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Academics at Middlebury

Middlebury seeks to create a transformative learning experience for our students, with rich opportunities to explore across more than 45 departments and programs. Meet our panel of professors to learn more about the distinctive features of our liberal arts and sciences curriculum and the exciting academic experiences that await you.

- Hello, everyone, and welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. I hope you won’t get tired of us saying congratulations again to the newest members of our Class of ‘26 and ‘26.5. Thanks to you and to your trusted adults for joining us for this virtual preview day session to learn more about academics at Middlebury. My name is Michelle Nelson. I use she/her pronouns, and I’m an associate director of admissions here at Middlebury. I will be moderating today’s webinar, and I’m joined by a panel of wonderful faculty colleagues who will introduce you to the type of learning environment that exists here at Middlebury. Over 300 faculty members teach courses across more than 45 departments and programs, which offer both majors and minors. No matter what you choose to study, you’ll find that your academic experience will include multidisciplinary exploration, reflection, discussion, and close mentorship from professors. You will certainly benefit from the eight to one student faculty ratio and small class sizes here, as well as Middlebury’s distinctive 4-1-4 academic calendar. And I hope that hearing from our faculty panelists will help you understand more about some of the intangibles that make academics at Middlebury so special. So we’ll begin this session with introductions by each of our panelists, and then we’ll move to answering questions from you about topics related to academics here at Middlebury. Please submit your questions at any time via the Q&A box that you’ll find at the bottom of your screen. I think you know the drill now on how Zoom works. We will do our best to get to as many questions as we can. And here we go. I’ll turn things over first to Sujata Moorti, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, also professor of gender sexuality, and in feminist studies here at Middlebury. Thank you, Sujata.

- Thank you, Michelle and congratulations to our newest class of admits to Middlebury College. As Michelle noted, I am Sujata Moorti, I am the dean of the faculty and also a professor of a really interdisciplinary field, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. I’m gonna speak here today a little bit about my role as Dean of the faculty. And as Dean of the faculty, I worked with 300 odd faculty colleagues to assemble an invigorating and exciting curriculum, a curriculum that heals closely to the ethos of a liberal arts education. The liberal arts were originally those disciplines deemed by the ancient Greeks to be essential for effective participation in public life. At Middlebury, we still believe that the education students receive should prepare them for effective participation in public life but we have updated the curriculum to the 21st century. Thus students still take courses in the humanities and the sciences, but they take courses in the languages, environmental studies and data sciences. Our faculty guides students to take creatively, critically and independently, no matter which discipline you are studying. We expect Middlebury students to learn broadly across the curriculum and in depth in one or two areas of specialization. And a hallmark of a education is immersive and collaborative practices to which our faculty teach students how to be global ethical citizens. Overall, I’d say that our faculty teach students how to be lifelong learners. We help students embrace the process of intellectual discovery and self discovery as a vital of their education. As you’ll hear from my colleagues, our faculty offer a really wide range of courses and teach in diverse ways. Some of our faculty use the Socratic method, others flip the classroom and still others see the classrooms as hubs of innovation, whatever a pedagogy, we share a commitment to an immersive classroom experience. One that is about all inclusive and grounded in the principles of equity. We teach our students to follow their intellectual and creative passions. We urge them to step outside their comfort zones and we help them and discover new passions. Over the course of their four year education, students come to learn, come to understand that learning is being in community. It is grappling together, inquiring together. In our classrooms they discover that you gain insight from rigorous debate rather than an agreement. We teach our students how to engage with the diversity of ideas and to think critically about them. Our courses will offer our students the tools necessary to navigate the world’s most complex issues such as climate change and structural racism. And here are put a plug for our website and I’ll urge you to read the college’s mission statement. And if you search a website, you’re going to find our learning goals. And we have about 11 of them stated, and these are the principles that guide a faculty inside and outside the classroom. And the key part of our education is that we teach students not just how to solve problems, but also to ask which problems to solve and why. And with that, I’m gonna turn to my faculty colleagues who will speak a greater length about different areas of our liberal arts curriculum. I’ll turn to Phoebe Armanios, who’s the co-director of the humanity center at Middlebury college, Phoebe.

- Thank you, Sojata, I’m just gonna get my screen up. Okay, great. So it’s a pleasure to be with you, everyone and congratulations to the students. And it’s really wonderful to be here, to talk to you a little bit about the humanities at Middlebury. If the humanities weren’t on your horizons, I hope after my very short briefing and after the Q&A, you are definitely thinking of taking a lot of classes and being a major, a minor, a double major, all of it. So bring your questions to me at the end today, if you have any. I wanna start with reminding you about what we do in the humanities. And this is one of my favorite quotes and also a reminder about Tony Morrison’s connection on the right to Bread Loaf at Middlebury back in the seventies. Morrison has said to us that the goal of the human is to pursue the human project, which is to remain human and block the dehumanization and estrangement of others. And I hope by the end of the day, when you’re done taking your humanities classes at Middlebury, you’ll feel like you’ve touched a bit of that sentiment that Tony Morrison outlines for us. I wanna talk about three major things in a very short period. Michelle, I promised to stick to the time. The humanities at Middlebury to me really represent three things. They are diverse, they are relevant and right now, because of a lot of unique things that we’re doing at Middlebury only, they are quite experiential, very experiential. So I’m gonna talk about that and pay attention to the pictures. I’m not gonna have time to stop and pause about every one of them, but I hope you have time to read the captions that are coming up. First of all, who are we on campus? We have an affiliation. I represent the accent center for the humanities, but we have an affiliation of at least 26 departments and programs across the college, that is almost a half of Middlebury. So make your way through our language department’s history and through gender sexuality and feminist studies. All of it is an affiliate of our big humanities at Middlebury. What are we going to help you in terms of thinking about relevance, which is my second point here. We are really helping you in our classes acquire critical thinking and analysis skills, clear and persuasive writing and oral presentation, creative and interdisciplinary thinking, being globally aware and sensitive to other cultures, independent original research skills, problem solving and design skills. We’re all very much integrating those into our classes and you’ll feel them when you take them that you’re really building up your toolbox. And just to remind you, there’s this terrible rumor out there that humanities are irrelevant to helping get helping you get jobs. Let me just show you this really lovely survey that was recently done by the association of American Colleges and University. 93% of employers approach said that it was humanistic skills, critical thinking, clear communication, complex problems solving far more important to them than a candidate’s particular major. So keep that in mind. Now I wanna take you to the experiential. This is the uniqueness that has been Middlebury the last couple years, especially that really a signature program, if you will, that we have piloted at Middlebury that I hope you will take advantage of called the public humanities labs courses. In these classes, students engage in two dimensions and experiential lab oriented element where they’re interacting with objects, materials, possibly being out in the field and the community, doing things like you see them on the right in Professor Will Nash’s class from last fall and also the public as in engaging with the public, but also possibly presenting their work to a public audience at the end of the semester. So here’s another class from last fall. This is our Professor Ayoub’s “Blackness and the Arab Imaginary”, where students connected their course with a local community organization, Burlington called the Bantu Somali community and worked with them in a variety of tasks like grant writing and event planning and in teaching English as a second language. And here’s a glimpse at a popular history class from J-term. And I know all of you’re excited to do J-term at Middlebury and this is Professor Povitz’s Practicing Oral History class. And we all turn Zoom to our advantage during the COVID era, here is our student Yamit Netter doing a Zoom interview with a Yiddish speaker, Fred Wallish about Yiddish language preservation. And then of course, when you get to study abroad, and I hope you do, or you will continue doing the humanities as well. This is a beautiful manuscript from the Oxford Library that one of our history majors engaged with and used to write his senior thesis. So again, I won’t prolong this diverse, relevant, experiential. Welcome to the humanities at Middlebury.

