinley, McKinley and I started at the same… same time, so we’re the same cohort, and so it’s been really lovely to kind of join the college community, and this semester I’m teaching intermediate French, so if you’re interested, for example, in studying abroad, you might be taking intermediate French, and I’m also teaching our sort of introduction to
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Francophone Literature course. So, a little bit higher level, what does it mean to read and start writing essays completely in French? And I really enjoy being able to introduce students to sort of that really broad overview and survey of a lot of different types of French literature, and also some films, like where I Chris teaches. So I’ll shoot it over now to McKinley.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: Awesome. Thanks, Teresa. Hi, everyone. I’m McKinley Brumbach. I’m in the Physics and Astronomy department here at Middlebury. Congratulations to everybody. This is also my third year, like Teresa said. I’m teaching two classes this semester. I’m teaching one of our introductory physics classes called Waves, Optics, and Thermodynamics. It is a fun mix
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: of some of these introductory electromagnetism-type courses, and you might take it if you’re interested in becoming a physics major, but you place out of mechanics, or you might take it if you are in chemistry, neuroscience, molecular biology. Those majors also often take this class, so it’s a nice lab-based physics class. We do a lot of really fun experiments, today in labs.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: my students built their own microscopes on the lab bench, and that was really fun. I’m also teaching a 300-level astrophysics class, high-energy astrophysics. My students are learning about black holes and neutron stars and all the ways that astrophysical phenomena can produce X-rays, gamma rays, ultraviolet light.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: So, that is amazing. I love all of the different opportunities that we’ve gotten to hear just from you five about the ways in which you connect with each other, and I think that’s a great segue into our first question here.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: So, one of the things that we often get questions about in admissions is what it looks like to truly be a student at a small college. You can read all of the numbers that you want about student-to-faculty ratios or average class size.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: But specific to kind of your experience teaching, my question for you all is, how does teaching at a small college kind of change the way that you design your courses, and how does it impact how students learn? And I don’t know if we just want to, like, kind of unmute as folks are
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: feeling like they have things to answer, no particular order necessary, but I’d love to throw that out as a discussion point for us to start.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Well, I’ll begin, I’m happy to start, if that’s okay. I used to teach at a large university, so I’m well aware firsthand of the differences between being at a place like that, and a place like this.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: one of the things I love about being here… the longer… I’ve been teaching 30 years or so total, and I have come over the years to value time in class. This is me, more and more and more. I really love it. And part of the reason I value it is because I get a lot out of it here. I can count on students to bring a lot to class.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: And it shapes how I go… you know, and when I was at a big university, I felt like I had to load them up on reading, and I had to come in.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: and do the lecture, and make sure everybody was on board. Here, I often find myself
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: requiring a little less outside of class and expecting more in, because I want a conversation about the readings and mostly about the films we’re talking about. So I can count on the classroom as being a place, as a kind of shared experience, me and the students, and when it’s best for them, it’s also best for me.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: That, to me, has been the really great pleasure of being at a place like this.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Also, because It’s a small place in a fairly small department.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: for instance, this semester, fully half the students I’ve had before. So, not only do I know them, they know me.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: And they bring that knowledge into the classroom, and they help create, a dynamic that I really like, an environment that I really like for learning, and I think works well for them. It was much more challenging to do that when I was at a bigger university teaching larger classes, to get that kind of…
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: of, fun learning experience, or what, for me, is a fun learning experience. So I’ll pass it along.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): I can jump in, and I was actually thinking of starting in a similar place, which is I was, you know, a graduate student instructor at the University of Michigan, so a big, enormous
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): university, amazingly wonderful institution, but I taught, as a graduate student instructor, I taught the same type of class that I’m teaching this semester. And I’m actually using the same textbook. It’s an excellent textbook.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): So I’m teaching the same content, the same statistical concepts.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): But the difference is, at the University of Michigan, when I taught this class, there were 300-400 students in the classroom. There was no way that you could assign a research project to students. Who was going to grade all those research projects? So I teach the same content, I use the same textbook, but students do independent research projects in my class.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Each student, they form a partnership, they have a partner, they pose a research question, an economic research question, they access data themselves.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): They, do statistical analysis, they write a project, they present it, both orally and in writing. So this is, you know, taking that same content, the statistical and econometric content that we did at the big university.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And then actually getting to do an independent research project. It’s a completely different ballgame. You simply can’t do that at a huge university where you have hundreds of students in the classroom.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): I meet with every research project group multiple times over the course of the semester, and we talk about their… we’re at this point in the semester right now where they’re posing their questions, and we’re sort of iterating back and forth on what’s a… what’s the difference between a topic
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And a question, right? Like, thinking about how do you actually pose a question that you can think about answering over the course of the semester. And sometimes it’s like, this is such an important, interesting question that I could see you doing this for your thesis.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): So we’re gonna start, you know, a thesis in our department is something you do as a senior, and this is more like sophomores and juniors who are in my class, but we’re already starting to think, in this sort of independent research project that they’re doing in my class, about a question that might wind up being so exciting that they keep studying it into their, you know, junior and senior year.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And like I said, that’s just something that isn’t possible at a big university where you’re taking this class with hundreds of other students.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): So, to me, that’s the… that’s special, and that’s why… that’s why I stay here.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: I’ll go first. The… I want to piggyback off what Tanya said about research projects, because that’s exactly what I was thinking as well. That’s also something that I really enjoy bringing into the physics classroom, letting the students work with data, and having that… that
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: time and focus and ability to one-on-one mentor is something that’s really important for the small class size, for getting to know the students, something that’s so wonderful in the Middlebury environment.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: So that… that I feel I do a lot in my classes, but to… to give a different answer, I also feel like I’m able to
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: take the temperature of the room a little bit in terms of how students are feeling about the material in real time, and as needed, adjust my lecture pace in a way that’s a lot less forgiving if, say, you know, you’re at a big university, and you’re teaching sections, and you need Section A to keep up with Section B so that everybody’s ready for the exam, and stuff like that, those kinds of, like, large class challenges.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: In my Higher Energy Astrophysics class, I kind of taught something that was very challenging, and at the end of class, I was hearing some discussions. I was like, guys, did we… how’d we do? Was this confusing? And they were like, yes, it was. And so the next class, we revisited it in a different way, with different examples.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: And made sure everybody got it, and then we moved on. And that kind of flexibility, I think, is so much easier in a small class size than it is in a big one.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Yeah, and I think, McKinley, what you just said
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): tails quite well with what I was about to say, which is that being able to read the room, in a way that, for the languages, and I’m in the French department, but I think I can speak for a good number of our languages, language departments here, which is that one of the great opportunities we have having small classes is being able to teach the language in the language, and that is only possible if you have a small classroom, so…
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): If I actually encounter my students in the hallway and they hear me speaking English, they’re kind of like, whoa, what is this? I’ve never heard your accent, I’ve never heard your voice in English. They’re used to hearing me in French, and I teach even beginner French, for the most part, in French, which can sound really intimidating, but it’s a real opportunity to get
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Speaking the language and getting immersed in what that feels like, much more quickly than you would be able to if you have
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): even 30 students. Beginning French is capped at 15 students. So, not only do I have the opportunity to get students speaking really quickly, and therefore they’re progressing quite quickly, I get to see those students progress from beginning French all the way up to a senior thesis, and that’s really rewarding.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Oh, yeah.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I have to tell you, Teresa, I went to language school this summer at Middlebury.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And I experienced it from the student side. I’ve been wanting to go, you know, it’s one of the great
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: programs at Middlebury, it’s the thing that’s, you know, when I wear my Middlebury shirt somewhere, that’s usually somebody goes, oh, language school.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And it was spectacular, this experience of learning the language and the language with my 60-year-old head was… stuff was falling out as fast as it was going in, but it was just a spectacular experience. And I had that same moment, my…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: My Spanish…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: professor at the end started speaking to me in English, because then I just was like, no, what are you doing? What is that sound you’re making? Who are you? What have you done to my beloved professor? So, yeah, it’s fun to hear everybody. I agree. I lean into the relationship.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: part the most. I mean, we do a lot of…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: A lot of student projects. My colleagues, especially my younger colleagues, are…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Really well versed in all the sort of active learning pedagogies that are out there that sort of appeal to different kinds of learning styles, and…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: So lecturing is definitely kind of…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: It’s done, and it, you know, it’s an effective tool, but it’s one of many, and maybe not even the majority one, is the way mathematics and statistics are being taught these days.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And I find, and I’m maybe going back to kind of what Chris was saying.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: When you… when you establish these connections with your students, which is inevitable in the sort of spaces that we’re in, and it’s kind of crucial because it leads to this…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: sense of trust.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And safety, and… and support, and it actually enables me to…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: to push harder and challenge them more, because I know that they know that there… nothing bad’s gonna happen to them, that this is… this is how it’s gonna be, and that they’re… they’re being thought about in these…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: In these… these really personal ways, and…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: So that… that helps me be a better teacher when I have that.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: that trust, and that trust comes, I think, from the connections that we make in the classrooms, so…
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: I love that that was what we got to end that first question on, because I think that’s one of the joys of a small liberal arts college environment, of really getting to feel like you have a community of learning around you that is lifting you up. And one of the ways that I think that can often manifest for students, and several of you alluded to this.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: is getting to dig into something that they are really personally passionate about, that they’re excited to research, that they’re excited to work on a creative project, and get to share that with other students. And so, I’m wondering if,
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: And if you would like to talk about, kind of, how soon students start doing research or, like, independent creative work within your field, how, does that start manifesting, and how does that…
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Work as a relationship between you as a professor and as a mentor and the student in developing into, kind of, going from consumer to creator of knowledge in that pathway.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: Yeah, I can start with this one. I love doing research with students. It’s one of my favorite parts of the job, and I’m just in the process of finalizing the students I’m going to take this summer to do summer research projects, so it’s kind of fresh in my mind.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: students can get involved in physics research as early as their first year. The summer after their first year, is not too late, or not too early, rather, to start.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: there’s a wide variety of research. Every faculty member in physics and astronomy has their own area of expertise, and so just going and talking to faculty members who have research that you’re interested in, even if it just starts as a casual conversation, can lead to research opportunities later, either over the summer or during the semester, there are opportunities for both types.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: And I…
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: get so thrilled when the younger underclassmen come and say, like, this sounds really interesting, I don’t know what I want to do, and like, let’s try this. And I’ve had students join my lab just for a semester, and then find their passion elsewhere in some other branch of physics, and move on and do absolutely incredible things. And I’ve had them stay in my lab all the way through graduation, and those students
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: by the time that they’re seniors, they are helping me write and submit telescope funding proposals. They are writing and contributing to research papers and are listed as authors on those research papers. They’re making real, meaningful contributions. We’re going to conferences over the summer and traveling together to present research. They’re joining
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: collaboration calls with other astrophysicists that I write papers with. It becomes this real collaboration and just this joy of discovery together, and it’s something I really, really like. So, I would encourage all of you, to just
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: go talk to faculty. Faculty love talking about their research. We love it! So it’s all we do. So come talk to us about it. We would be so thrilled to chat, and that’s how it starts.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: I’ll go. So, obviously, research, independent work of various kinds varies from department to department. In our department, we have required senior work. Every student undertakes an independent project, but in a film media department, that
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: that project takes a variety of forms. It can be a critical essay, it can be a screenplay, it can be a short film, a documentary, or fiction, it can be a podcast. Anything that reasonably falls under the umbrella of film and media, we accept.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Provided students have done the preliminary… laying the preliminary groundwork for that. And this goes kind of to what Tanya was saying. A lot of times, students,
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Sometimes without realizing it, have a kernel of, some senior independent work in their minds early on.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: And they get it partly from doing the preliminary courses they need to take to prepare them for that. So in our department, students are doing… taking filmmaking classes, screenwriting classes, and doing independent work, creative work. They are very early on to prepare them for their capstone project.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: And beyond that, we have several, active filmmakers in the department who have, included students, current and former students, in their production work as crews.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: and as collaborators. My colleague Jason Mattel and I run a summer videographic workshop for faculty, from literally around the world, and we routinely have a student working with us who has been through that class. So, in our department, students are doing some kind of independent work
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: In their courses pretty early on, as they discover, kind of, what path they want to take toward their capstone project.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): maybe just piggybacking on that idea of research and sort of independent work looks very different across departments. I think for… for French and Francophone studies.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): like a lot of departments, senior work is really where a student will have an independent idea, and they get to really pursue that in whatever sort of form makes sense for the research question that they’re posing, and they’re creating that question in dialogue, with faculty, kind of in the process… same process that Tanya was talking about, about refining a research topic down to a research question, and then figuring out what kind of
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): evidence you might need to support that. But even from as early as French 102, I would say, thinking about artistic productions, French 102, so beginning French II, it’s taught during our Middlebury’s kind of special winter term, so it’s a very intensive time where I’m seeing students pretty much every day, for 2 hours, and they create their own skits.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): in French, and so even though it’s not a research project, that’s beginning French students
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): having whatever idea they want to pursue about what kind of skit they want to create, and performing that for their friends. And I think that’s a really wonderful opportunity for students to feel like they are,
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): leaders in their own kind of experience of learning, so that it’s not just the kind of content that I’m giving to them, or the question that I’m asking them, but they get to kind of
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): bring forward to me and to everyone else that they’ve taken the class with what they’re interested in and the kind of stories they want to tell. On a slightly different track, the other kind of research opportunities we would have in French and Francophone studies is working directly with a faculty member. Research in the humanities does look a little bit different than, say, a lab setting, but
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): If a student has a sufficient proficiency in the language, there are opportunities to work with a faculty member on their research and help them develop their research forward.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): I’ll just add to the… I can’t remember…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Good thing McKinley was talking about this, that,
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): in terms of students working with me on research, that’s often… sometimes during the semester, but often in the summer, and this, you know, it’s really fun to be on campus in the summer. There’s a community of students doing… well, first of all, they’re the language schools, which is really exciting. There’s, you know, all of the dorms are… well, not many of the dorms are filled with students who are in their particular language schools, so you’ll be walking around Middlebury, and it’s like.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): You’ll hear a French conversation, or Chinese, or Russian.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): But then there’s also a group of college students who are working in labs or with other faculty members, doing research over the summer. And it’s just this really lovely… Vermont is beautiful in the summer.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And, you know, you’re not in class, but you’re sort of working on a research project, so I had, you know,
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): I had a project where we were working on looking at the relationship between forest loss and malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, and we had a student who was a geography major, a joint geography econ major, and they were helping us do
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): mapping. So this was, like, a computer lab, not a test tube lab, but they’re working in the computer lab, helping us do this mapping work.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): To look at the relationship between forest lost and malaria. I also had a double major in econ and computer science that helped us build an application for teaching statistics concepts.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And that student actually wound up being a co-author on that published paper. So, yeah, those are examples of research projects that I worked on with students.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Over the summer, and then, you know, they’re here basically for, I think, 8 to 10 weeks over the summer. And yeah, that’s a really fun experience… a fun time to be on campus, and to have this research experience, and also just really focus on a single…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Topic.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Shannon, are we on a… on a tight schedule here? What’s happening?