- Thanks Phoebe. Now I’ll turn it over to Pieter Broucke. Pieter you’re muted.

- Muted. I’m so sorry. Thank you so much, Michelle. Hello, everybody, wherever you are all over the world and congratulations with your admission to Middlebury. My name is Pieter Broucke and I am a professor of history of art and architecture. And I’m also at the moment serving as the associate Dean for the arts here at the college. And so for the arts at Middlebury. So we have a total of seven majors, seven academic programs or departments in the arts, architectural studies, about which more later on, art history and museum studies, dance, film, and media culture, studio art, music and theater. So there’s like really the full range of the performing and the visual arts that you can pursue while a student here at Middlebury, either as a major, as a minor, as a joint major, there’s really plenty of opportunities to link whatever it is that you’re interested in. Do something else to make the most out of your of liberal arts experience here at Middlebury. Like Phoebe, I wanna emphasize the experiential nature of so much of what it is that we are doing. I mean, the performing arts are almost by definition, experiential, actually embodied for the most part. But then in addition to the academic programs, we have actually real world experiences. I’m not gonna go through all of them. Just give you a couple of examples. Theater has a summer program in New York city where our students work with equity actors are on stage and for the last 30 years or so have actually generated place that have been reviewed including in the New York times, the New Yorker, whatnot. It’s an amazing experience for our students to be able to do this as undergraduates being on the stage with equity actors. The other thing I will single out is in architectural studies dear to my heart, ‘cause I’m the director of that program. We have engaged with a lot chapter of habitat for humanity here of Addison county and we are building affordable housing, all of them net zero housing, and the students as teams in a class design, develop, permit and then generate the construction documentation for those houses. And we’ve done six so far and we’re in the process of designing, right now this semester, four additional ones right here in Middlebury, right here in town. It’s an amazing experience for all of them. I could really go on and on. I’m not going to do that. I just wanna say one more thing also about the global aspect of what it is that we’re doing. You can study abroad for most of the majors in the arts. If you do architecture, you can go to Montevideo. You can go in Uruguay, you can go to Paris, you can go to Ferrara, Italy, or you can also go to Dublin has a very, very good architecture program. In short, it’s embodied learning. You will learn to solve problems. You will interact with your world, engage with your world. And this is the kind of things that you can do in the arts. I’ll stop right here. So I am right on time. Thank you very much.

- Thanks Pieter. We’ll turn it over to Rick next.

- Hello. Thank you all for joining us. I’m Rick Bunt, I’m a professor of chemistry and like Peter, I’m associate Dean for the sciences. And at a liberal arts college, there’s sometimes this belief that the sciences are sort of the counterpart or the alternative to liberal arts. But as my colleagues have said, I think emphasized really science is our core piece of the liberal arts experience. And that’s how we view sciences here at Middlebury. And my message is really very simple. All my colleagues, whether it’s in math, computer science, the more traditional biology or chemistry or physics or the interdisciplinary programs like like neuroscience, we view science as a participation sport, right? You have to not only learn what’s in the textbook or what you see in the classroom, but what you also learn and experience in the laboratory or the field, whatever it is that you’re doing, science is an active participation. And our goal is to bring that love of our sciences and our maths and computer science and so forth as well, the stem areas in general, to students, whether they’re interested in a single course as part of a distribution requirement, perhaps students who are majoring in the sciences who want to go on to graduate school or professional school, whether it’s something like medical school, vet school, law school, or of those students who wish to continue on with careers in the science is going on to graduate school, to earn a PhD. And so our programs are all designed to meet all those different needs in different ways. And the key thing that we feel about our experience at Middlebury is that there’s a very close interaction between faculty and students, whether it’s in the classroom or it’s in the laboratory, or whether it’s in research that you’re working on with somebody, you really get to know the faculty very well and you also get to see and use all the instrumentation, the facilities we have here at Middlebury. Occasionally, people will think, oh, if I wanna go into sciences, I must go to a big research university. I must go to MIT or Stanford. And I can tell you, I’ve been to those places as a student and they’re fabulous, but Middlebury and schools like Middlebury, do a fantastic job, preparing students for careers of all kinds, whether it’s as a lab coat wearing scientist or simply someone who needs a technical background for whatever career they end up getting into, whether it’s journalism or law or just to be as my colleague. So suggest said an educated member of society. And so that’s really the key goal for all of us is to get students engaged and excited about science and then actually doing science. The rest of the details you can certainly see on the web, or happy to answer some emails, if you wanna let me know about some specific concerns, but the key thing again is that it involves you with us in partnership. We’re really your partners in this experience, not simply giving you the information, we’re helping you get it yourself. Thank you.

- Thanks Rick. And now I’ll turn it over to Chris Eliza and remind all of you in the audience. Please feel free to put your questions in the Q&A at any time. And when we’re finished hearing from Chris, we’ll start jumping into those questions.