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: You have a few minutes to answer if you have a story you’d like to share before we need to get to the next question.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I grabbed this on my… off the bulletin board on my way out, you know, I couldn’t see it, I can barely see it. So the… we have a great crew of summer research students in the… in the department, and…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: It might be 15, or… So, every summer, and they’re doing just a…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Landslide prediction in Puerto Rico, and… Growth rates for terrapins, and…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: statistics on earthquake energy in the ocean, and spinal cord stimulation for chronic pain. I think that’s my colleague, Jen Cordell, who does…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: you know, neuroscience modeling. So, and there’s some pure math in here. Coxider groups, I know that’s gonna be a big seller for this crowd. The idea is… is kind of what you’re hearing, that, you know, these are not…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: students all going to graduate school. These are students who took a course in modeling, or a course in data science, or a course in something, got interested, and… and are… are… are…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: being offered an opportunity to spend a wonderful summer in Middlebury.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Working with a group of students and a faculty member in this kind of pretty ideal setting, that comes with a community. It comes with…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Trivia night, and a tennis tournament, and, you know, all the other things that happen when people work side by side over a period of time on something that’s quite engaging like that, so…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I like the community that we’ve built up, especially within our applied math and statistics program that has led to a very, sort of, self-generating enticement for a lot of our students. And again, we have 20…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: 20 majors in mathematics and, you know, 15 or 20 in statistics.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: a year.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And there’s…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: 14 or 15 faculty, and you can kind of do the math. There’s just a lot of opportunities if this is something that’s interesting.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: you can do it here, because of the scale of things, where I think that’s a…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Maybe a significant difference with a really large institution like that, so…
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Thank you for grabbing that, Steve. I love that you had that to hand, because that’s an excellent, excellent introduction to one of the things that I wanted to talk about with you all next, which is Middlebury is a liberal arts college, everybody’s discipline does not exist in a vacuum.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Things touch other disciplines, things get influenced from other places. And so, how do you feel your discipline, your academic experience for students is strengthened when people are bringing in perspectives from different disciplines.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: or different life experiences, different perspectives from their own, kind of, viewpoints. Like, how does that strengthen the work that goes on in your classroom?
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): I mean, I think because, like, as we were saying, our classes tend to be so discussion-based, it can only strengthen our classroom discussions and the learning experience when students
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): are bringing forward what they, you know, what they already know and their experiences. In terms of cross-disciplinary, kind of, fertilization at Middlebury, one sort of
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): teaching and, research example I can give is last semester, I teach a upper-level course on, the French Enlightenment, so the, the, 18th… it goes from 17th to 19th century, about, and, we explore ideas about tolerance and resistance, but we’re also thinking about sort of large intellectual
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): history. And I collaborated with a colleague in theater named Summer Jack, and we had students, go to, think about, sort of dress history and performance history as we were reading plays that kind of foregrounded these themes. So her class came to sit in on my class, my class went to sit in on her class, and then together we,
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Summer and I collaborated with a research student to create a 17th century dress, literal dress, that a student helped, make by hand over the summer. And the students then in my class were able to experience what it looks, feels like, and looks like to put on those kinds of garments, and how it changes the way you might sit or walk, and then think about
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): how does the way you inhabit your body change how you might inhabit different ideas? So I think we really benefit from having us as colleagues being able to know each other, because it’s a small enough place where we can know each other, and then being able to bring that into the classroom for the students.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: I’ll say something, if I may, by way of also answering one of the questions that I saw pop up in the Q&A list, someone asked about the difference between a double major and a joint major, and I’ll just answer quickly and say a double major is literally you complete two full majors.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: With the joint major, you…
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: complete a kind of abbreviated version of, or an abridged version of each major, but you’re required to do some senior project that brings the two disciplines together. So there’s a structure in place, and it can’t work with every department, but with many departments it can, that there is a built-in structure for you to start bringing disciplines together. In film media, we’ve had
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: joint majors with English and History and Political Science and Religion and sociology, and they’ve done a range of kinds of projects. So the joint majors is one place where a lot of students find
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: To specifically bring different disciplines into conversation with one another, in a, in a capstone project.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I’ll tell a personal story,
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I was absolutely minding my own business and being a very responsible mathematician, grading papers and proving theorems.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And I got an email… From my colleague in theater, and she was directing a play.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: It was a new play to her, and it was full of mathematics, and she said.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Would you be willing to come down and talk to my cast about what all this means? We’re sort of…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: wrestling with it. And I had no background in theater, I was never an actor, I was never…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: But I loved theater, it was sort of fun to have a skill that would be of use to a production, and I went to have.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And I read this play, it was called Arcadia by Tom Stompard, if you know it, or the playwright.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And it… it…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: it blew me away. I was breathless reading this thing, and I went down and met the cast, and I loved the energy of the room.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And I basically stayed. I chatted with him for a night, but it just led to these questions, and I…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I came back again, and then I started doing research on the math that was in this play, because I didn’t really understand it all myself, and I kept working with the director, and by the time we were done.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: the two of us said, well, we need to teach a course together. And so we taught us a winter term course, this winter term that you heard about, which is tailor-made for this sort of misbehavior.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And… At the same time that this was happening.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: This play was so successful that a lot of other playwrights started looking to mathematics and science more generally for source material, and this discipline of science theater started happening in front of us, and so…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: We taught our course again, and we started going to these conferences, and this… this…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: interest, this hot… I don’t know what to call it, sort of…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Spun a little bit out of control, and really became a component of my research in the last decade of my career here, and it’s just…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: been so, energizing and different, and different kinds of teaching, and I’ve taught
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: courses at the boundary of Science and theater a few times, and published and worked with students, and it’s really been…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Like… Part of the whole…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: joy of this job, and the reason for being at Middlebury is to have these kind of possibilities become
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Presented to you, and then you can act on them, and your life changes in ways that you didn’t expect.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And so that’s… that’s my story. I could keep talking for a while, but there’s 6 of us, so I need to… need to stop, but…
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: Nice. Yeah, I just want to echo what everyone’s been saying about the importance of these, like, interdisciplinary conversations that I feel like are just naturally born in a liberal arts environment. I’m not sure if interdisciplinary and physics, like, are necessarily at the top of people’s associations, but when I teach.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: The course I’ve been teaching in the fall, Intro to the Universe, which is a, introductory astronomy class that’s taken by a wide variety of majors. It’s not… it’s not in the physics major track per se, so it’s not just for physics majors.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: We end up asking all kinds of questions, like, what does it mean to think about time before the beginning of the universe, and can physics tell us if there is a God or creator or not? And these kinds of questions get really philosophical and really interesting, and even though those aren’t my own areas of expertise, I love having those discussions with students. I think it’s fascinating to…
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: wonder at the universe, and to hear what everyone has to say, and I’m hoping to build some classes in the future around those kinds of fun, maybe more philosophical sides of physics.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: The first-year seminar program’s another really good
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Avenue for… for… for to indulge these… these kinds of…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: This thing that makes us all…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: The reason we’re all here, we love being students of our disciplines, but also just being students, and it’s part of the life of a…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Academic or professors that you… you’re constantly…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: a student in your own class, you know, sometimes you start a course and you actually don’t know the last third of it that well, and… but you’re going to, and you’re going to do it with your students, and this… this…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: A great place to indulge these, these, these wonderful
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: sort of excitements that we get that are outside of our areas of expertise as in the first-year seminar program, which
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Maybe you’ve… you guys have heard about in different forms, but that’s one of the…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: a course you’ll sign up for over the summer before you would come to Middlebury, and you’re in with a group of 15 people, and the…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: This list of courses that you pick from are sort of a wonderful portrait of all of the, you know, intellectual fantasies of all the faculty that, you know, courses on.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: books of Jane Austen are the, the, you know, for me, the, the, you know, science and theater, for, you know, the…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: you know
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: The game of Go, my colleague loves to teach that, you know, the Japanese culture and the way it’s sort of built, hiding in the details of this wonderful ancient game of stones on a board, and so all of these things are…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Or… find their way out into different teaching forms over… over our careers, so…
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Being mindful of time, I do want to make sure that we get a chance to talk about some audience questions. So, with that, I would love to kind of dive into the last official prepared question that we have.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Which is, can you talk very briefly, like, a sentence or so, about why you specifically have chosen to teach at Middlebury, and why you’ve chosen to stick around? Because all of you have been here for at least a chunk of time, but in one sentence, what makes you stay here? And then we’ll move on to some questions that have come in through the audience Q&A.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: I can answer… I’ll say, I did a, after I did my undergraduate degree, I did a master’s degree in English and an MFA in filmmaking and a PhD in film studies.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: But the profoundest experience I had was as an undergraduate. That’s where the, sort of, the light really went on for me. And I think, I identify with undergraduates in a way I don’t think I would as a teacher with graduate students.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: And I sort of get to… I get to relive this every semester, the experience of being an undergraduate. And I love being able to think about,
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: teaching for my students the way I enjoyed being
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: taught when I was an undergraduate. I love these… it’s a really exciting time.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: For so many students when they find their path, or they get really excited about something they maybe didn’t know they were that excited about. Yeah, that’s it. It’s being part of and seeing and sharing that.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: With students as that’s happening.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Likewise, I would say the community. I mean, I don’t know that I even need a full sentence. It’s very much the community, whether that’s the students and being able to kind of really get to know them and get to know them over 4 years, and see them grow because I… because it’s small enough that I get to know them, whether it’s my colleagues and being able to attend the random theater play, or a colleague’s research talk,
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): It’s being able to be in a small community and have those kind of,
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Random, one-off, really interesting conversations that actually lead to something much larger.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): So I went to a liberal arts college, as an undergrad, so it kind of
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): to Chris’s point, there’s something about the undergraduate experience that I had that was really magical, and remember sitting in the office, as I said, I was a philosophy and economics major, and remember sitting my senior year in the office of
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): one day, my philosophy professor, the next my economics professor, and just discussing these senior projects that I was working on.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And then I took this sort of very winding road to get here, right? I worked at a bank, I was a photojournalist, I was a stay-at-home mother, for a while, and at some point, I sat down and said, what do I want to be when I grow up? And I decided I wanted to… my dream was to grow up to be one of those liberal arts professors, and be on the other side of the desk having those conversations, with students, and…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): So I went to started grad school the same day my daughter started kindergarten, and a few years down the road, I got my dream job. So, here I am.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Liberal arts professor.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: I…
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: was a physics major in a liberal arts environment, when I was in college, and I loved it. I thought it was the best way for me
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: to learn something that was so challenging, and in a place where I could really rely on the relationships with my faculty members. And that is the key relationship that I like building. I like sitting with the students and helping them get breakthroughs, in their understanding, and I like
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: walking into class and knowing everybody’s name, and not feeling like a performing circus act at the front of a huge lecture hall, but to be in a community where I’m known and I can know other people, that’s exactly what I wanted for my career, and that’s what I found at Middlebury.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I feel like I’ve already outed myself as this perpetual student.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: You know,
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I love being a student like my colleagues did, and in some weird way, it feels like one long progression.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And in fact, graduate school Which I did enjoy terrifically.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I did miss the richness of… of being… being surrounded by these other kinds of thinkers, so the opportunity to come to Middlebury was… was just a thrill. Just an enormous thrill to get a job at a place like this.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: because I knew the kinds of students that would come here, and they would have that same love of learning, and that same…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: willingness to… It’s not… It’s not…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Content, you know, because the content’s like the excuse we have to engage in this other activity of trying to make connections between
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: What you’re learning, and…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And who you want to become in the world, or what kind of person you want to be, or what sort of member of your…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Community, and how you want to… you want to engage with all the complicated and interesting
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: ways that the world works. So I’ve just been honored to have that be the land in which I’ve been able to
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: you know, make my living, and I… and I love the relationships. I was sort of counting as you guys were talking about the number of weddings I’ve been to of former students, and I… I think that’s a…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: That’s how you know you won, when you get an invite to the wedding, you know? And we’re still connected after they leave, and…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: You stay in touch, and you feel like you’ve… Connected and given, you know…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: intertwined your lives in a way that lasts a long, long time. So that’s… That’s a great gift.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Really is. And I love that we get to really celebrate that full life cycle of the student, right? From starting off as a first-year student all the way through to
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: diving into research and some of those senior theses that people are talking about, to being a perpetual student and getting to come back to your professors, you know, years after you’ve graduated and you’re getting married. And I think that’s one of the joys about being part of this place, and one of the reasons that I think
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: we all probably stick around here, is that it is a place that celebrates that growth, and that…
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Continual maintenance of relationships, in whatever way that that manifests.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: So with that said, we have a couple of questions that have come in, and I’m gonna kind of generalize a couple of them, because there are a couple topics that have popped up frequently enough that I’d love to get a couple answers from people. It doesn’t have to be all five of our professors, but if you feel like you have something that you’d like to share…
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Please feel free. So the first question is diving into the use of AI, and obviously this is a big topic at many schools. Middlebury has had lots of discussions going on about AI, and so we’re not going to be able to cover, obviously, that topic in
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: the 12 minutes that we have left of this hour. But, if you would like to speak a little bit about how you are seeing
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: that work happen in your classroom, in your conversations with your colleagues, kind of to share any information that can help students understand kind of the nuance of how the AI discussion is happening at Millbury, I think that would be really valuable, because there’s a couple questions in here about that.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): I mean, maybe just to tie briefly into the liberal arts… Question, I think, that…
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): one of the wonderful things that I’ve seen is so many different approaches to it within the college. So students have an opportunity to kind of see different disciplinary perspectives and different sort of approaches to it. So I have a colleague in philosophy who teaches a course on sort of the ethics and the thinking around AI, and so if you wanted to approach it from a more, sort of.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): philosophical question, societal question. I think there’s a way to learn about that in… in… in a… maybe…
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): I think they do test out the tools, but it’s not meant to be a completely applied setting, versus, for example, in a computer science class, where there will be…
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): chances to actually use tools and think still critically about, you know, their role and their use. But, you know, if you’re someone who wants to get kind of very hands-on with the tools, there are classes for that, too, and I think.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Depending on your level of interest, there’s a little bit of…
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Of everything that I’ve seen so far, but I don’t know if my colleagues here in the room have taught a class on AI. I haven’t, but I think with the languages, it’s a bit more specific, where we’re actually thinking about, how does artificial intelligence influence the kinds of, language that’s accessible? So if something’s being, dubbed into another language via AI, what does that
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): mean, and what kind of language output are you getting? If you are watching a video that’s been created by AI in another language, what does that sound like, and how does that change how you’re learning? Or, you know, if you want to use AI as a study aid, what does that kind of engagement
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): with that tool, how can that be productive? And when is it really not productive? When does it really help to, refrain and, and…
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): And use the sort of, human relationships that we were kind of just, just underlining.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): So I’m in a discipline, and in a class, actually, in particular, where we’re learning coding, we’re learning to code in statistical software, and how to… and so we talk a lot about ways in which
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): AI, certain AI platforms can help you with coding, right?