- Hi folks, and congratulations to everybody out there and your parents and other family members and friends who’ve helped you get to this point. It’s a great moment. I’ve been at Middlebury since 1990. I am a joint faculty member in political science and environmental studies. Middlebury has an extremely robust social science set of departments and social science, anthropology, economics, education studies, geography, political science, psychology and sociology. And in terms of environmental studies, we are the oldest major, undergraduate major in the country founded 1965. And it’s a very popular major at Middlebury, currently the third largest major. And I just wanna do a quick screen share of the architecture of our program, just to give you a sense of what interdisciplinarity looks like at Middlebury. And we have some other great interdisciplinary programs. I like to think of it as a great example of how we can weave together some of the things my colleagues have talked about. We have a set of four core courses, one in the sciences, one in policy, contested grounds is the humanities and environmental studies. And then the students take something in spatial analysis. Then the students pick an area of depth, and this is across our curriculum in the sciences. For example, you can do conservation biology or environmental geology in the arts and humanities. There’s a robust environment and architecture program, as well as environmental history and then environmental economics or policy. You take a couple of other courses to get breadth across that liberal arts curriculum. And then all the students come together in this capstone experience where they’re doing a community engaged practicum. It’s an example of project based learning, which is something very common across the curriculum like Pieter was talking about with building the home for habitat or humanity, like Phoebe talked about, in terms of some of the work being done in the public humanities lab. And like Rick talked about in so much of the sciences they’re folks are doing these hands on works. The students are also kind of doing study abroad, I think at Middlebury, and again, this stuff is a little hazy coming out of COVID, but it used to be about 60% of the Middlebury ES majors would study abroad, which I think is about the same as our student body generally. And again, Middlebury is a great place. The students get out and work in the community, but it’s also great for them to go to study in Chile or in Africa or in Europe somewhere. And the last thing I think I’ll mention is we have a very robust sustainability program on campus, which is outside of our academic program. It relates, in some ways the college itself is a laboratory for the students to do work on things like getting to carbon neutrality, convincing the trustees to divest. All of this was really spearheaded by students. And it’s a great bridge between the academic work they’re doing and the work they’re gonna be doing for the rest of their lives when they move on from Middlebury. So again, congratulations everybody, we look forward to your questions.

- Awesome. Thank you all for those introductory remarks. And I would love for us to jump right into questions. There are plenty and students keep them coming. So our first question is about cross-curricular options and this student was asking specific to neuroscience and music. So maybe we wanna address that specifically but also use that as an opportunity, maybe to talk more broadly about how do students combine their interests across the curriculum? What are some of the options for that? So maybe Peter or Rick, you’d like to start with that one.

- I’m happy to get it started. Then Peter can correct me if I mistakes. It’s very common for students to be involved in multiple programs. I mean, whether it’s a formal, double major, or major and minor, or simply taking a large focus of courses in a certain area, something like music, for example, or language is also very common for a student to major in the sciences and also have a major in Spanish or French or Chinese, whatever it is. So that’s very common. If you’re talking about trying to combine those things that requires a bit more coordination and planning, and I’m not sure I could imagine a specific music neuroscience joint project, but I wouldn’t put much the faculty of Middlebury for coming up with something like that. What do you think Peter?

- Well, what I would say about this, it’s not directly to music, but what it reminded me of the question is the fact that the dance program acquired recently motion tracking hardware and software, and this will be used by students in neuroscience to work with dance movements and whatnot. It also reminds me of the kind of things that are going on with checking brain activity. The difference between when people are actually performing scored music, or whether they’re improvising. And so it activates very different parts of the brain. So there’s actually a lot of overlap between those areas. And this is exactly one of the kind of things that you can actually pursue at Middlebury because you can actually go see a professor and say, this is what I’m interested in. And then say, can we make that work? Access to the faculty is very easy. I mean, when my door is open, my students can just walk in and they know that and they do. So that’s pretty much the policy that I have about this. But just for another thing, Rick and I started collaborating on installing between the arts and the sciences, the affiliation of a Fuco pendulum and the big hall of Bicentennial Hall. And so maybe this will happen when you all students here at Middlebury, but so there’s a lot of interaction between, whether it is academic, but also non-academic, there’s also co-curricular activities, for instance, as we’re about to renovate a building that I’m in right now, the art and architecture building, after the renovation, we’re gonna put the maker space in here. So there’s gonna be a blurry. We are a residential college. And so there’s a blurry distinction between the academic and the curricular and the co-curricular. And so this will only get stronger. Rick, I think we have exactly the same thing in Bicentennial Hall, no?

- Real quick, I just wanna add to what my colleagues, Rick and Pieter said, we do have a very cool interdisciplinary major in the history department called the history of science medicine and technology, which is in it’s in second year of existence. We’re one of the only if not the only liberal arts college in the country to have such a major housed here. So do check it out if you’re interested in something like that.

- And if I can quickly add to that, we’re actually in the process of developing, Middlebury has a really strong collection of historical scientific instruments. And so that ties in, Phoebe, exactly with what you were saying. This is like the intersection of the humanities, the arts in terms of curating and museum practice and the sciences.

- So not surprisingly, we have a question about requirements. How many electives are required and what kinds of things are required in a student’s academic course of study? Maybe I can call on Sujata to tackle that question.

- So I’ll take fab and I’m sure my colleagues will correct me if I get things wrong, but I would say overall, we expect our students to have 36 credits to graduate. And most majors, I think he saw what Chris put up for environmental studies there, they were between 40 into 15 courses, but the majority of majors are between 10 and 12 courses. And so this allows students to really get the breadth of courses and breadth of knowledge that we emphasize is key to a liberal arts education. Apart from the major requirements, the other things that are required are, we expect our students to take certain distribution courses. And these are really addressing those core liberal arts capacities. So some of them are courses that are designated as fulfilling a history requirement, no, or a particular or scientific and deductive reasoning language skills. So we have eight broad areas and students that expect to fulfill at least seven of those eight areas. And then we expect our students to become familiar with certain cultural and civil knowledge. So there, they expected to take four courses. And oftentimes the courses that fulfill those requirements could also fulfill your courses for your major or for your minor. So these courses, you can take them to fulfill two different kinds of requirements. So I think the broadly 36 courses, about 14 to 15, at the most, for a major, and then you have a bunch of other kinds of requirements, but those requirements can fulfill other requirements at the same time. Did I get it all? Okay.

- I think you did. I would only add briefly that that leaves you kind of space in your course selection to add a second major, a minor, a semester abroad that may or may not be directly connected to what your major course of study is. And so there’s a lot of flexibility beyond those requirements, which is much appreciated. So our next question, I think really, maybe a couple of people can address this from your sort of relative perspective, how large are introductory classes at Middlebury and are all classes taught by faculty or are their teaching assistants that help?

- I can take the first stab at that. And I’m just gonna give my regular teaching load to just give you a sense, and it’s gonna vary across the curriculum, but as someone who’s teaching the social sciences last fall, I taught the intro environmental policy course that had 45 students. I would consider that a big course at Middlebury. I did two lectures a week and then three discussion sections. And then I taught all three of those discussion sections. So unlike when I was a graduate student, a very smart graduate student, like we all were, and was teaching those discussion sections at the university of Minnesota, at Middlebury faculty members are teaching those discussion sections. My second class last fall was a course of 16 that was team taught. And then this semester I’ve got a course with 20 and another seminar with 11. So I think you’re gonna have, depending on your field, depending on the intro course, I’d say in political science, the intro course is 30 to 45, maybe, but then after that first course, they’re gonna really drop off in size.

- Maybe pretending to the second question, not so much teaching assistant, but for instance, in architecture, one of the things that sets our program apart is that all the architecture studios, all the design studios are actually taught by practicing architects, people who work in the community and this allows us to do things like the habitat for humanity houses, for instance, and those classes are limited in size to, I think the intro is limited to 18. And then the other course, the other studios are by definition, less than that. So there too, I mean the student to faculty ratio is very, very small and everybody knows their faculty members individually and the faculty member knows each and every one of the students quite well and is able to follow them almost personally.

- Let me just follow that re remind everybody to underscore that the Middlebury campus does not have graduate students. We are just an undergraduate institution. And so again, that’s different from some places. And so we don’t have those graduate students around who might step into the classroom.

- All right, hearing no other comments, I’ll move on to the next question. So lots of different kinds of questions are coming up for students about research. How soon can one start participating in research activities? I will sort of preface this by saying, on Wednesday, April 6th, I believe, we will have a webinar specifically dedicated towards undergraduate research at Middlebury. So we’ll probably just scratch the surface here right now and I would encourage students to join us again for that informational event. I think I saw Phoebe raising her hand.

- Yeah, again, I’m gonna speak from my experience. When I teach my first year seminar, my students right away have to do an independent research paper at the end of that first semester at middle grade, it sounds intimidating, but we work through it together. We give you all the tools, we go to the library, we find the sources and we talk about it and we do presentations and it’s very collegial. And it’s been the highlight of my almost 20 years of teaching my students working on such a project. So from your first semester onwards, and then there are all kinds of opportunities. Other classes will have similar formats. You might also find that a professor is looking to hire a research assistant. I’ve always worked with students as research assistants. So there you are working with a professor working on their research, helping them with their research. Rick can speak more in the sciences. Of course, there’s definitely something there that’s very collaborate. And also in the humanities, there are opportunities for collaboration with your professors. There are grants where you can apply to work with your professor during the summer and do research with them and possibly publish something together, or produce a work of research that’s partnered with your professor. So it’s available across the disciplines. But like I said, I’ll let Rick jump in on sciences. Oh, one more thing. A lot of majors have opportunities for senior history thesis. So that’s another big chance for you to do independent research as well, but later.

- Yeah, thanks Phoebe. I would pick up on that, that the senior thesis program is also so very well utilized in the sciences. So it’s very common for students to do either a year long pieces project. Sometimes it is an outgrowth of perhaps a summer they spent at Middlebury working with a faculty member in the sciences. It’s probably most typical in that summer between one’s junior and senior year to do that kind of a summer experience, but there’s not a limitation. I mean, there certainly are students who, after their first year or second year, or even during their first year, though it’s less common because you’re often busy doing other things during your first year of school, to get involved in research with faculty members. So I’d say it’s really based on one’s own interest and initiative. And I’ll wait to Wednesday for more details, but there’s no limitation. It doesn’t say that it’s only up until seniors. The thesis program is directed towards seniors, but we have lots of other students who do that during their careers.

- We should also mention that in just a couple of weeks, we have student symposium coming up, which is a celebration of student research work across the curriculum. And can’t remember if it’s been 15 years or something like that that’s been going on, but I think it kind of started out more for seniors doing the work they’ve done on their thesis work or whatever. I think there are often many first years doing work, sophomores juniors. So it’s a really a celebration of the work that students have done across the campus, across the curriculum.

- Yeah. Oh, oh.

- Can I just, I just want to piggyback on what Chris just said. So starting, I think in the last couple years, we’ve also started having first year symposia where we showcase the research and the projects that students are undertaking in their first year seminars. So as Phoebe mentioned, research starts as early as your first semester, and then it continues. And it’s really up to the student to seek out these opportunities to work closely with faculty.

- In the arts, the arts/humanities, I mean, there’s opportunities in the summer for integrated museum internship program. For instance, students work in archeology in the fields, in a variety of places worldwide, there’s really opportunity pretty much everywhere. And then in the arts, senior work is expected from everybody, from all the students. They do some form of senior work, all of them. And it’s so important to the students in their last year that they’re at Middlebury to really go into something that is more personal and totally stretches their minds very often. It’s really transformative very often.

- Thank you all. Thank you all. So next I have a question that I’m gonna direct to Rick. A student is asking whether or not stem students would be able to study abroad at Middlebury.

- Absolutely. It’s very common. I mean, one of the sort of unspoken problems about colleges that the there’s too much that you want to do, that you can’t really do it all. And Middlebury is no exception of that. Everyone comes in wanting to do everything. And you can do many things, but it takes planning. If you wanna go to med school and study abroad and double major in econ, there’s a lot of ands there. It requires a lot of careful planning. For most students, spending a semester abroad is actually almost trivial to do with a science major, as long as you’re moderately proactive about it. A year of study abroad is also very doable in a lot of programs, as long as you’re careful about choosing the program and the courses that you need for graduation. So it’s really very common for students to study broad. It really just depends on what things you wish to, how you wish to prioritize your four years.

- We definitely recommend that you visit the website or reach out to them for connection, our international programs office, to hear more about how study abroad works. This is probably gonna be our last question, because I expect that each of our panelists will have something really interesting to say and respond to this question. Have you taught J-term classes and what were your favorites? And if we can all maybe try to be a little bit brief on that. Anyone wanna jump in first? Sujata, thanks.

- I have taught a course on crime dramas and specifically television crime drama over J-term. And what was fun about that was even as students were learning about let’s say Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, as the final project, students actually ended up creating their own crime drama and they enacted it in by hall and they film it and they set it to music and it was fantastic.

- Go ahead, Phoebe.

- Thanks Michelle. So yes, I’ve taught J-term many times. And my favorite class is a history of food in the middle east class, where we spend four weeks intensively looking at all kinds of topics, including medieval cookbooks from these far away places and time. And the highlight has been that we actually try to replicate some of these medieval recipes in some of the kitchen spaces that we have on campus. And students actually do a beautiful job in interpreting some of these foods and very delicious, very fun class.

- Go ahead, Chris. And then Pieter after Chris.

- A few years ago, I taught a course with an alum on the public lands of the U.S. and this alum had been the chief of staff to the U.S. Forest Service and an election led to his opportunity for other employment, shall we say? And so the timing was perfect. He came up to Middlebury for the semester. He had incredible connections and he was able to, lightly twist the arm of a few of his old friends and colleagues down in D.C. who flew up and joined us to visit with the students. So that was a lot of fun.