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): But we also do a lot of talking about how the more you know how to think in that code.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): before you go to the AI tool, the better you are at using it, the better you are at understanding what it’s giving you and whether or not it’s giving you the correct information. And so that, you know.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): we’re not sitting around here denying that AI exists, or denying that AI is going to become a useful tool, but we’re doing a lot of thinking and talking about what it means to be someone who’s learned how to think.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): In this liberal arts setting, before you enter into those… to using those tools.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And so, you know, we… I actually sometimes will do an assignment that says, try this thing yourself.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): then try and tell me what prompt was and what it gave you back, and then we sit and we talk and we think really carefully about what that AI… how AI came up with some code, and was it different, or better or wrong compared to the code that we were learning together. So we’re like.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): actually, like, really grappling with it together as a group, as a class.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And we also just sit down and talk about, like, what is it gonna mean? What can we bring as humans? What is it that…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): we are gonna have when we leave here that AI can’t have. I think it’s a really, like, interesting and important and sometimes scary question that, like, I just sit on the, you know, in the room, and let’s say, let’s just talk about it. Like, how can we make this project, this research project that you’re doing.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): What parts of it can we think of using a tool like AI, and what parts of it can you walk out of here and say, I did myself, and no computer could have done it?
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): that’s a really interesting thought experiment. And, like I said, I’m trying… we’re all learning about it together. Nobody knows for sure what the future’s gonna look like with AI, but I think because we can have conversations, we have classrooms that are small enough.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): that we can sit down and really grapple with things together. I feel encouraged by that. I feel encouraged by the possibility that we can learn together. So, again, I’m not an expert either in AI, but I am learning along with my students.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Anyone else want to jump in on that?
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: All right, then I will wrap us up with a question that’s come up in a couple different forms, which is, what advice do you have for students as they’re picking classes, as they’re thinking about what their first J-term might look like, what they might sign up for for their first-year seminars? What
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: cautionary tales do you have to offer? What nuggets of wisdom can you throw out there for students who are getting ready to embark on their first year of college? And, would love to hear any thoughts you have about, kind of, the first step into the academic journey at the college.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Well, the first bit of advice that I would give, probably, is,
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: think broadly. The conversation… the best conversations I have with my students around advising, around course selection is.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Have you taken the class in econ? Have you taken the class in religion? Have you thought about this?
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: Especially as you talk to a student, get to know their general interests, you can steer them. Therese said something a while ago that I want to emphasize. I think it’s actually probably a lot more important than the students realize. It’s not just that you form relationships with your professors, but your professors know one another. We know… we all know each other, and that makes a big difference for your experience.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: student comes to me and is interested in math, I can say, oh, if you… you should go talk to Steve Abbott, tell him I said to stop by, or stop by his office hours. And that’s what I would encourage when I meet with students. Don’t load up on any one thing, especially out of the gate. We have a lot of departments and disciplines here that most students don’t get to experience in high school.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: And there’s every reason to cast a broad net. We also have… it’s really common for students to come in saying, I want to major in one of these three things.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: and they stumble into a classroom that’s not in one of those three majors, and that’s… that’s what, really excites them. It is an important, really important time to explore.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: You asked about the first-year seminar. I’ll say, I’ve had a number of students who are majors in our department who
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: deliberately did not take a first-year seminar in our… led by one of our faculty, because they said, well, I know I’m going to do those, I need to do something else. I thought it was really, really good advice. I’ll take a class in religion, or in physics, or by a religion professor or a math professor, rather than film, because I know I’ll get plenty of that. Real good advice.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I’m thinking of that… that wonderful student, Bea, Chris, is she still…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Did she graduate? Yeah, she was.
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Chris Keathley, Film & Media: No, she’s graduating in the spring. She just took care of our cats last weekend.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Well, she… she was so excited when I told her about a film department, and I think…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Every time I’ve seen her, she gives me a big hug.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Calculus was not where I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be over there making movies with Chris.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: I like what Chris said a lot, and I… I would add to that.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Over the years, I think there’s some weird dis…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: little bit of disjointness between, sort of, what you have to do in high school to get into a good college. There’s a little bit of a… I think, I see a sort of vestiges of this…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: this…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Need to be a little bit perfect, or be… not make a mistake, or, you know, be a little risk-averse.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: For fear of, you know.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: whatever, a bad grade, or whatever it is you did to be admitted to a wonderful school like Middlebury, and I’m sure some other ones, those skills might not actually be the ones that will serve you well in college, that this willingness to make mistakes in front of your peers and
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And, and be… be an active learner. There’s this… at the beginning of a lot of my classes, I… I repeat this
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: phrase I heard at a benediction years ago, it was by a Jewish rabbi. I think maybe it’s from one of those great books of wisdom. It said,
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: The impatient cannot… Teach, and the shy cannot learn.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: And I just think that’s really wonderfully true, and to be a student in a class, and to be an active student.
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: helps us do our job, and helps your peers do their… get a better course. You know, classes have personalities, and the ones I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones that come with students who have kind of cracked through that reticence to maybe…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: make a mistake, say something wrong, be, you know, reveal their… their… their shortcomings, or their… something they don’t know. Oh my gosh!
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: How much don’t all of us know?
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: So if I could… I could send you with that… that feeling of…
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Confidence and just trust that… that you’re going to be in a place where the more you… the more you invest in
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Steve Abbott, mathematics: Stretching yourself, the more you’re gonna get back.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: I’ll just add that, I think some students come in really knowing what path they want, and to those students, I say, explore. Be broad.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: embrace everything you can learn from a class that you might not expect liking. There are so many students who I’ve seen take some of the intro physics classes and go, oh my gosh, I love this, I wish I’d found this earlier, and…
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: that’s wonderful. You can still take lots of physics classes, but you never know when you’re gonna find something that you love, and that clicks with you. So, even while you have a plan.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: Be open to new experiences.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: And then there are students who might not have that plan, might not know, might be looking for it. How do you find it? The answer’s the same. Still explore, still try things. If you think a certain department or class sounds interesting, and maybe you don’t get in.
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: Talk to the faculty member, go talk to the department chair of that department, and just go see, what they can tell you about other courses that they might take, what’s another way to get
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: Get involved, I think that the faculty at Middlebury want to help students
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: find their way through the curriculum in a way that’s satisfying to them. And so, chat with people, chat with your first-year seminar instructor, chat with the department chair of a department you’re interested in, and you’ll get
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: a slew of different advice to help you navigate, but the beautiful thing about a school like Middlebury is the chance to
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McKinley Brumback | Physics: Try a lot, and find what you love.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): I know we’re right on time, so I don’t know if we’re fully going around, but I would just say, if we don’t have any time, is that I completely echo. I think, don’t stress about the first year. I think there’s so much adaptation that comes with
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): coming to a new place if you’re not from Vermont, going and meeting new people, coming to a new school, coming into university, and what that means, and what college life is like, that the first year is not, gonna make or break those four years, right? So take that chance to explore, to get to know people, whether you, as McKinley said, have a path.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): completely defined already, or you’ve… I’ve seen a couple comments or questions in the chat saying, I don’t know what my major is yet. That’s great, that’s fantastic. There are probably so many more majors.
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): Here, than you might have thought about, in high school, and…
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): so take the time to kind of explore, and I don’t think it’s, you know, you’re doing something wrong if you don’t know exactly what you’re going to do in those four years, your first year, and I would,
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Therese Banks | French (she/her): echo maybe the caution of maybe the first year, just let go of the plan and see what interests you, and see what happens.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Yeah, I echo all of that. You know, try things out, right? Try different departments, try different… I mean, part of the way that the course,
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): your requirements at Middlebury are set up, kind of, I don’t know, force you, but encourage you to take classes in all different disciplines. I mean, that’s, you know, the nature of the liberal arts, and so you will, have to
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): to graduate from Middlebury take classes in many different departments. And so that’s sort of…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): Almost freeing, in a way, because you have to get your distribution, so you are gonna need to take classes and things that you might not have known that you were interested in, and that’s sort of like…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): this wonderful… freedom, right, to…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): that you have to experiment, and you might learn. Like, I would… when I went to… to college, a liberal arts college, I was gonna be a philosophy major, that was my plan. I’m gonna go to be a philosophy major, I’m gonna go to law school, I had this whole plan when I was, you know, whatever, 17 years old. And I took an econ class, and I was like, oh my goodness, this is so interesting. They’re asking the exact same types of questions that I think are really interesting in philosophy, but they’re using a different set of tools.
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): And I would never have taken that econ class if I didn’t have a distribution requirement. And so…
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Tanya Byker | Economics (she/her): you know, take advantage of the fact that you have to take all different courses at Middlebury. You’re gonna… may discover something that will change your life.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: What a great way to wrap up! Thank you so much!
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: I want to say thank you so deeply on behalf of all of the students and families and supporters who are in the audience, to all of you for being willing to spend some of your evening hanging out and answering questions with us.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: And to those of you who are attending, thank you for being here, for being curious, for bringing your full selves into questions.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: If there are any additional questions that you have, please reach out to your admissions counselor, etc. We are more than happy to help connect you with people in different departments to make sure that if you have questions about a specific academic discipline or a specific pathway at Middlebury, that we can help you get those answers.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: Reach out to the faculty if there’s a specific faculty member that you’re excited by classes that they’re teaching. But as you’ve heard multiple times throughout this entire conversation.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: This is a place that encourages experimentation and exploration and boldness, and I would encourage you all, if we’re wrapping up this evening, to carry that into the questions that you’re asking about how college is going to look like for you academically.
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Shannon Palmer | Admissions: So, with that, we’re gonna go ahead and wrap up, but thank you all so much for your time this evening, and I hope you have a lovely rest of your day, wherever you are in the world. Thank you.
Affording Middlebury (March 26, 2026)
Middlebury’s Executive Director of Financial Aid, Mike McLaughlin, breaks down how to read a Middlebury financial aid letter, how to be an informed consumer of college aid, and how to approach financing experiences at college.
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Alrighty, as folks are coming in, welcome, welcome. We’re excited to see you all virtually. As you all are coming in and getting settled in. I’m going to run through a couple of things about the format of tonight.
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So to kick us off, my name is Shannon Palmer. I’m one of the associate directors of the Middlebury Admissions Office. If you are from a swath of international areas, including Japan, South Korea, the greater Boston area, or Hawaii, I am your admissions counselor, and I’m delighted to see you here.
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Um, and we’re going to have Mike McLaughlin, who is our awesome financial aid presenter tonight, speak with you.
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Before we kick that off though, I want to mention a couple of things.
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Number one, this session is general, so this is designed for you all to get information about what your financial aid letter looks like, information about how to read it, how to understand all of the vocabulary. This is not a session that’s designed for individual financial aid questions.
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Mike’s team is amazing. They are super willing to talk with you if you have questions. We’ll drop their contact information into the chat if people want to ask individual questions about their various financial aid packages. But just keep in mind that if you do have a question, tonight’s great for general questions, not stuff about your specific package.
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Um, and with that, I am going to hand it over to Mike, and he’ll kick us off for information about affording Middlebury, and if you do have questions, please use that Q&A function so I can keep an eye on it.
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Thanks, Shannon. Hi, folks. My name is Mike McLaughlin. I am the executive director of financial aid here at Middlebury College. It’s my pleasure to be joining you all tonight. I will share my screen in a minute to kind of go through our.
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presentation, but I just want to reiterate what Shannon was letting you know. We’re going to try and run through the information that you see in your Middlebury financial aid offer, kind of run through the details of what that looks like, kind of the… some of the lingo or jargon that goes behind it that you may see.
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Um, and other financial aid awards that you would receive from other colleges, and really trying to decipher just exactly what it is that you’re looking at, because we understand it’s not a one-size-fits-all with financial aid.
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There’s a lot of differences between the schools with need-based financial assistance, merit financial assistance, combination of both. So we’re going to try and go through that all tonight and get you as much information as possible.
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Go ahead and see if I can get our presentation up here.
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And Shannon, can you see my presentation? Perfect. Alright.
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Sure can.
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So this evening… We’re going to run through some items that you will see on not just our financial aid offer, but potentially other offers from other colleges. We’ll talk about the difference between an expected family contribution or the EFC.
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Uh, which is terminology these days that is very specific to when you complete the CSS profile application, Student Aid Index, which is a newer term that is now associated with the FAFSA application or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
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Uh, cost of attendance, number of children in undergraduate college factors into how we award financial aid, how we determine financial need, and then how we meet that financial need. And we’ll talk the difference between grants and scholarships, which are the… free money that you do not need to pay back, uh, work and loans, uh, which we kind of…
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Put together in what we call our students’ self-help component.
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deciphering what is the net price versus what is perhaps the actual price that you may pay. I’ll talk about some of our support programs, and then usually there’s always questions with regards to outside scholarships and or.
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tuition benefits. Um, on the first page of your financial aid offer, you’ll see a nice welcome to the college. In here, we try and identify what we have calculated as your expected family contribution.
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we calculate that, we’ll also identify how many undergraduate students that you will have enrolled or identified you would have enrolled in college for the upcoming 26-27 year. I think it’s really important to note.
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that the expected family contribution is a number that is widely used, but it never necessarily translates into the exact number that you pay towards a college. For colleges like Middlebury and similar.
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that EFC is what we use to determine how much financial assistance we can award. There are some colleges, most colleges across country who don’t meet calculated need where there’s your family contribution, and then there’s a gap.
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Kind of beyond that family contribution. So, we’ll talk a little bit more about that, but the reason we reference the EFC in our letter and not necessarily the SAI or the Student Aid Index, that family contribution helps us determine what we’re going to award.
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in institutional funding. So that is the number that we really focus on. The number that comes across in a FAFSA, which is the SAI, is a figure that helps us and the government determine what federal financial aid you may qualify for.
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And those are much… that makes up much less of what a financial aid award is for the majority of our students. Helps determine Pell grants for our neediest students, work study eligibility, and then federal subsidized and unsubsidized loan eligibility.