- I haven’t taught J-term in a really long time. And actually the one I was gonna mention was in the humanities. So I’m not gonna mention this, but I’ll just say what we did in architectural studies this past winter term. We had an alum come back, somebody had worked in Legos, Nigeria, talk about the planning aspects of global architecture and financing, those kinds of aspects. We also had two alums come back to teach a course where students made a biography of buildings, as they called it. So they went to Burlington, they picked the building, they got to know it, they drew it, photographed it, researched it and then did presentations on those things. And then we also had one of the habitat for humanities classes going on the third and the sequence of three, which pertained to creating the construction documentation. So that’s what we had offered in architectural studies.

- I’ll wrap things up and give everybody a brief scare. I I’ve taught organic or chemistry during winter term. It’s not super common. It’s not a very large class, but it’s actually a great deal of fun. And this course has offered, when it’s been offered, is primarily to allow students to help coordinate their schedules for things like study abroad or other issues so they can actually navigate through the major and do other things they wanna do. As you can imagine, if you’ve probably heard organic chemistry has one of the harder street reps out there, but it’s actually a course that by the end of the semester, everyone is really just so engaged with each other, that it really becomes a family. And so it’s really kind of fun to kind of journey together through that four week semester and cover the same thing that you do in the fall semester. And I’ll say that the students, despite the fact that they’re scared, they love it when they do it, because it’s like committing to the moment for the month.

- Even those few examples have sort of given the sense that there’s something for everyone here at Middlebury, certainly during J-term. And there are over 115 courses offered each year during J-term. So, so many, one wonderful things to choose from. So I’m afraid I’m the bear of bad news in that I need to call this event to a close. Thank you again for joining us today, admitted students and your trusted adults. A big thank you to our panelists for their time today. We’re sorry that we couldn’t get to our questions. Please feel free to follow up in admissions, if we can be helpful in answering questions. We hope to see you at our next virtual preview days event, which starts in about 15 minutes, ask a Midd kid, We all get to interact live with current Middlebury students. Thanks again, everyone, and we hope to see you again soon.

Look Ahead: Career Exploration and Internships

A liberal arts and sciences education will equip you to take on a variety of internships, jobs, career paths, and graduate programs. This webinar will offer a brief introduction to Midd’s Center for Careers and Internships as well as a sampling of how some of our students and alumni have put their education into practice during and after their time at Middlebury.

- And all of you here joining us on our panel this evening. My name is Tracy Himmel Isham, and I am an associate director for Social Impact Advising at the Center for Careers and Internships. And I’m here this evening, join by several of our Middlebury alum, who I’m gonna get really excited to introduce to you in a moment. But before I do that, I just wanna congratulate everyone who’s on this call tonight, both students and parents. I’m a parent of two college aged kids, and I have one more who’s lining up to make their way. And so I know all the hard work that everyone put into getting where you are today. So I’m really excited to be here to just introduce you to some really neat young alums that have gone through Middlebury. And they can tell you a little bit about their stories from Middlebury to where are today. But before I do that, I wanna get you really excited about the work that I do. I think I have the best job on campus. My husband is a professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, and he and I have a debate about whose job is more fulfilling. And my job is to work with your students and new students, as you come into Middlebury, as you step foot onto our campus, I get to work with you for four years and I also get to work with you beyond your four years. The Center for Careers and Internship is always here. So once you graduate and your alumni, we are here for you as well. And the kind of work that we do at CCI as we affectionately call ourselves, is what we call career preparedness. It’s about really trying to get your students and the students here on this call to think about like intentional decisions. And that doesn’t mean that when they get to Middlebury, they have to know what they wanna do. We wanna meet every student where they are and we wanna do it at any point in their trajectory. So if you walk in my office the week after orientation, we will be there all six of our advisors to help guide you. And I’m here for the seniors. I mean, it’s spring right now, we’re getting ready to launch some new seniors out and I’m making a lot of really new friends to be honest with you. And it’s great. So what is CCE about, CCI about, well, we’re really here to help you explore what’s next in your life and in your career. One of the things we specialize in is we certainly, and we have 14 staff and we’re really here to help you explore and to really find ways to just fulfill your curiosity and also to find maybe some guideposts and way to think about how you wanna use your academics. And by that, one of the big things that we do here is we help you to find internships and to really get you to of think intentionally about just trying things out. So as a first year, coming to Middlebury, whether you start in the fall or you start as a Feb, you are eligible for an Explorer Grant. So that’s a thousand dollars grant that you can write a proposal and you can use it for your first summer out of Middlebury. The next three summers later, you have an opportunity to apply for funding for unpaid internships, for instance. So we have $3,500 grants, and those run from business, to nonprofits, to research all kinds of opportunities. You can bring ‘em to us, or you could find them on Handshake, our internships and jobs database. Where we’ve worked with alumni to really curate opportunities that we know students are really looking for. And that kind of internship funding for unpaid internships, we give out almost, it’s about $675,000 last year. I just looked down at my little note here. And with that through surveys, what we found is that about 75% of the students graduate, having done some type of internship, which is amazing, like what a great way to try things out for size. As I always say, it’s better to find out now what you don’t like than wait until once you get out into the real world and have a mortgage to pay, you got the kids and you realize, what am I doing? So just going back, we’ve got 14 staff, we’ve got lots of employers coming to campus, and we really wanna get you to just come in and explore and listen, and to learn really just to learn about different types of careers. So we have a database called Midd2Midd that has over 5,000 of our alumni. A lot of young alumni, I’ll say who are signed up to volunteer to talk to you students about anything. About their jobs, about how they got there, about navigating life at Middlebury too. Maybe you’re an international student, and you wanna know what it was like for an alumni who was an international student. How did they navigate some of this stuff? So they’re there for you, those volunteers. The other thing I’ll just say about the volunteer program is it’s a mentor program that we launch for sophomores. Sophomores, we’re really encouraging second year students to sign up for a mentor and this mentor is an alumni who’s there for you. Specifically there signed up to help guide you and you can talk to them literally about most anything. I mean, it’s really, really incredible. So that’s another really cool early engagement program that we’ve got going. So with all that, I’m gonna let you all as the students and the parents ask questions in our Q&A and I’ll be able at the end to start to incorporate some of those in. And what I’d like to do now is turn this over to our panelists. And I’ll say this, maybe I’ll give seniority. For the first person, who’s the eldest most mature grad here? Who would like to make their introduction first? Anyone wanna raise their hand? Who might that be? Oh gosh, do we know?

- I guess, I guess I’ll go first.

- Oh, Danny.