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Just a little information there. So, on the second page of your financial aid award, we’re using Michael Middlebury as our example here, and Michael’s family could be generalized as having four in the family. They would have two undergraduates in college at the same time, and what we do.
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In our cost of attendance is really just break down what are our build charges, tuition, student activity fee, housing and food, and then we kind of break out what are the non-billed expenses that the college would not charge, but we understand that you will have.
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those costs, uh, coming up. And in that non-build, you may notice there’s nothing in there for books and supplies, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later, uh, but we have allowances for personal expenses, and then travel, and travel can vary.
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Depending upon where you’re coming from, our own Michael Middlebury comes from none other than Middlebury, Vermont.
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When we want to talk about how we determine financial need. For us, it’s actually a pretty straightforward calculation in how we determine financial need. We build that cost of attendance that we just referenced on the page before.
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And we subtract what we have calculated, as your expected family contribution, and that’s… that’s your financial need. So, again, very straightforward.
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non-billed costs, subtract your family contribution, and then that is the family’s financial need.
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And what we get from that is what we are able to award in the financial assistance. And Michael Middlebury’s case, if we just go back a second, we’ll see his financial… where do I get that here?
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Sorry, his net price will come up once we award his Middlebury grant award of 80,786. Now, what we get here is a net price. Now, the net price again, never the exact number that you’re going to pay because it’s only factoring in.
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What’s the cost of the college minus the free money that a student may receive? Any of those grants and scholarships.
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Uh, at the bottom portion of the financial aid award, we have the other amounts that are available. In Michael’s case, he has federal subsidized loan eligibility of $3,500, and for those more familiar, subsidized loans.
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is in interest-free while in school, so no interest built on that loan while in school. He also has $2,000 of unsubsidized eligibility.
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And then he has a federal work study position offered as well in the amount of $2,900.
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So, understanding that financial aid for Michael Middlebury, we see his cost of attendance is $95,586. We take away that expected family contribution of $8,400, and he has need.
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of $87,186. And you can see there’s the three components that make up the financial aid award. Work-study and that subsidized loan, we kind of package together, and we call that the student self-help component, and then the large grants and scholarship amount.
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of $80,786. So you can see the total aid offered meets this student’s financial need.
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I think it’s important to go through what the categories are with regards to the financial aid. There are a lot of different types of need-based grants and scholarships. There’s those that are awarded through the institution, like Middlebury. That would be in Middlebury.
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college grants or any of our… I mean, we’re several hundred endowed scholarships. All of our scholarships work towards meeting that calculated need. Part of meeting that financial need can also come from any federal grant eligibility that students have.
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A lot of students will see federal Pell Grants on their award already. That is a guaranteed grant for those that the FAFSA deems eligible. And we also have a smaller portion of what we call SEOG grants. Those are campus-based.
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need-based federal grants. And then we do have some states in here that offer state grants. Those that we see students mostly bringing with them to our campus are Vermont State grants and Massachusetts State grants.
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There are some grants like the New York State Grant or the Cal Grant. Those generally have to stay within the states that you are coming from. So they would not transfer or be eligible to come to Middlebury College. But for students in Massachusetts, those grants do travel up to Vermont.
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As we talked about, student self-help categories, these are part of a student’s financial aid award. It could be bullet number one, federal work study or in Middlebury College job. Again, that’ll be determined by your application on which one you get.
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And that’s the ability for students to work, earn that income. I’ll be honest with you, most students are taking those earnings, and they’re using them for their day-to-day living expenses. That could be help with transportation to and from home, or just.
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Going out and getting a pizza with friends. Most students will utilize those earnings for those day-to-day living expenses.
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If you are an international student, and you do not qualify for federal student loans, you will see potentially institutional loan at Middleborough, what we call Middlebury College Loan in your financial aid award. This is also.
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a subsidized loan, meaning interest-free while in school, very similar to the federal subsidized loans. And then for our students or domestic students who are eligible for federal financial aid, you will see to some degree subsidized federal loan.
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And then on top of that, if there’s room, we award the unsubsidized eligibility.
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So I want to talk a little bit about net price, which we saw a little earlier in the financial aid award versus what I would call actual build price.
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And it really comes down to what are when you look at the net price, they’re factoring in the full cost of attendance. So they’re talking about the billed fees, tuition, student activity, housing, food, and then just subtracting the grant and scholarship aid. So it comes out with what I would consider to be a higher.
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net price, but this is kind of what the standard industry is, or recommendation from the government on how we should reference this information. I like to get a little more detailed. What is my student bill going to actually look like? And in that sense.
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I like to go with what are our actual bill charges, tuition, housing, food, student activity fee. I subtract the grant aid from that. And then, as part of our student self-help component, if they utilize their loan eligibility, which for the majority of students is.
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$3,500 for that first year. Your actual bill price is much lower at $10,100. So I’d just like to draw that distinction there between kind of the net price you see and the actual bill price. Now, that actual bill price.
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can change a little bit if you elect to not utilize any of those federal student loans. And again, that is… you’re not required to take out your student loans, but they are available for students who are looking to utilize them.
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This part also comes directly from our financial aid offer, and it references our book support program. For all students who receive Middlebury need-based grants and scholarships, uh, the college will cover all books and course materials.
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Uh, that are required while you are in your undergraduate studies. The one little caveat to that is it may differ a little bit if you study abroad for a semester or for an academic year, because the whole.
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book and bookstore and book program is a little bit different, but for students who are on that need-based financial assistance, we will cover your required books and course materials. So that is… that is a great added bonus that students do not have to worry about paying out of pocket.
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So I can’t emphasize that enough. That’s been a really popular program for us. This is going to be our incoming class this year will be the fourth and final class to be implemented into this program, and it’s been very well received from our students.
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I always want to be able to talk about that program.
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One question we always receive from families is, what is your treatment of outside scholarships or benefits?
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Because we are in a unique position, we’re one of a couple dozen of schools in the country that meet full calculated need, there’s not necessarily what you would call a gap between.
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your family contribution and your financial aid. We’re filling that full need. So, when students receive outside scholarships or tuition benefits, it will impact the financial aid award.
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I like to say in Michael Middlebury’s case here, Michael Middlebury has student self-help, $2,900 in work study, $3,500 in a subsidized loan.
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students can bring in with them almost, in Michael’s case, $6,400 in outside scholarships that can reduce or replace that work and loan component before it would ever reduce Middlebury grant assistance. So I think that’s really important, because we oftentimes get questions.
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Should I bother applying for scholarships? Is it worth it? And in my eyes, it is absolutely worth it when you can have the free money of an outside scholarship or benefit, replace a work and loan component of a financial aid award.
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definitely worth it.
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Uh, the one thing that always comes after we talk about how the financial aid works, okay? Now I kind of have a rough idea of how do I… what I need to pay. Now it’s how do I transition to how do I pay it? So, option one is kind of, if you’re not gonna… Go with any special plan. There will be kind of a lump sum due, you know, split up by semester, so fall semester would come due on August 1st, spring semester would come due on December 15th.
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We have a high number of families who like to take part in our monthly payment plan option, or option number two, for a small fee, I want to say it’s about $35 per payment plan, so by semester, you can split up the payments.
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Over a 5-month period for each semester, so basically 10 months for the full academic year. I can’t stress enough how many families like to take advantage of this program and be able to spread out those payments throughout the calendar year.
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And then option number 3, for any families that perhaps did not qualify for need-based financial assistance, but you’re still tuning in because you just have some general interest in how things are work, we do offer a multi-year prepayment plan.
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Uh, for up to 3 or 4 academic years. And what you do is, uh, with that prepayment plan, you would lock in the rate, the tuition, room and board rate of the year you join the plan and lock it in for either those 3 or 4 years.
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So, again, if you have questions on that, you can definitely contact our office as well.
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One thing I really want to stress to our highest need students, uh, we do offer above and beyond programs for students that we’ve calculated a family contribution of $2,500 and lower for.
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And that program is a very generous program that purchases a new Apple MacBook for students, as well as covering student health insurance for all four years, up to 8 semesters. And I can’t stress enough.
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uh, how important these programs are to our most financially vulnerable students who may not have this level of support that they’re coming to college with. A new computer and health insurance, which, if you’re paying attention to health insurance these days, the cost just keeps.
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Rising and rising, so we’re really proud to be able to offer these programs. And again, we have gone out and notified our students who kind of fit into this category and sent out communication earlier this week. Um, so if you do have questions on that, you can, uh.
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Definitely contact us if you receive one of those emails from us.
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Uh, as we hear every year, families come at us with financial aid appeals, reconsideration requests. It’s the standard, it’s the norm of what financial aid office is around the country.
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deal with, uh, specifically this time of year, right? Mid to late March through that May 1st deposit deadline.
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I want to talk a little bit about the types of financial aid appeals that we receive that we can work with, but I want to… you know, just first start off with, you gotta keep in mind, we’re need-based financial assistance. We don’t offer merit financial aid, and that’s merit for academic, merit for athletic or extracurricular. And we really don’t match awards from other schools. What we’re really looking for when families are.
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looking for a reconsideration request. What are those extenuating circumstances that were not available to our office through either your CSS profile application, your FAFSA application, the tax returns?
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That we received. Um, we’re starting to hear from families, you know, that are, you know, Fafsa profile. They’re using your 2024 tax information, but I may have filed my 2025s recently. We’re not really looking at 2025 tax return information right now.
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As you will probably pick up upon, we require students and families to reapply for financial aid each and every year, and each year, we’ll be using that next year tax return. So the 24 is really the basis for which we’re using right now.
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That being said, we certainly understand that families go through some extenuating circumstances, and we’ve run across many throughout the cycle, um, you know, some really hard stories, whether it’s loss of.
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parents, parent loses a job. There are some real hardships out there. I would stress to please contact our office if there’s a real extenuating circumstance that was not easily identifiable through either your application materials or your tax return information.
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Um, so we want to be able to work with you and come to the best result possible to get a fair financial aid offer out for you that represents, you know, the extenuating circumstance that you may be going through.
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So I can’t stress that enough. And then just, uh, general contact information for our office. We’re student financial services. Our office handles many different areas. We handle financial aid. We handle all student billing. We handle all education finance.
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Cashier’s office. We work with students very closely when it comes to work-study and student health insurance, so it… we’re not just a financial aid office, we are a bigger office that touches all.
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student populations and all areas of the campus. So you feel free, you can always email us at sfs at middlebury.edu. We have, uh, you can always give us a call, and always visit our website. And one thing I would, when it comes to the website, I always stress.
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There’s a lot of great information on our website, whether it is just the first time you’re coming to Middlebury, but even once you’re at Middlebury, we have great information and easily accessible links.
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for when it comes time to reapply for financial aid for every year, when it comes to studying abroad and you have questions with financial aid and how that works with study abroad, or if you’re applying to any of our summer programs, like language school or School of the Environment.
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We are kind of… we have really are a one-stop shop that services all areas of our campus. And with that, I will stop our share.
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And… go to you, Shannon.
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Awesome, thank you so much, Mike. We’ve definitely had an active Q&A session in here, so I’m going to filter a couple of those questions over to you, and a lot of them are starting off with questions about what happens after this year for financial aid. So are awards guaranteed for four years? If I potentially take an extra semester to graduate for some reason, will it still be there?
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Is my financial aid going to change significantly after the first year? Can you talk a little bit about that?
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Yeah, from a starting point, I would say, you know, the question, we always start with the question.
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Does costs go up each year? Yes. Tuition costs rise each year at pretty much every school across the country. That being said, if your family’s financial situation, meaning your family size, your income, your assets, the number of students you have in college, if they stay relatively.
00:25:26.000 —> 00:25:42.000
unchanged. The way we calculate your family contribution will be in a very similar fashion each year. So, as the costs increase, your financial aid can increase. That being said, there are very… there are a lot of factors, and we do a reassessment on a yearly basis.
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The biggest fluctuation that we see in financial aid awards, and this can be positive or negative, is when families gained a student in college or lose a student in college. Because unlike what the FAFSA… the FAFSA does not… no longer factors in how many undergraduate students you have in college.
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So colleges that only rely on FAFSA information, they don’t factor that in at all.
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Because we use different institutional methodology and we collect information through the CSS profile, we are factoring in when there are multiple children coming and or leaving. So when you gain that second child or third child in college.
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Your expected family contribution is going to drop, but when you lose them, it can also increase. So I always tell folks, and a lot of you, I think in conversations I’ve had utilize our net price calculator on our websites.
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Those calculators are nice to be able to kind of play around with, like, hey, what’s my financial aid look like now with, you know, four in the family, one in college, but in a year or two, I’m going to have two in college. And you can kind of play around and just get a general sense.
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Worst case scenario, give a call to our office, and we can… I just had a conversation with a student yesterday. He’s like, I need to know what my financial aid is going to look like in two years when my older sibling graduates college. And those are conversations we can we can give you.
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a rough idea of what you’re looking at.
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Yes.
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Awesome, thank you. That’s so helpful. We do have another question about the book program, and you mentioned that this is the last year that that’s being implemented. Is that going to then continue through all four years?
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Oh, yes. When I say last… the last class, meaning we’ve implemented with the three prior classes. This is our last class to get it in, so that all classes moving forward are part of our book program. So all of our under… all of our undergraduates.
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Thank you.
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Uh, moving forward will be part of our book support program.
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Yes. Mm-hmm.
00:27:56.000 —> 00:28:03.000
Awesome, thank you. Um, another couple of questions are coming in about that self-help component, whether that’s work-study or loans. In what order is that self-help reduced if students are bringing in external scholarships?
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Does work of study go first? Loans?
00:28:04.000 —> 00:28:15.000
Yeah. Yep, so, uh, I want to preface it by saying that self-help component actually fluctuates depending upon a family’s income level.
00:28:15.000 —> 00:28:38.000
And I say that, um. When we fill self-help for students, we are looking at a family’s overall financial picture. So, for our highest need families or families making, uh, $50,000 or less in income, our student self-help component is $1,000 in the loan portion, and $2,900 in the work-study.
00:28:38.000 —> 00:28:49.000
Families making a little more than that, and that $50,000 to $80,000 category, have a $2,500 loan, and the $2,900 work-study, and then families over $80,000 have that $3,500 loan.
00:28:49.000 —> 00:29:06.000
Um, that being said, okay, if you’re sitting there and thinking, hmm, my family’s in that zero to 50,000 category, but I don’t see a $1,000 loan. I may see more in there. Just know that we’re meeting your need with the understanding that you have $2,900 in work.
00:29:06.000 —> 00:29:22.000
$1,000 alone, and then the remainder is a need-based grants and scholarships. That being said, if you have room in your cost of attendance for additional loan eligibility, we are granting. The government basically says you have to make known to a student.
00:29:22.000 —> 00:29:38.000
How much federal loan eligibility they have. So, I just want to clear up any confusion there may be there. But with regards to the order, normally we would replace the work component first, just because the work component doesn’t deduct from a student bill, like a loan would.
00:29:38.000 —> 00:29:56.000
But if a student feels strongly that they would like to have their loan and keep their work steady, we can definitely do that. They just need to contact our office. I think it’s important to note that even if the work study is removed from a financial aid award.
00:29:56.000 —> 00:30:15.000
there is still an opportunity to work on campus through a college job. It just may not be funded through the federal work-study program, and it may not mean you can work off campus at one of our off-campus agencies, but there’s still that ability to work.
00:30:15.000 —> 00:30:26.000
Thank you. Since we’re on the topic of on-campus jobs and work study, a couple questions in there about how easy it is to find jobs when students typically start working, what that usually looks like. Can you speak a little bit on what you typically see for students?
00:30:26.000 —> 00:30:49.000
No? Yeah, so our Student Employment Office is kind of part of our human resources office, and they do a really nice job of keeping all job postings online. So when students apply for these work study jobs, they’re actually applying online, very similar to anyone else who’s applying for a job at Middlebury College.
00:30:49.000 —> 00:31:01.000
Uh, so all the areas of campus will create their job postings. We’re Student Financial Services. We have students who work in our office. You may have had the pleasure of speaking with some of them if you’ve called into our office.
00:31:01.000 —> 00:31:17.000
Um, so students can apply. I always recommend, you know, students can start looking over the summer, uh, for what those positions are, um, and I, you know, my rule of thumb is try and find 3 to 5 positions that you might be interested in.
00:31:17.000 —> 00:31:37.000
Uh, because many students will be applying, you want to make sure it’s a match for your academic calendar, for the needs of the area of the college that you’re, you know, wanting to work in. It needs to be a match there. So, you know, we see students, Shannon’s got students that work over in admissions, we have students that work.
00:31:37.000 —> 00:31:57.000
up in athletics, in the library, in dining, in our academic offices. So there are many different opportunities across campus, and even some off-campus through… we have some local children’s daycare that students work at, so there are many job opportunities, but, you know, as you get into the summer.
00:31:57.000 —> 00:32:13.000
You want to start looking online, and you can start applying right when you get to campus. And, you know, we try and make sure that students who actually are awarded work-study in their financial aid awards get that kind of head start.
00:32:13.000 —> 00:32:30.000
in those positions, we try to emphasize to the employers around campus who are hiring to make sure that they’re looking at our work-study recipients first.
00:32:30.000 —> 00:32:37.000
Yeah.
00:32:37.000 —> 00:32:52.000
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so, uh, you know, if you’re asking study abroad, that means you probably have done a little bit of research already, and you know that we have, you know, over 30 programs all around the world that are Middlebury schools abroad.
00:32:52.000 —> 00:33:11.000
The great thing about our financial assistance is both federal and institutional assistance travel to all of our Middlebury schools abroad, as well as some of our exchange programs, and we have some exchange programs within the U.S, but we have exchange programs over in the UK, over in Netherlands.
00:33:11.000 —> 00:33:27.000
So, we have many, many, many opportunities. You know, a lot of our study abroad programs are very much language-based, but because we’re in the UK and Netherlands, we do have some English-speaking programs as well.
00:33:27.000 —> 00:33:31.000
Uh, that our students can travel and take their financial aid to.
00:33:31.000 —> 00:33:49.000
The downside of that, obviously there are options outside of our Middlebury Schools Abroad programs. While federal financial aid can travel to those programs, generally speaking, institutional aid does not travel to those non-Middlebury or external programs.
00:33:49.000 —> 00:34:06.000
Um, the level of financial aid can actually differ a fair amount from being on campus, and I only say that going back to the formula, cost minus family contribution is that financial need, and we fill that need.
00:34:06.000 —> 00:34:25.000
Most of our schools abroads are much less expensive than being on campus for a semester. But what I stick with telling our students, especially when they, you know, they come in and they meet with us with these very same questions, you should not see any real price difference in studying abroad.
00:34:25.000 —> 00:34:40.000
Middlebury program than if you were studying on campus. Your family contribution that we calculate to determine your aid eligibility, it’s the same whether you study on campus or you’re studying abroad.
00:34:40.000 —> 00:35:06.000
Awesome, thank you. I know that’s one of the things that I really love about getting to work at Middlebury is I get to see all of the students go abroad and have these really cool experiences. Um… There’s a couple of questions in here that folks would like to talk about in terms of what happens if you don’t take loans one year or if you’d like to decline part of your financial aid package. So, for example, you decide you’d like to take work study but not alone.
00:35:06.000 —> 00:35:07.000
What does that look like mechanically? How do students do that?
00:35:07.000 —> 00:35:24.000
Yeah. Yeah, so right now, you know, our students receive their financial aid offer through their admission slate portal. Once we have our matriculated class, we will send out what we call our finalized aid notifications. It’s really…
00:35:24.000 —> 00:35:42.000
for families who applied, early decision, they’ll see a change because we have a cost of attendance increase that we didn’t have back then, um, for our students who’ve applied regular decision, there really shouldn’t be much of any change, um, because we’ve kind of had all your information already.
00:35:42.000 —> 00:36:00.000
But what it will do is it will give you access into our Middlebury financial aid portal, and within that portal, you will have the ability to do a lot of things. You will have the ability to view your financial aid, accept any grants and scholarships that haven’t been accepted yet.
00:36:00.000 —> 00:36:15.000
You have the ability to accept or decline your work or your loan eligibility. So yeah, you will have access to do that through your Middlebury Financial Aid portal. And as you get through the years of Middlebury Financial Aid within that portal.
00:36:15.000 —> 00:36:34.000
There’s a lot of nice information, you know, that keeps track of what your loan history is over the years. It gives you college financing plan, so it’s a different format of how to look at your financial aid offer. So there’s a lot of helpful information. And then, should you choose to apply to one of our summer programs.
00:36:34.000 —> 00:36:48.000
There’ll be an application right on there that you can do if you want to go to language schools or to School of the environment or museum studies. So it’s a great one stop shop for all your financial aid information.
00:36:48.000 —> 00:37:07.000
With regards to the work and the loan, you’re not required to take or utilize any of them. They are part of the financial aid award, and they are very helpful. But you’re, you know, I always advise families. If you can avoid taking loans, avoid them as long as possible.
00:37:07.000 —> 00:37:18.000
And whether that is trying to pay out of pocket for perhaps a year or two, spend down your 529 plans, whatever it might be, whatever strategy you may have.
00:37:18.000 —> 00:37:27.000
The longer you can go without taking a loan, absolutely. That totally makes sense. And some families, students might be hesitant on.
00:37:27.000 —> 00:37:47.000
Getting a work job right away. Um, you know, you don’t want to get acclimated to college, um, kind of, you know, get their bearings and everything. And one question, Shannon, that I always get comes from our FEB students, because they’re concerned that when they come in half year, all the jobs will not be available.
00:37:47.000 —> 00:37:59.000
But with every entering Feb class, there’s got to be an exiting Feb class before that. So there are job opportunities for our FEB students when they do come in in the middle of the year.
00:37:59.000 —> 00:38:16.000
Shannon, one other thing that I think you asked before, and I don’t think I got an answer for you, was if students needed an extra semester. At a baseline, students are expected to graduate within their 8 semesters here at Middlebury Public College.
00:38:16.000 —> 00:38:31.000
We understand there are some extenuating circumstances where a ninth semester may be needed. There is a special process by which students would have to go through through our administrative committee, should they need a ninth semester here at Middlebury.
00:38:31.000 —> 00:38:53.000
as far as financial aid goes, if students are approved on the administrative side to require another semester, then we would also extend financial aid for a ninth semester as well.
00:38:53.000 —> 00:38:54.000
Mm-hmm. Yep.
00:38:54.000 —> 00:39:03.000
Awesome. Thank you. Excuse me. couple of other questions that have floated in kind of regarding how that Efc is calculated. Does debt go into that? Does debt count as extenuating circumstances? What else is used to calculate that family contribution besides like your straight up income?
00:39:03.000 —> 00:39:10.000
Yeah.
00:39:10.000 —> 00:39:24.000
Yeah, I mean, it’s… A long and convoluted formula that would put many to sleep. At its core, it’s trying to judge.
00:39:24.000 —> 00:39:41.000
What’s your family size, and what are the costs of running a family of that size? How many students will you have in college at the same time? I will say, you know, we oftentimes get questions with students who’ve graduated their undergraduate studies and are in a graduate program of some type.
00:39:41.000 —> 00:40:01.000
Once students graduate from their undergraduate studies, they’re no longer counted as that kind of in-college or sibling split that we talk about. At that point, for our purposes, they’re kind of independent, self-supporting. Families, we understand families assist and help out, but for financial aid purposes.
00:40:01.000 —> 00:40:16.000
We’re not factoring them in. We try and gain a total family income picture, and you can probably tell by the questions that are asked on the profile and the level of tax return information. We’re trying to gauge all areas of income.
00:40:16.000 —> 00:40:31.000
Um, which will be identified easily sometimes as your taxable income, your adjusted gross income, um, but we’re also looking at, you know, what are the non-taxable income areas that.
00:40:31.000 —> 00:40:47.000
families have that don’t show up on a tax return, but kind of give us a total income picture. And for most families, that’ll come with contributions to your retirement accounts. I think it’s important to know when we are calculating that family contribution.
00:40:47.000 —> 00:41:07.000
We are excluding any value that is in a dedicated retirement account, 401k, 403B, a pension plan. The value of that asset is not factored in. We do look at what is being contributed to that as part of that total income picture.
00:41:07.000 —> 00:41:17.000
From the income side, we’re taking away a lot of deductions from that, right? What do you pay in federal and state and local and social security taxes?
00:41:17.000 —> 00:41:32.000
Uh, like I said before, what is the cost of running a family of the size in the state that you’re coming from? There should be some allow there are allowances built in there for what? What should I be able to put aside for emergencies and for.
00:41:32.000 —> 00:42:02.000
education savings. On the asset side of things. We are looking at, you know, both liquid and illiquid assets, right? What do you have in cash and savings? What do you have in non-retirement investments? Equity in a home, you know, the FAFSA doesn’t look at equity in a home. Most schools who are utilizing the CSS profile application are utilizing some level of home equity. We actually cap the amount of home equity that we are factoring in. We limit it.
00:42:02.000 —> 00:42:14.000
times a family’s total income. Just keep in mind that total income is determined by our office. If you have equity in a business, equity in other real estate or farms, those kind of all factor in.
00:42:14.000 —> 00:42:30.000
That being said, our formula is heavily income-driven, not heavily asset-driven. It’s only when families have substantial assets that it can really drive that family contribution up.
00:42:30.000 —> 00:42:45.000
On the expense side, unfortunately, consumer debt does not factor in tremendously to our calculation, whether that’s debt on your mortgage, your home, credit card debt, other student loan debt. That does not.
00:42:45.000 —> 00:42:57.000
really factor into our calculations. There are some limited expenses, specific expenses that do factor in. If you have younger siblings in, uh.
00:42:57.000 —> 00:43:16.000
private school, there’s an allowance for an expense for that. If you have exceedingly high medical expenses, those can factor in as well. Um, but yeah, that’s kind of… we bring all that information together to calculate that expected family contribution.
00:43:16.000 —> 00:43:34.000
Awesome, thank you. One of the other things that might be relevant for students who are in this conversation is learning about some of the other ways that Middlebury can support financial need during their time at the college. I know this isn’t strictly student financial services run.
00:43:34.000 —> 00:43:35.000
Hmm.
00:43:35.000 —> 00:43:47.000
But can you talk a little bit about the student access grants or the student opportunity grants, as they used to be called, and kind of what that looks like for students who might be receiving financial aid?
00:43:47.000 —> 00:44:02.000
Yeah, so, uh, different area of our campus, uh, it kind of is the holder of that grant or those funding opportunities that are really meant to assist students who.
00:44:02.000 —> 00:44:18.000
have expenses that are non-education related. When I say non-education related, not exactly related to your tuition or your housing or your food. They could be emergency travel home, emergency technology needs.
00:44:18.000 —> 00:44:34.000
emergency clothing needs, uh, needs for something with regards to job interviews. We work very closely with Elaine’s area to make sure that students of, uh, that we would consider.
00:44:34.000 —> 00:44:54.000
in our highest or higher need categories are students who have the highest accessibility to funding for those programs, or for those different needs, those non-education-related needs. And Elaine’s area does a really nice job of working with students.
00:44:54.000 —> 00:45:21.000
educating them on what is available, and, you know, it’s a great support program for students who kind of come up with unexpected expenses that, you know, they happen within every household. Why wouldn’t they happen while our students are at college?
00:45:21.000 —> 00:45:22.000
Okay.
00:45:22.000 —> 00:45:34.000
Excellent. Um, there’s a couple questions floating in the Q&A about the 529 process. If families have a 529 college savings plan, what can that be used towards? And are 529 distributions from parent or grandparents treated as student income for that financial aid distribution?
00:45:34.000 —> 00:45:50.000
Yeah, so to answer the second part 1st, no, we don’t. We don’t treat that as as an income. It’s a savings plan is really what it is. So students are not penalized for utilizing 529 plans that have been saved in their name.
00:45:50.000 —> 00:46:16.000
Uh, most families will initiate any 529 payment plan directly through their provider. Um… Just a reminder, our billing usually goes out in mid-June. They will probably look for some type of a bill first, just as proof. I mean, I’m not a tax expert, though. I do play one from time to time this time of year when awarding financial aid.
00:46:16.000 —> 00:46:40.000
But there are certain tax implications with regards to it’s got to be an educated related expense. They’re kind of vague with what that can be. You know, whether that’s tuition, room and board, it could be books and supplies, although that really shouldn’t come into play could be using educational expense for.
00:46:40.000 —> 00:47:00.000
a computer, I mean, those are… tax expert is always the best one to talk to about that, but with regards to sending payment in, not a big deal. We get… it’s… the world is changing. It used to be all checks that came in, but now we’re starting to get ACH payments in for them.
00:47:00.000 —> 00:47:30.000
But again, if you have any specific questions, once our billing goes out, definitely feel free to contact our office, our Bursa’s area within our office who handles all of our student billing, can answer any questions you might have about 529 plan payments.
00:47:33.000 —> 00:47:50.000
Right. Yeah, so just to go back a little bit, remember, work study does not deduct from your student bill at all. You earn that in the form of a biweekly pay. What I recommend, and I think what most students do, I mean.
00:47:50.000 —> 00:48:05.000
I don’t know if I was a student, I’d want the money as fast as possible, which means I’m signing up for direct deposit. So you can sign up for direct deposit, and that is the easiest way to get your payment. And like I said, we work on, uh.