- If we’re going by class year, I don’t know about maturity, but, but by class year, I’m certainly the eldest and I’m always flattered when I get included on panels that have young alumni in the description or title. Hello everybody. My name is Danny Zhang, I graduated from Middlebury College in 2015. Congratulations, first and foremost, everybody who’s tuning in. It was a very long time ago when I applied and I’ve heard that the process has only gotten more competitive so kudos to you all. I hope that you were able to take some time to celebrate ‘cause it’s very affirming to get into a place like Middlebury and to have that opportunity available. At Middlebury, I was a Political Science and History of Art and Architecture joint major. I originally grew up in Toronto, Canada and for a number of reasons, Middlebury was a, I thought Middlebury would be a good fit for me and had a wonderful experience there. Since graduating in 2015, I’ve lived in New York City and now I’m in Northern California. In New York City, for six years, I was working as an auction house specialist at a place called Sotheby’s. I developed an expertise in impressionist and modern art and was doing a lot of research using my art history degree, but also developing business skills and working with clients and had a really wonderful time while I was there. Starting last fall, I moved out to California to Palo Alto to start law school at Stanford. So I’m a first year law student out here and I’m very much enjoying the wonderful environment around here. I am very happy to be back in school, it’s very different from Middlebury, but that’s what I’m doing now so…

- Great. Thanks Danny. Who might go next? Do you wanna tag the next person? How’s that?

- Sure. Tony.

- Sure. Hi everyone, my name’s Tony Cross. I use she, her pronouns. I graduated Midd in 2018. I’m originally from Florida born and raised. My parents are Caribbean immigrants and so it was very weird of me to end up in Vermont for those particular reasons but I have a passion for foreign languages and so I Googled best college to study languages and Middlebury came up and so that’s where I went and I’m so happy that I did. And so I was a Russian and Eastern European studies major for the International and Global Studies Program and I also got a minor in Arabic. And after Midd I went straight to Georgetown to do my masters in national security and halfway through, I realized that I wanted to be a lawyer and so I am a second year law student at Vanderbilt Law in Nashville, Tennessee, which is where I am right now. And so if anybody has any questions about a number of things, including grad programs, after Midd, studying abroad, I went abroad for an entire year, studied in Russia and Morocco, lots of campus activities. I did so much at Midd, I don’t know how ‘cause I have no energy today. But if anybody has any questions about that kind of thing, let me know and I’ll pass it to Elijah actually. Sorry, Jules.

- So, hello everyone. I’m Elijah Willig, probably the most recent grad here from 2021. Use he, him, his pronouns. I am originally from Grinnell, Iowa and if that’s , that’s because it’s another small town with a small liberal arts school. So I knew growing up that I wanted to go to a liberal arts school, but I just didn’t wanna go to Grinnell because Grinnell was home, right. And sort of my journey led me to Middlebury eventually. While I was at Middlebury, I majored in sociology, but I also studied Spanish and Portuguese. I was also very attracted to Middlebury because of its languages. I had sort of a desire to try to understand people and it seemed like studying sociology and two foreign languages seemed to be some of the best ways to try to get to that ultimate goal. Now, since graduating Middlebury, I am currently in graduate school. I’m finishing out my program of education, right, master’s in education at the Harvard Graduate School of education, studying Human Development and Education and Higher Education with the goal of working in student affairs. So, like the seniors at Middlebury, I’m very much in the midst of a job search. That’s what I’ve been up to since I’ve left Middlebury last year. And I’ll give it to Julian now.

- Yep. Thank you Elijah. I’ll round it out. Again, Hi everyone, thanks for joining. Really happy to be here again. Lucky enough to have done this a couple times and every time I get the email for the invite, I get excited. I’m like, yes, I get to talk to these folks again. But yeah, I’m, Julian Safran use he, him pronouns, originally from North Carolina and sort of have a winding way up to Middlebury. But I guess the main things that brought me there were one, I really wanted to get out of the south and just experience something new for college, so that was the main one. I was originally born in Wisconsin and moved away when I was young and so really wanted to see the snow again. So Middlebury was, that was one reason as well, but I guess more importantly, I was really interested in liberal arts colleges. My father’s a professor at UNC Charlotte, and you really impressed upon me, you need to learn how to learn. And so from, I guess from the onset, I was really interested in sort of the small classes at Middlebury, and the ability to get really close with professors and sort of just the liberal arts mindset where you’re kind of getting, you’re able to specify a little bit later on, but sort of rounding out your ability to think critically and ask questions not only about yourself, but also about the material and the ability, it’s for the flexibility in the curriculum. Something that I really liked. So that’s why I joined Midd, I studied International Politics and Economics there with a language concentration in French, took a couple courses in Spanish as well. Currently I work, I do, I’m in Social Impact Strategy Consulting, which is a bit of a mouthful, but in short, I do, I help nonprofits and foundations like the Gates Foundation, USAID and other smaller nonprofits. Sort of help them look at their strategy and maximize it for impact in a couple different sectors, like climate in the environment, domestic health, global health, reproductive health, as well as economic mobility. So again, it’s sort of the liberal arts of the workforce. You’re in a bunch of different sectors and you get to ask really interesting questions. For the future for me, I was sort of chuckling at myself. I don’t know if the admissions did this on purpose, but all of us are either in grad programs or are doing grad programs. For me, I’m again, yeah bitten by the education bug and so going back, we’ll be back on the east coast pursuing a master’s degree in MBA. So master’s in Business Administration this summer. So that’s me.

- Great. Well, thank you all for these great introductions. I was reminded when I was told who the invites were, the alumni who were coming back and just sort of seeing your trajectories, it’s so interesting. I just, I’m… Like, it’s so touching to see how you all have made your decisions along the way. And I think Julian, you put your finger on it. I don’t think we actually realized that everyone just about was going into grad school or was in grad school. And so I thought maybe we could ask this question in the sense of like, how has your… How was your time at Middlebury? How did it influence you in respect to the path to grad school? Like, did you have a sense that you’d end up where you are now or not?

- I can take a stab at that. I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. I didn’t do any internships at Middlebury. The summer after first year, I just, chilled at home with my family and the next summer I did Arabic school at Middlebury’s partner campus, Mills out in California. The next summer I was doing research for my thesis and I went back to Russia to do that. And then there I was a senior and I was like, I don’t really know what I want to do. I ended up applying for and receiving a state department scholarship and one of the conditions was that I go to grad school. I’m like, okay, great. I’m gonna go to grad school and then I’ll work for the state department. And I realized that I didn’t want to work for the state department at that point, but I picked a grad program that I liked that I thought would continue off of what I’d started kind of learning at Mid. When I was at Midd, the Russian Department was very small and so we didn’t get to have like some of the classes in like Russian politics and geopolitics of Eurasia in that area that I wanted, but I had the language skills and I had knowledge of the culture from my time in Russia. Like I said, I went twice when I was at Mid and I had also been to a Russian high school. And so for my graduate program, the program’s technically in international studies, international security rather. And so I made sure that that program would pick up where I’d left off at Mid. And so that’s how I ended up going there, but I had no idea what I was going to do or what I thought I wanted to do until literally November of senior year. Professor Isham, are you talking to us or-

- No.