00:48:05.000 —> 00:48:20.000
Two-week pay calendars, so you can get paid bi-weekly, and, um, really offers great flexibility with your day-to-day living expenses when you’re utilizing, you know, I would add to that.
00:48:20.000 —> 00:48:35.000
students see, for the most part, $2,900 in their financial aid offer for work study. That generally averages out anywhere, I would say on average, if you want to earn the full $2,900, about 8 hours per week over the course of the year.
00:48:35.000 —> 00:48:52.000
It’s not a super high workload to be able to earn that full $2,900. There’s different pay scales depending upon the skill level of the job. There are increases each year from.
00:48:52.000 —> 00:49:05.000
first year to sophomore to junior, senior, as far as the pay wage scale goes, um, but they’re, they’re… I would consider them pretty generous and pretty easy for students to earn that $2,900.
00:49:05.000 —> 00:49:23.000
As some families might know, parent plus loans are now capped at $20,000 a year and $65,000 total. How does that play into the the Middlebury situation? Like, what advice do you have for families who might be looking at borrowing?
00:49:23.000 —> 00:49:27.000
to fund their students’ education that might need more than that per year.
00:49:27.000 —> 00:49:36.000
Yeah. One big beautiful bill act. Made some changes to federal student aid. So.
00:49:36.000 —> 00:49:55.000
for your students who are going to college for the first time, there are going to be new annual caps and an aggregate cap on how much Parent PLUS loans you can borrow for new students coming to college. And as Shannon said, there’s a 20,000 cap per year.
00:49:55.000 —> 00:50:09.000
65,000 for the lifetime of the student. So, if you do the math there, if you take $20,000 out the first 3 years, you’re coming up short that last year.
00:50:09.000 —> 00:50:20.000
we’re starting to see our private lenders get much more into this market now of competing for parent loan.
00:50:20.000 —> 00:50:29.000
volume. Some may be as competitive, if not more competitive, than the Parent Plus Sloan.
00:50:29.000 —> 00:50:49.000
The nice thing about the Parent Plus loan, it’s a pretty easy loan to apply for. It’s a pretty easy loan to be accepted for. The Parent Plus loan is looking for families who have good credit history. They’re not doing debt to income ratio, checks or anything like that. They’re just looking for families with good credit history.
00:50:49.000 —> 00:50:56.000
When you start getting into private lenders, private loans, whether it’s parent loan or student loan.
00:50:56.000 —> 00:51:24.000
they’re going to treat you much more like a bank would. They’re gonna judge your… your interest rates and your eligibility based on your creditworthiness. Um… So they’re gonna do that debt-to-income ratio, your full credit history. So I would. My advice be the best consumer that you can be. We have some great tools on our website. We have a section that’s dedicated specifically to plus loans.
00:51:24.000 —> 00:51:29.000
We have a section that’s dedicated to private loans, whether that’s parent or student loans.
00:51:29.000 —> 00:51:40.000
They have a nice tool called Fast Choice that allows families to go in and run through what seems to be an ever expanding historical lender list.
00:51:40.000 —> 00:51:58.000
But that tool, Fast Choice, allows you to pick multiple lenders and kind of compare against each other what the rates and terms will be on those loans. And like I said, more and more of these lenders now see an opening in the market for parent loans.
00:51:58.000 —> 00:52:05.000
And there will be more availability than there have been in prior years.
00:52:05.000 —> 00:52:21.000
All right. I think our questions are starting to slow down, so if you do have any last minute questions, please make sure you get those into the Q&A. First up, for students who might have a parent who works someplace where they have employer tuition benefits.
00:52:21.000 —> 00:52:22.000
Um, does that count towards income in the formula?
00:52:22.000 —> 00:52:26.000
Mm-hmm.
00:52:26.000 —> 00:52:37.000
No, tuition benefit is. I mean, I guess. I guess it’s all dependent on how it’s treated for your tax purposes. I don’t oftentimes.
00:52:37.000 —> 00:52:53.000
see tuition benefits on a parent’s W-2 or in their 1040 tax returns. So in my opinion, I don’t think that’s going to impact many, if any families. The tuition benefit.
00:52:53.000 —> 00:53:08.000
Again, it’s almost like taking from a savings account and making a payment towards your student’s tuition. It can, as I mentioned before, impact the overall amount of aid. You can’t necessarily stack.
00:53:08.000 —> 00:53:22.000
benefits on top of our need-based aid, but we can let it replace that self-help component of the student’s financial aid award. So there still is an added benefit to using it.
00:53:22.000 —> 00:53:38.000
Thank you. Um, another question about the 3-2 program. So for those in the audience who might not be familiar, Middlebury offers a couple of dual degree programs in connection with Columbia and Dartmouth for engineering.
00:53:38.000 —> 00:53:48.000
Um, if a student is interested in pursuing those, how does aid work? Because they’re doing two degrees over five years, like, they’re going to two different institutions, how does that reconcile with your office?
00:53:48.000 —> 00:54:00.000
Yes, and most of the students that we see kind of take that that Dartmouth route for whatever reason. I’m not sure exactly why. So they’re at Middlebury for their first two years.
00:54:00.000 —> 00:54:17.000
Apply, receive aid as they normally would that junior year they go to, let’s just say, Dartmouth for this purpose. We treat them almost like they’re studying abroad. Uh, we get what we call a consortium agreement.
00:54:17.000 —> 00:54:33.000
We make sure the student and Dartmouth fill it out, and it’s basically Dartmouth documenting what the cost of their program is, and we award financial aid very similar to as if they were on campus. We will meet full calculated need based off of that Dartmouth cost of attendance.
00:54:33.000 —> 00:54:53.000
Then they come back and finish their fourth year here at Middlebury, go back and we award financial aid as we normally would, and then that fifth year, when they go back to Dartmouth, they’re off of our books, for all intents and purposes, and they’re now on to Dartmouth’s books.
00:54:53.000 —> 00:55:03.000
All right, excellent. And then in terms of the next couple of months, the financial aid letters officially say like an estimated aid. When’s the finalized financial aid package available?
00:55:03.000 —> 00:55:21.000
Yep. Yeah, so once we have our matriculated class, uh, which we would normally wait till that May 1st deposit deadline, we will start finalizing. We’re sending out basically a second notification of your financial aid award. So our goal.
00:55:21.000 —> 00:55:37.000
We’ll be doing that along with our returning undergraduates through the month of May and into the month of June, up until when our billing goes out. So just keep in mind, our billing usually goes out about the third week in June, so we have a very tight window, May into June.
00:55:37.000 —> 00:55:42.000
In which we will send out our finalized first year awards. But again, I wouldn’t.
00:55:42.000 —> 00:55:44.000
And just to clarify, how much do those change between what that estimated 8 is?
00:55:44.000 —> 00:56:00.000
Yeah, so for our families who’ve applied regular decision, I mean, I don’t really see much of anything changing. We have our cost of attendance for next year, we have all your tax return information, so I really don’t see much changing. That really more impacts.
00:56:00.000 —> 00:56:12.000
Our families who applied in an early decision who were awarded with our prior year comprehensive fee.
00:56:12.000 —> 00:56:22.000
All right, any last words of wisdom for the folks in the audience as we’re wrapping up here on costs of attendance, the value of Middlebury, anything like that?
00:56:22.000 —> 00:56:29.000
Well, I mean… Be the smartest consumer that you can be.
00:56:29.000 —> 00:56:41.000
I love to brag about our financial aid, right? We’re one of, you know, just a few dozen schools in the country that can meet full calculated need.
00:56:41.000 —> 00:56:54.000
Are we the only school? No. Are there some schools that may be able to do it a little bit better than this? Absolutely. There’s not a lot of schools that can do it much as good as we do or better.
00:56:54.000 —> 00:57:04.000
So, but, that being said, we understand, like. There’s going to be families out there, students out there, who might get higher merit awards.
00:57:04.000 —> 00:57:14.000
than a need-based award from Middlebury. And there’s not a lot that we can do about that. Like, we’re trying to get that aid out to the families.
00:57:14.000 —> 00:57:21.000
in a more… the most equitable way possible. That being said.
00:57:21.000 —> 00:57:34.000
the value of the Middlebury education itself. You know, for families who perhaps are a little hesitant because we may have a small loan and our financial aid award.
00:57:34.000 —> 00:57:42.000
We have amongst the lowest cohort default rates in the country when it comes to students being able to repay their loans.
00:57:42.000 —> 00:58:00.000
We have some of the lowest student loan indebtedness in the country for students. We consistently see students, again, for their lifetime borrowing only 15, $17,000 in student loans.
00:58:00.000 —> 00:58:19.000
It’s a small investment in a wonderful education, a wonderful campus, wonderful faculty, wonderful staff. And, you know, I’ve been at Middlebury for over 20 years now. I’ve been around a little bit to other places. There’s nothing that compares to.
00:58:19.000 —> 00:58:26.000
The education, the atmosphere, the family that you get at Middlebury College.
00:58:26.000 —> 00:58:44.000
I think that’s a great place to end. If you do have any other lingering questions for those of you in the audience, please contact student financial services. I promise they are very nice people, and their goal is to help you. So if there is anything that you want to talk about with regards to financial aid, please don’t hesitate to reach out to them.
00:58:44.000 —> 00:58:56.000
And then if you have other questions, please talk to your admissions counselor. That’s what we’re here for. But hopefully this has been a helpful session for you all. Thank you all so much for being here, and have a great rest of your evening, wherever you are!
00:58:56.000 —> 00:59:04.000
Thank you, everybody.
Welcome to Middlebury (March 23, 2026)
Hear from Middlebury’s President Ian Baucom, Elsa Alvarado ‘18, and Bill Shufelt ‘05 on the transformative power of the Middlebury experience.
Nicole Curvin, Dean of Admissions and Vice President for Strategic Enrollment
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. There’ll be a few folks joining along the way, but I want to welcome you. I’m Nicole Curvin, I serve as Dean of Admissions and Vice President for Strategic Enrollment, and huge congratulations to the Class of 2030 and 2030.5. We are thrilled to welcome you to the Middlebury community, and I also want to shout out family members, trusted adults, anyone who supported you along the way.
I know this is a long process for many, and we are so thrilled that you considered Middlebury. And, want to also shout out the admissions team, who was really integral, that read 11,458 applications over the last 5 months, and considered and reviewed and examined all of the information that you sent to us.
This program is really designed to be a welcome kickoff. We are going to record the event, so I want to let you folks know that. And so if you want to share this with anybody else, or you want to check it out on the Admitted Student webpage, you’re welcome to do that. We’re also going to close out the Q&A and the chat box, and we’re going to just have a lively conversation and a back and forth, and share some insights with you.
We were so thrilled, as an admissions team, to review and consider who was in the pool.
And we considered the ways in which students were deeply engaged learners. We considered the ways in which students showed up for their communities, and the ways in which, I think, which is most important to me, the ways in which they took joy in the things that they were doing, whether it was writing poems, or playing on a team, or supporting a faith community.
I think all of those are really integral to who we are as a community, and the value of the liberal arts is really deeply embedded in connection and community, and so all of those pieces are really important.
I would say there’s plenty of time for us to do a lot of welcomes, and to welcome you to the community at large, but I want this opportunity to be a moment of learning. We can do a parade more of welcomes and other events.
But I want to give you some chances to think about Middlebury in a deeper way. And this evening is an opportunity for you to be able to hear from our president, hear from illustrious alumni, and really think about not just the facts and the figures, but more the experience of “what kind of community would you be joining?” We know that there are students out there who have fully committed to Middlebury but we know that there are some who are still considering their options, and you’ll have many wonderful options, I imagine. This is an opportunity to really think about outcomes, to think about what the experience in the classroom on our campus in Vermont is like.
And I hope that you take away a few gems, a few insights into what the personal experiences were of our panelists, and more importantly, the ways in which you might connect to the same things as well.
Before I move on, I want to introduce the folks that’ll be sharing their insights this evening.
First up is President Ian Baucom. We are so incredibly amazed and so humbled that he joined us last summer as our president, and he has come in with full force, thinking about strategic vision, thinking about our future, and thinking, I think, most importantly, about the transformational nature of the liberal arts education.
Next up is Elsa Alvarado, Class of 2018. She was a political science major when she was at Middlebury, and she has launched into an amazing career in global affairs, political structures. She has spent time at the Department of Defense and the Department of State, and she’s currently working as a political consultant.
Next up is Bill Schufeld, who joins us as the CEO of Athletic Brewing Company, the fastest growing non-alcoholic brand in the world. And he served as an economics major here at Middlebury, and also played on our football team. I am so thankful that they are spending time sharing some insights into what Middlebury is all about, what their experiences were, and more importantly, how Middlebury launched them into the world. So without further ado, I want to turn it over to President Baucum.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
04:58
Thanks, Nicole, and thanks, all of you for joining us, and let me just say congratulations, you got in. Some of you have known for a little while, some of you I know, Saturday morning, I think starting around 7.15 or so AM, messages started to go out. We’ve been waiting for these days for a long time, but we know we haven’t waited as long as you have. And, I’m the president of Middlebury, and I’m also the father of six kids, so I’ve gone through this 5 times, and I just want to say congratulations to you, and we are so thrilled that you have shown an interest in us.
And we feel so lucky.that we have the opportunity to invite you to join us. So, so thanks. Congratulations, thank you, you’re in, and for some of you, you are about to make what is almost… Certainly, maybe not certainly, but, the most important decision of your life.
You’re about to decide where to go to college.
And what we really want to try to do tonight is just to spend a little bit of time with two of our alums who made that same decision. Made that same decision 20 years or so ago, made that same decision about a decade or so ago, and to do so also from my perspective, I made that decision a year ago.
Just about exactly this time, when I was invited to be president. I’d spent the previous 11 years at the University of Virginia, a place I loved, a fantastic university, and then the opportunity to go to Middlebury arose.
And I needed to make the decision that… that you are all making.
And I chose Middlebury. And it has been the best academic choice of my life.
I’ve been invited into a family, I’ve been invited into a community, I’ve been invited into an institution of higher learning, I’ve been invited into a place with a profound sense of civic responsibility and civic engagement.
I’ve been invited into a place that, at its heart, is about its students. So I can testify to you, with absolute integrity, that given the most important academic choice of my life, I chose Middlebury.
And we hope you will, too.
So, we’re going to spend this in conversation. I’m just going to be asking our panelists some questions, and we’ll have a chance to discuss things together. And so, Elsa, Bill, I want to start with something just clear and obvious. What led you to Middlebury? What guided you in making that decision? How did you get from where you were when you were a senior in high school to choosing to come to this amazing place?