- Okay.

- Good. Anyone else wanna… Danny, I don’t mean to pick on you, but I have to say it’s really interesting going from the art world I bet now into considering law. Is that something you can give us a little insight into?

- Yeah, I can talk about that a little bit. Similar to Tony, I didn’t have a… I actually, I think Middlebury made me less certain of what I wanted to do. I went into college thinking that political science and government and public policy was what I was going to pursue after college and I got to know some really wonderful political science professors at Middlebury, but when I was there just kind of fell in love with this new subject that I had no exposure to before, which was art history. I was able to use a couple of my summers to explore opportunities in both those fields. So I did some research for a political science professor one summer, I worked on campus at the museum on campus one summer and then by the time senior year rolled around, I was kinda like, all right, well now, I really don’t… Like, I see enjoyable parts in both, and I really don’t know which direction I want to go in. So I ended up applying to like consulting jobs and people operations jobs, and research jobs, and this one position at Sotheby’s, which ended up working out. And even the position at Sotheby’s was not really committal to any one department, it was a rotational program, which I thought would be a nice way for me to sample the different departments in the company, see if the out world is a place that I would want to have a career in. I ended up meeting really great managers and just ended up staying and building a career out of it there. I had no intention on going to law school right out of Middlebury. If grad school… If I were going to go to grad school at that point, I was thinking more about doing a PhD in either art history and political or political science, partially because I was so inspired by the academics and the professors I had met at Middlebury. I thought their jobs were really cool. I thought that they just had really wonderful lifestyles as well, being able to work on their research, but also interact in the classroom with students. And then once I was out in the real world, I kind of had an awakening of like, there are thousands of job opportunities one could pursue, and what a gift, the Middlebury education was to me in that it provided me a foundation to pursue all those things. In terms of the transition back into law school, I got to work with a bunch of lawyers at Sotheby’s and thinking about art law issues which were really fascinating to me. I got to work with in-house lawyers who were sort of generalists problem solvers and I was like, wow, like, what you’re doing is not necessarily developing expertise, but really taking substantively what I’m telling you to come up with solutions to problems that I’m facing and I kind of wanted to explore that itch a little bit. I missed school again, like I had mentioned, I missed just like the ability to read books with people who have that interest. And then I also thought that the, at least the part of the art world I was in there was limited opportunity to make an impact in real people’s lives. It’s a pretty sequestered place with a limited number of clients whose lives are just very different from most people’s lives. And I wanted for a way to be a little bit more in touch with maybe policy issues, maybe problems and causes that really have a concrete impact on people’s lives. So for a combination of those reasons, I’m now back in school and in law school in particular.

- That’s great. Thanks, Danny. I think I wanna try to… I’m gonna hit a few of these questions that we’re getting that are coming through, and that was a great segue to this next one, which is thinking about like the skills that you were building through internships and also your study abroad. So could you all just describe, like what programs like abroad programs you did or internships while you were at Middlebury?

- Yeah. I can start with that. I would say so I did a couple of things extracurricularly at Middlebury, especially over the summer. So I did go abroad my junior fall for Paris and I’ll speak about that quickly in a second. But then at Middlebury, I did like an unpaid, I wouldn’t even call it an internship, it’s more like an externship. Like observership almost where I sort of just followed someone that ran their own law firm, which was really insightful and sort of got to speak to a lot of people that were in the field. And I’d always kind of… I guess, for me entering Middlebury, I had a couple like different small hypotheses and one was like, oh, I wanna go to law school after. And then after that summer, I was like, maybe I don’t, maybe this isn’t as like interesting as I thought it would be. And so that was something that was really cool. I think that was partially funded by the Middlebury Career Center. As well, I did research, another one was like, maybe I’m really interested in international politics and economics broadly. Maybe I want to go into like a think tank and really focus on research after Middlebury. And so I did a summer at Middlebury, which I suggest for everyone, but I did a at Middlebury doing research for a professor. Professor in the department. And after that, although the work was really interesting, I was like, ah, I don’t know if I actually wanna do research. I don’t know if that’s actually my thing, but what it did teach me was, okay, this was actually an opportunity to kind of publish a piece that I think is going to have some sort of tangible impact to society and that was something that really kind of grasped me. I was like, this is actually something that’s interesting and so after that when I was in abroad in Paris, I would say that while I did learn a lot academically, for me that was more of like personal development. In my mind, as I take it away, it was much more of a personal development. Okay like, how do I operate in a city by myself speaking a different language? How am I like making new friends? And that really actually gave me the skills and the confidence at least to be able to move to a new city or to feel like I could do that and make friends and sort of survive. And so I would say that experience as well, sort of led all into the culmination of, getting a job out in Seattle across the country where I knew actually one person, I only knew one person there and she was actually someone that I had done abroad with. She didn’t go to Middlebury, but I met her while I was in Paris, but yeah, that sort of gave me the confidence to say, okay, this is social impact focused. Again, it was sort of a cop out of a job in the sense that it sort of let me explore a bunch of different hypotheses of like, what actual sector do I want to do. I’m gonna be doing a bunch of different work in a bunch of different sectors, and what’s gonna be interesting for me while also being impactful. And then the ability to really try out like a new city and sort of having that foundation of saying, yeah, I can do this. I can make friends and navigate. And actually it’s not just facing that challenge but welcoming that challenge I would say was something that I really took from Middlebury and was, I guess really started from the summer experiences that I had.

- Nice. Elijah, you wanna add anything? Were you part of the COVID world where you didn’t get abroad or?