And Elsa, maybe I think I’ll start with you, and then Bill, turn to you.
Elsa Alvarado - Middlebury ‘18
07:52
Sure. So for a little bit of context, I’m a born and raised New Yorker, I’m from New Queens, New York, and I had been used to being in the city my entire life. I’m a public school kid, my classrooms were 40 to 45 students. And I thought I was gonna be in a city for college. I had applied to a lot of schools in New York City, a lot of schools in DC. I was already very passionate about politics.
And my French teacher had told me, you’re a star in French, I know you want to, you know, study abroad one day, you should think about Middlebury. And so I applied to Middlebury, by the recommendation of my French teacher, and it was the only rural school I applied to, the only liberal arts college that I applied to, and I remember getting the letter, from the admissions office when I was accepted, and it had a handwritten letter that said. “we loved your language learning website, we think you would be a great fit at Middlebury,” and they just listed out a couple of bullets of things that, that they liked about my application. And I felt…
that I wasn’t just being accepted because I was accepted because of my grades, like, they really took the time to understand who I was as a person. And I said to myself, I’m probably gonna be in DC for the rest of my life, why not spend those 4 years somewhere totally different? So I think there was an adventurous part of me that was…you know, interested in being in Vermont, a place… a 180 degree difference from New York City.
And so I took the plunge because of the combination of being in a new environment, but also still doing what I loved, which was studying French and political science. But it was definitely that kind of decision that… it took me days to decide that, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
09:33
That’s great. Bill, before you jump in, just because there’s something that’s resonant there. When I was interviewing, for the role as president, the vice chair of the board of trustees, Kirtley Cameron, Middlebury alum, opened that discussion by saying, “hi Ian, I’m Kirtley, do you mind if we call you Ian?” And there was something that just captured, honestly, my heart at that moment.
Because I felt that I was coming to a place where people knew each other by name.
And they knew the person and the story behind the name. And that, I had a chance to be somewhere where people were seen. And Elsa, I hear that, in what you’re saying about that moment where you got a letter back, and it wasn’t just, congratulations, applicant number 475.
It was Elsa.
We want you.
Elsa Alvarado - Middlebury ‘18
10:34
Exactly.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
10:35
We care about you, yeah. Bill, Bill, what led you to Middlebury?
Bill Shufelt - Middlebury ‘05
10:39
Yeah, I… I would love to tie back to that in one second, too, because that’s, like, extremely relevant to my experience. Just in a super quick intro, Bill Schufelt, Class of 2005.
You know, 25 years ago, I was in the same boat as all the students here, receiving those highly coveted letters, and I’m so thankful every day, and more and more with each passing year, the decision I made in that moment.
I grew up in the New York City suburbs. I had a wide range of interests in high school, a very wide net of academic interests. You know, I took Latin and different things with my electives. I was an EMT on the ambulance, I played 3 sports, and basically my mom had always encouraged me to do less. She was worried about me overheating or something, but I just… I had a very wide generalist range of interests and things I wanted exposure to, and when I looked at… I did a big range of school visits to get a feel for all the different colleges, from, like, very narrow like, schools or Ivy League schools, and had family go to both NESCAC and Ivy League, so had a decent perception of it.
And the thought of going to a school and having a very narrow specialty terrified me. And I wanted a school where I could really stretch my imagination, as well as get out there into the wilderness, too. Like, I love the outdoors.
Middlebury sports are incredible, the extracurricular activities, no matter what your level of experience is, like, I… like, it was just kind of the perfect spot for me as I considered that.
And really leaning into the community, I did go on a number of visits for football, which was my primary, the three sports, and at the Middlebury visit, I felt immediately welcomed. People came up to me and were asking genuine get-to-know-you questions and hoped you came to the school.
And I hadn’t actually been at school very long as a freshman, and the depth of those bonds really came through, where, I unfortunately lost my mom to cancer 3 months into my freshman year. Which, my mom was, like, the anchor of our family, like, the optimist, the spirit of our family, and it was so uprooting.
And I looked up at the service, and there were 30 Middlebury people there already, and I’d only known these people 3 months and they’d traveled 4 and a half hours to be there in that moment for me, and I think…
That depth really hit home to me, and honestly, even though college on paper is a short window of time, the bonds I created at Middlebury have lasted lifetimes, literally. And as my career goes on in different directions, I bump into more and more interesting Middlebury people in the world every single year.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
13:20
That’s great. Thank you, Bill, and thanks for letting us know about your mom.
Bill Shufelt - Middlebury ‘05
13:24
Thank you.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
13:25
Sorry for her loss.
I want to take you both back, to 18 years plus about 6 months. So you’ve received the letter, and now you’ve arrived. And family has sent you off, maybe family has been with you to drop you off. You’ve moved into a dormitory, classes have begun. And if you could just kind of cast your minds back to those opening months, or even year, year and a half, as you’re arriving… what impressions were left on you? What… what… is resonant in your Middlebury memory of “I’m here?” What, what, what persists? What, what, what holds on? What, what feels like, okay, this has stuck with me for a long time, and Bill, maybe this time we’ll start with you. Just some early things about what it felt like. We’re going to get into more detail, but what it felt like, and what… What struck you about, “here I am, and this world is unfolding around me, in this space?”
Bill Shufelt - Middlebury ‘05
14:41
Yeah, it was, I think, kind of at once both comforting and somewhat familiar, in a way where, you know, you do naturally bump into a lot of people on, like, similar academic interests, or sports interests, or activities, feeling it out at the dining hall, and, you know.
I generally try to just say hi to as many people and, like, you know, kind of open the surface area up a little bit to get to know people.
But it… it was weird, it wasn’t… wasn’t overwhelming, it was just a lot of opportunity, and…there’s the very obvious, like, class curriculum, and you’re off and running, and you’re scheduled, and then there’s a lot of opportunities to meet different people. But also, it’s the fall in Vermont, and it’s absolutely gorgeous, and you feel like you’re in the perfect place in the world, too.
So, more to do, more excitement, more people to meet, but at the same time, not overwhelming somehow.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
15:38
Great, thanks. Elsa?
Elsa Alvarado - Middlebury ‘18
15:40
Yeah, for me, it was really, eye-opening, because I actually had… did not visit Middlebury before I accepted, so my first day on campus was move-in day. It was my parents and I’s first time in Vermont, so we had no idea what to expect.
And there was a sense of excitement. There was, of course, a little bit of fear, having been in a place where, you know, I was in the city that never sleeps, going to a place where now I could look up and see the stars. So I was very excited during orientation to do all of the outdoorsy activities that I had never been exposed to, like stargazing, like hiking. My trip took us to Treehouse Cabins, where we, volunteered at a local shelter, and I just… I had a list of all the things I wanted to try, because it was such a new environment.
And then the other thing that struck me, once we started meeting our professors, were how small the classes were. That was so different for me, because I was used to, you know, barely getting to know a teacher in New York. Maybe they got to know your name after 3 months.
But my classes at Middlebury, like, my first year seminar, was, like, 14 students, and so the fact that the professor took their time to get to know us, I had never had that experience. So I already started to think about all of the friendships and relationships I could make on campus, because there was the space and the time to do so that I just had… had not had in New York. And that really… that really struck me at the beginning.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
17:10
Thanks, Elsa. It’s actually a perfect segue, because my next question was going to be about faculty and sort of people who made a difference in your life. But just one note for students and families, there, part of the charm and wonder of this place is we really try to experience it together, and so I decided that I should try to experience Middlebury at least for a day, in the same way in which students do.
So I moved into a dormitory for a day, over winter term, and I spent 24 hours living in one of our dorms, and my wife sent me off with a little backpack, and I went into the dorm. I actually remembered, walking in a little bit of that sense of what it was like to be, 18 years old arriving, and not quite sure what it’d be like, not quite sure if I’d have friends, not quite sure if people would talk to me. And… I will tell you, the experience of being in a dormitory on the Middlebury campus, just for me for one day, reminded me of what a marvel a residential liberal arts college is. The highlight was, I went to the cafeteria, I got a tray of food, I sat down at a table, I ended up sitting with a bunch of just amazing student athletes from our football and track and field team. And we sat for about two and a half hours, over dinner in the cafeteria. No one looked at their phones. And we just talked.
And, that… that balance of a little bit of trepidation, a little bit of uncertainty, and a sense of welcome was real for me. I know I’m the president, I know it’s a little bit… I know it’s a little bit false, but… but I’ll tell you those… those students welcome me with open arms, and I think they’re going to welcome you and your students, too.
Elsa, so you, you, you, you led us just to this… this key question of, you know, one of the reasons why you go to a small liberal arts college, is because there is this opportunity to get to know your faculty. We have a 8.5 to 1 – for every eight and a half to nine students, there’s a faculty member, which is just kind of remarkable. Classes are small. You can meet a professor in your first year seminar and take courses with them throughout your time. You can meet someone in your second or third year who has just a huge impact on your life, and that really is one of the transformative and very special reasons to come.
Could you just talk about that a little bit more? And then, Bill, I’ll turn to you as well. Let’s kind of tease that out a little bit. A faculty member, or a course, or it could be a coach, or a librarian, or someone who worked in one of the art museums, a curator, just any stories of people who made that difference in your life.
Elsa Alvarado - Middlebury ‘18
20:15
Absolutely. I would say, for me, my very first J term, January term, I chose a class for government and politics, taught by former Governor Jim Douglas, and I… just the fact that the course was taught by a former governor, I was already invested.
And what struck me was that for every single writing assignment that we had, it was, like, we got to choose what we wrote about. So, whether it was how women got the right to vote in Vermont, or a recent bill that passed, it was a choose-your-own-adventure kind of course, while still having the foundation of understanding the structure of Vermont. And I became really close with the former governor, and he’s still, to this day, one of my closest mentors.
And what struck me was how many classes with him I took, because there were some classes where he would collaborate with a political science professor, and I would take that class as well, or I would become a speaker for his future classes.
So, the fact that I was able to develop that relationship throughout my four years, and even now, having graduated almost a decade ago, has been really, really wonderful, and I would… I just would have never thought that that kind of exposure politically, would have existed in Vermont. But there were so many opportunities like that.
The other example I have is Professor Yuen in the political science department. She taught a class called Weapons of Mass Destruction, and, you know, I thought it was going to be a lecture, and… and we were just gonna understand different, different events in political history that had to do with weapons of mass destruction. But she made the class interactive, where we would play games, and strategic games, and Jenga, and simulate negotiations as if we were the leaders at the State Department doing these things. And so she created stakes for us that made it feel really impactful. I ended up becoming a tutor for her class after, but those were experiences that I still think about even now, because they really prepared me for the career that I have today.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
22:11
That’s great, thanks. Yeah, Bill?
Bill Shufelt - Middlebury ‘05
22:14
Yeah, I… I mean, I don’t want to downplay other experiences I have, but one definitely stands out in my mind. And I would say as a backdrop to this, I would… I’m… I just was never the personality who would go to office hours, or get any extra help, or… I’m a do-your-work-operator and don’t talk to anyone kind of person. In… in my… in some ways. But I was working… I had this incredible professor, Scott Pardee, for corporate finance one year and my economic seminar the next year. He brought amazing experience to Middlebury from… he was a leading executive in financial firms, the New York Fed, and great perspective.
And one of my favorite projects of college was a corporate finance project in his class, and I went in to talk to him about that project as it was taking shape. It was, like, a very, very long multi-month project.
And he asked me, you know, on campus, all the major financial firms come through, and you get great exposure. You get a chance to do that first round of interviews on campus, and then you go to New York City for the Super Days, and so I’ve been going… he asked, like, what I was doing, and I said, “oh, I just got back from, like, the JP Morgan Investment Banking Super Day.”
It’s like, “what have been your favorite parts of economics so far?”
And I happened to mention that I really liked this trading session addendum to, like, a microeconomics course that we had done. And he zeroed in on that comment in a way that would never happen in a 300-person seminar at a large school. And he started pulling books on trading and technical analysis off the shelf, and gave me books that weren’t in the curriculum, and was like, you may want to consider looking at these if, like, that really got your interest.
I’m like, specifically trading was not, like, the hot track for finance at this time. Like, I had left high school wanting to go into New York City finance, and probably investment banking.
And he got me to a firm, Knight Capital Group, that would not have been on my radar, but after being on Wall Street for a few years, I learned it had, like, the top trading reputation on Wall Street. He gave me special skills to ace an interview and get my foot in the door there. And 5 years later, I was at one of the world’s top hedge funds in a path… that I couldn’t have gotten to that hedge fund in another way, really. And it was just, like, really unique customizing… customized coaching, and I ironically later, ran the summer internship program at the hedge fund, Point72, and the acceptance rate is about 50 times as hard as Middlebury, so I was very thankful for the track Professor Pardee steered me on. But that was just one of many examples.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
24:50
That’s great, Bill, thank you. We don’t have time for this tonight, but I’m sure Nicole and her team will keep following up. It’s not just that we have (and we truly do have) faculty members who will just pour themselves into the lives of our students. I hear this with every student I meet, I hear it with every alum, I meet. There’s also an absolutely phenomenal alumni network, and one of the powers of a small place is if you show up in New York, if you show up in DC, if you show up in LA, if you show up in San Francisco, if you show up in Atlanta, if you show up in London or Paris, or Santiago, and you have that Middlebury name, that network reaches out. Artists, climate activists, corporate leaders, governmental leaders, people in elected office, people in civil society.
And I do want to underline that, the power of a small place.
The power of deep and intimate bonds, what can happen, when a whole community is built around this knowledge that we all made this very specific decision to come here. And at the core of it is opening the door of possibility for young people. Just 100%. That’s why we exist.
Okay, a couple things. We’re going to turn in just a few minutes to life after Middlebury, but I’ve got one or two, two last Middlebury questions. What did you do when you weren’t in class? And this can range from, the serious to the quirky, the, you know, the deeply, you know, civically committed to the, that was just fun, parts of life, that were, that were important.
important to you from, from Middlebury time. So, Elsa, I’ll start with you, and then, and then Bill. Just a couple things you did when you weren’t in class.
Elsa Alvarado - Middlebury ‘18
26:39
Yeah, I’ll say I was a workaholic. I tried to have as many jobs as possible, so my senior year, I had about 4 jobs. I worked at admissions, worked at the library, I worked as a writing and Spanish tutor, and I was also a babysitter for many of the professors on campus. So I was just working all the time, but I also had, you know, I was part of extracurriculars like Alianza, which was, like, the Latino activist group on campus.
I also, like, did a lot of the outdoorsy things, and I would go on the hikes, and I would go to the swimming holes, and go to Lake Dunmore. So I definitely took advantage of the environment that we were in to the max. And of course, I was involved in the political scene, so every election night, I was there waiting for the results, but I was primarily a workaholic.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
27:28
That’s great. Thanks, Elsa. Bill?
Bill Shufelt - Middlebury ‘05
27:33
So, on… on the one hand, got involved in a lot of official school activities. Football team was a big part of my on-campus life, and really, I try to be as involved in that as I can be as an alumni as well, giving back. But also unofficial athletics, too. I played intramural softball, which is a lot of fun. I mean, and there were so many ways in a serious academic setting, like, life is so stressful these days. There are a lot of ways to unplug and relax and find community and learn from other people and build good relationships on campus outside of the classroom, too.
I’m a huge skier, still am, so I skied way too much at Middlebury, but the proximity is world-class. You know, you have 5-plus great resorts that all have special student discounts, including the Middlebury’s own Snowbowl, basically within 30-40 minutes of campus. So I absolutely took advantage of that while I was on campus. And that’s really carried through in my adult life, like, the amount I got outdoors and traveled around the states with friends and went on really memorable experiences, either visiting other colleges, whether in the NESCAC or Ivy League, within driving radius… there’s a real, like, ability to move around. I get up to Vermont all the time with my family still, at least a few times a year. I was there last weekend with my son skiing.
And the more I go around the state, I’m like, I’ve been here. Like, I covered so much of the great state of Vermont that is absolutely gorgeous, it’s challenging in an outdoorsy way, there’s a really good forward culinary scene, because it’s such a creative state, and so there really is so much going on in the state of Vermont, too, that it’s a really fun ecosystem to plug into for the four years.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
29:12
Thank you. One last, while you’re at Middlebury, and Bill, you’ve already shared this with us a little bit, but I did want to ask you a question about moments when life was hard and challenging. College is about realizing possibility, it’s about joy, it’s about fun, it’s about learning, it’s about discovery, it’s about opening. And it’s also about transitioning into early adulthood. And for all of us, there are going to be some challenging moments in that, and how a college and a community helps you think through, and is around you in a challenging time is a key part of this, so…
Bill, thank you for already sharing this story about your mom. I really, really appreciate that. Is there just another moment or time, whether it’s a moment or just kind of something that was challenging, and what you feel like you’ve learned from Middlebury then, and that might have continued in your life? And then Elsa, I’ll ask you the same question.
Bill Shufelt - Middlebury ‘05
30:17
For sure, and thank you so much for the kind words. It’s one of those things with, as you get 20 years in the future and, like, have some perspective on it, it’s like, wow, I really was in the perfect place. It was better for me to be there than at home, even. And… you know, it could have so easily gone sideways and trailed off, and, you know, Middlebury was there to collect me in a number of different ways, whether that was the, like, busy academics, the strength of the football team, friends and family, and those bonds that… I think a lot of deeper bonds were really formed in that period, too, that I’ve carried through to my life.
But switching back to academically, too, I know that the school didn’t just, like, coddle me and let me not go to class and stuff. I… I came to Middlebury thinking I was a great writer. I, you know, had probably, like, most kids going, or most adults going to Middlebury, you’ve achieved a level of academic excellence to get your foot in the door. I thought I was a great writer, and right around that time, I got my first long-form paper absolutely trashed by a professor, one of my freshman year history professors, and it was one of those moments where I really had to take my writing down to the screws and rebuild it up. There was a lot of very thoughtful commentary, and that’s a theme that builds throughout Middlebury, is, like, it’s such a writing-intensive school.
But those skills, I will say, have hit at every moment of my career. Early in my financial career, you know, I tried to make a name for myself by being one of the earliest people on the desk, and I wrote a morning newsletter that ultimately thousands of people started to read and depend on as the first thing they looked at on their phone when they woke up.That is, like, Middlebury punchy writing and, like, effectiveness right there. Senior people in my firm started relying on me to edit their… their client memos and stuff every single morning, too. And that was, like, Middlebury’s liberal arts skills building on their effectiveness, driving me ahead in the room I was in, a 500-person trading floor room.
But then transitioning to athletic brewing and the entrepreneurial journey, writing pitch decks. I was writing pitch decks for a segment that had been totally stigmatized and dead for 80 years, and needed a total transformation, and I was gonna do it in a really expensive way. And so, I’m writing pitch decks, and you know, business pitches, it certainly has helped me every step of the way.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
32:37
Great. Thank you, Bill. And we’re going to get back to the… that’s the pivot next after this. We’ve got two questions left, everyone, just so you know, in terms of watching your time, the pivot is kind of post-graduation to kind of where you are now, but also just if you could take us back to moments like that, or…
Elsa Alvarado - Middlebury ‘18
32:51
Sure. Yeah, I think for me, one of the most rewarding, yet challenging experiences was studying abroad in Paris. I mean, for me, it was the first time that I was really independently abroad, having all of my courses in French, I mean, my brain was exploding every second, just trying to grasp, “oh my god, I’m living abroad, I’m not with my family, I’m not at Middlebury’s campus,” where I had already been over 2 years. Everything was new, and what I liked was that I was able to have this experience and study at Science-Po, but also the Middlebury School in France was there. So even though I was challenged and I was with French students in my day-to-day courses, we still had the Middlebury School that helped us with, you know, like, French grammar skills, or how to, like, you know, order XYZ at a store, or just even trips to, like, better explore Paris in a familiar group. So, while it was challenging, I feel like it really pushed me, and it was one of those experiences that taught me that the best thing we can do is just be adaptable to new and evolving environments, and it led to me not having as hard of a time when I eventually moved to China.
But yeah, I think being abroad is one of those things that’s just once in a lifetime, so I always tell anyone that I can that I really encourage it, especially at Middlebury, since it’s a major part of the culture there.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
34:12
It is, and let me, you probably know this, but, students and families, two things that Elsa has mentioned. We have a winter term, so fall, spring, fall, spring. It’s a month, winter term on the campus. We also have courses off of the campus, that’s part of the curriculum, it’s part of the whole, structure, and we get to offer intensive versions of existing courses, but also a lot of new experimental things, bringing in faculty, bringing in people from the political world, people from government, people from industry, artists, so that’s part of it. And as I hope you know and probably know, one of the things that Middlebury is most renowned for are our schools abroad.
So our heart is the college. Our heart and our core is the residential liberal arts experience in the town of Middlebury in Vermont, but all of our students have access to 30 sites around the world – and I do mean around the world. Europe, Latin America, Africa, East Asia, the Caribbean. So, extraordinary possibility.
Okay, I promise two last questions, because I know for some of you it’s late, and for some of you, you probably haven’t had supper yet. So let me, depending on which coast you’re in or which time zone you’re in.
Could you both talk just a little bit about your path from Middlebury to… to where you are now? Just kind of… you graduate, here you are. How’d you get… how’d you get there, and are there one of two things that you took from Middlebury that are key?
You’ve already alluded to these in many ways, but if you could just talk through that again, I’m going to keep bouncing. Elsa, I’ll start with you. Just remind people what you’re doing now, how you got there, and a couple of key things that Middlebury gave you that helped you.
Elsa Alvarado - Middlebury ‘18
35:58
Absolutely. I really was set on pursuing more education after Middlebury, and I ended up applying for a fellowship, a one-year paid master’s in Beijing called Schwarzman Scholars. I applied as a senior at Middlebury, and I was prepped at Middlebury by professors who gave much of their time helping me prep. I ended up not getting it that year, and then I applied again, and I got it the second time, because I was really persistent. I really wanted to go to China. And so, I was able to work for a year, and then I went to Beijing, got my master’s in Global Affairs, and that basically started my career in the foreign policy world.
After that, I worked on a presidential campaign, ended up being appointed by President Biden to serve at the Pentagon as Director of Strategic Communications. I was there under the invasion of Ukraine, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and it was… it changed my life. That started my career in DC, and since then, I’ve been in the private sector, advising CEOs, nonprofits, advocacy groups on all of their communications, and I hope to one day get back into government, because I really did enjoy serving.
But when I think about the impact that Middlebury had…. I think about the small classes, and how much was the emphasis on the conversations that we had in class, hearing different viewpoints, debating in a respectful way, and… and just being open to perspectives from international students as well. I mean, when I was in China, I was with students who had never visited the U.S, had their own opinions about our history, our culture, our political system, and I think being able to have had those conversations in my undergraduate years, I was even more ready as a graduate student, and especially now.
So, I think that was a really big part, and then secondly, I think just the fact that I always look at things with an international lens, that work started at Middlebury.
I think there’s a misconception that because Middlebury’s in Vermont, you’re really just, like, isolated, and you’re not thinking about… about things that impact the world, but every single day, we were challenged to think about a global impact. And it really left a lasting impression on me.
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
38:11
Yep. Two quick pickups. We have an office in DC, and part of our strategic planning, and this will be true for students who are coming in, is we want to be much more fully present in DC, and I think it is true to say that we are probably the most global liberal arts college in America. And that’s our student body, it’s our curriculum, it’s our presence abroad. So, if that’s something, those two pieces, the DC presence and what it means to be a liberal arts college both grounded in a beautiful place in Vermont and open to the world. I truly think that’s a… that’s a Middlebury advantage, and I mean that. It’s one of the things that led me to Middlebury, in addition to our climate commitments and other issues.
Bill, can you tell us your story of how you got from that — being a senior playing football, studying econ, to actually having innovated… being one of the world’s leading entrepreneurial innovators.
Bill Shufelt - Middlebury ‘05
39:06
Oh, thank you so much. It’s definitely a bit of a wander, for sure, and I think it all stems back to, like, at Middlebury really fostered a… you know, a lifelong love of learning, and really leaned into my generalist interests. You know, I knew when I went to Middlebury, I didn’t want to go a thousand miles deep on one topic. I wanted a really strong breadth of knowledge coming out of there, and that for sure delivered.
And so, yeah, I graduated from college with, like, I became a prolific reader at college, and then that continued on after, which, and then really just, like, I’ve been on the quest of self-improvement, lifelong learning, and I think… that journey has led me on a number of different things. You know, I fell in love with trading and Wall Street. I got my CFA in the years preceding college, as I, like, dove deeper on that interest. And then somewhat moved up the investment process to Point72, you know, one of the world’s top hedge funds, but…
I was on this journey of my own where, you know, it was very self-fulfillment, health and wellness oriented. I was thinking about all the big goals I had in life, and they weren’t all necessarily being met by this career that I had just had 20 years of assumptions that that was going to be my career forever.
And so I, with the encouragement of my wife, followed this new interest, and… That, honestly, was really where the generalist depth of Middlebury’s education and that lifelong love of learning really kicked in. It was, you know, rather than being a very narrow interpreter, I got to explore this depth of all the different topics, whether that’s, you know, very close to relevant things for me, like finance and operations.
But then sales, marketing, legal, HR were all, like, developing passions for myself, and I honestly think that would have been much more difficult coming from, like, a more narrow like, bigger school, or more… with, like, more specialized majors. And I… I will say, in the Middlebury network, there have been two times where the Middlebury network has been super relevant in my career. One was during the financial crisis in 2008. I was trading a financials portfolio at Knight Capital Group, which coincidentally, was about 20 times as busy as any other portfolio for a period of time there.
And the Middlebury network of people on Wall Street and all different perspectives in the financial crisis to get a handle on what was going on in real time, trade notes, do dinners after to dive even deeper after these very stressful work days, and have both community and understanding. Like, it was such a strong moment of the Middlebury network for me in my career at that point.
And then, as I’ve gone into entrepreneurship, it’s been really amazing to see how many other entrepreneurs there are coming out of Middlebury these days. Some of my best friends have gone on to different entrepreneurial pathways and had really exciting journeys. You know, I’ve got two friends in tech, software, AI journeys right now that are really exciting, and, but that’s really just, scraping the surface, so…
Ian Baucom, President of Middlebury
42:14
Thanks. Let me… I’m actually, I think I’m gonna, end with that, so that I keep us on time, but one of the things I’ve been struck by is that there is this entrepreneurial and founders mentality, at Middlebury, and it ranges across broad domains. So, from people who are founding new companies, people who, really like, like Bill, and, Bill, but you’ve done something remarkable. You’ve built a company, and you’ve built a company, you know, whose product people love, and that is also kind of a great boon to public health.
So, you know, and so there’s…There’s, there’s that entrepreneurship, one of the co-founders of Salesforce is a Middlebury alum, people are interested in the arts.
Let me just name one more, and then I’ll move beyond that. Sean Ryan, who is a Middlebury alum has, I think, either 3 or 4 shows running on Netflix right now, so, has really helped sort of create new forms of writing, and who every year brings Middlebury students who are interested in being screenwriters, filmmakers, producers to LA to spend time with, to spend time with him.
And we’ve been entrepreneurial and founders, social, social entrepreneurs, and in activist movements. 350.org, probably the world’s most important climate active movement, emerged from a winter term course at Middlebury.
And so that, that span of market-changing. socially engaged, artistically invested capacity to found things, has… has been, I would say, one of… one of… the unsurprising great discoveries for me, about the magic of Middlebury.
Okay, Vice President Dean Curvin, we said we would go till 8.45. It is 8.44, and so I’m gonna… I’m gonna release this – I’ll spreading things back to you with
Bill, Elsa, just profound thanks to you, and above all, students, families, really, really appreciate your joining us.
You will feel good if you choose us.
And we will honor that choice. So, we hope you’ve given you a little bit more to think about as you make this big, important decision in your lives. Nicole, back to you.
Nicole Curvin, Dean of Admissions and Vice President for Strategic Enrollment
44:31
Yeah, thank you so much, Elsa and Bill, and of course, President Baucom. I feel so lucky and energized every day to be in community with folks who are thinking about the world from every different angle.
So, huge shout out and congratulations again to the Class of 2030 and the Class of 2030.5.
And, you know, stay tuned. We have a lot of events coming up, both virtual and on campus for admitted students, and this is just a launching pad for you to start asking some questions about what you’re hoping to get out of a college experience. So thank you for your time, we really appreciate you, and we look forward to hearing from you again soon.
Take care.
What Makes Midd Unique (April 1, 2025)
Join this session to hear about what makes Middlebury such a unique and special place! Current students and Admissions staff will discuss and field questions on a range of topics. We’ll cover language programs and study abroad opportunities, interdisciplinary environmental studies, February admission, our location and community in Vermont, and more.
The Midd Experience (March 19, 2025)
Join us for an inside look at student life beyond the classroom. This virtual event features representatives from Residential Life, Student Government, and Student Activities, along with student organization leaders. Learn about on-campus housing, student leadership, and opportunities to get involved. Gain insights from current students, ask questions, and explore ways to build your community. Whether you’re interested in leadership, events, or student organizations, this session will help you navigate campus life. Don’t miss this opportunity to connect and prepare for your college experience!