- So I went abroad just before COVID became a thing. So I just got to sneak in right before everything shut down. So I was really blessed in that regard. But I think my journey in terms of internships and abroad were kind of all over the place at Middlebury, but sort of led to a general place that have led me to where I am now. So my first summer after my first year at Middlebury, I actually did an internship in Nashville working for a company that managed like country music artists in Nashville. I was sure of several of my interests. I liked about people, I liked cultures, I liked languages, I liked music, but I wasn’t sure exactly where that would lead me. Now, the first experience was amazing. I was in a new city, I was figuring out things, right. I was working for a great company with a great supervisor, but it didn’t really fit me so I started to reevaluate and I started taking new classes and things that mildly interest me. And one of those was Portuguese and it certainly led me to a place with a connection professor who actually led to me being able to do research after my sophomore year with him, he was doing research on sort of forming a starting point on sort of up hauling Middlebury’s curriculum to sort of incorporate a proper global perspective, right? To include more diversity, equity and inclusion within the curriculum across all departments at Middlebury, which is still an ongoing effort for my understanding. And then right after that, I went straight to Montevideo, Uruguay to study abroad for a couple months, right. And it was an amazing experience and think I, in which I learned a lot about empathy, other perspectives on how people view things from across the world and how people interpret wider global politics. And while I was there, I was doing an internship as well, right. You have the option typically from my understanding when you’re abroad to, instead of doing a class, do an internship for credit and I was there translating documents for an educational organization within the city. Which was a wonderful experience that sort of pointed me again into sort of the direction of education, but more sort of an administrative side. Immediately coming back from my abroad experience in Montevideo, Uruguay I was actually doing internship for the study abroad office at Middlebury and helping them promote their study abroad programs to others. I actually formed several videos interviewing Middlebury students about their experiences abroad. And I think that was when things started clicking for me of like, I like education, but not necessarily the teaching side, but more of interacting with students and going to fairs and helping people figure out choices for their own future. And sort of from there, I came to a point where I applied to be a senior admissions fellow in the admissions office in which I would be talking and promoting and talking about my experience as a Middlebury student to prospective students, applying to Middlebury and helping them in their journeys of figuring out where to go to college. And all of that sort of ultimately culminated me figuring out that I wanted to work in student affairs and led me to applying to the current grad program that I’m in and currently in the position of applying for jobs, right. So I think the best thing that I got from it over in terms of both internships and being able to study abroad was just sort of the opportunity to figure things out over a period and really get to explore my vast interests and figuring out where they can best converge.

- I’ll say that my study abroad experience, I mean, it was crucial for me, just as someone who has always loved to travel and always loved different languages. And so it was just such a huge period of growth for me to spend literally September of 2016 through July of 2017 in two different countries, in four different cities, learning to navigate places on my own. It was not easy being black in Russia during the 2016 elections. I learned more in that semester than I have in, years of schooling, honestly. But those experiences were just so important for me personally, but they really like helped me to get into the grad programs that I got into. My standardized test scores were like, were okay, not fantastic, but I’ve had admissions officers and my acceptance letters for grad school and for law school, right. It was your languages and your travel experience that really like pushed you over the edge for us. And even in law school, applying to jobs for post grad, which that process starts ridiculously early in law school. But I’ve had law firms that I’ve been interviewing with say, we don’t normally let first years or second years work in our international offices, but we think that you would go there and actually work and not just be there for a vacation, if you want to do that, you can absolutely do that. And the law firm that I’m slated to work with this summer, as well as after graduation has already committed to letting me start in their global practice group, where I’ll be able to spend a couple months working out of their Paris office or their Barcelona office or whatever, because they know that I’m not just going to go take their money and go on vacation, that global perspective and that ability to work with people across the globe is something that I value. And so I’m so grateful to Middlebury for letting me spend a year and a summer, an academic year and a summer abroad. That was crucial.

- Great. Wow! thank you guys for sharing that. I’m wondering, it just reminds me of just asking you this as a quick question. When you think about your stories today, like who you are and what you’re doing. A lot of us who have graduated from college, well, I’ve been out for a long time, but we sort of moved past the, sort of, it was a great four years now I’ve moved on. Do you… What in your story and Elijah, this might be a little harder for you ‘cause you’re right out. But like, I’m just wondering what in your story do you think about or talk about that had maybe the most impact on you from Middlebury?

- For me, it was actually a little bit, it was attached to Middlebury, but a little bit out of Middlebury. For me, it was, and I guess this adds to my summer experiences, but one summer before, I think it was my sophomore year, as well as January of my junior year. I actually went to the Monterey school and was able to do some graduate programs there. Thankfully again, that was financed by the CCI and the Middlebury. But there one was called Frontier Market Scouts, the other was called Design Project Management Innovation. And so those really helped me begin to, I talked about these like hypotheses, right? And I knew I sort of liked international relations, but I didn’t really, I knew I liked problem solving, I knew I liked working in teams, but I didn’t know how to combine those. And so those experiences actually allowed me to begin to combine things that I liked in different ways to figure out, okay, what actually excites me, every day. So beginning to look at projects and figure out, how are international projects or international development, how is it done and what do those projects look like and how do you make them sustainable, right? So figuring out those issues and then for Frontier Market Scouts I was looking into social enterprise and specifically impact in social enterprise and impact investing and beginning to think about, how do you invest in a company to allow it to grow? And how do you do that for example, with an international mindset. Then also, how do you help that company grow from like a strategic standpoint? And so those two courses really sort of began to light the fire under this like current hypothesis that I have that I’m really interested in impact investing. And so I’m going to grad school to test that one out as well. But I think that was really the beginning of a switch in mindset to me in terms of what I might want to do in my, at least beginning career.

- I think for me, there were two things, there are two things that I continuously think about and that really were rooted in my experience at Middlebury. First academically, obviously my passion for art history and art and appreciating that as a subject like that. All that started in college that I had no idea what art history was before I got to Middlebury. And had I gone to another place maybe I would’ve been struck by the same bolt of lightning but at Middlebury there was a supportive infrastructure behind all of that too, right. It’s not just the classes being there and being available for you to take as a student, but also the professors that were supportive and encouraged me to take more classes and encouraged me to look into career opportunities and supported a sort of unorthodox idea for a thesis, things like that. And then related to that, I think the relationships that I built at Middlebury are ones that continue to be with me and shape me every day. I know that the two professors who wrote letters of recommendation for me, I know them very well and have been able to keep up my relationship with them and I’m sure that that was really instrumental in completing my profile as I applied to law school, but also other professors who I’ve never asked for a single recommendation letter from, who I consider to be friends. Like having those relationships in my lives have really enriched my experience in the real world. I’ve gone to them for career advice when I was thinking about graduate schools, stuff like that. So those relationships have continued to be with me. And then obviously socially, a lot of my friends are people that I met in college and they’ve scattered all over the world, but I’ve maintained an emotional intimacy and attachment to all those friends and I hope that continues to be the case going forward. So those are a few ways in which Middlebury continues to impact me but I can go on about this question for a while.

- Tony or Elijah, if not, I’m gonna take a quick wrap. You guys wanna jump in?

- Sure, I’ll say absolutely the relationships with classmates and with professors, like my thesis advisors still like sends me pictures, like email updates with pictures of her baby and my major advisor and I chat on Facebook all the time and the people who worked in the commons office when I was a try chair, I don’t know if they have those anymore, but the commons office gals hype me up on Facebook when I post pictures and I can’t go a day without talking to friends that I met at Midd, so the relationships are so important. And then also college made me realize that I, that variety is the spice of life, like I will never be able to just go to school or just go to work and not do anything else. Being able to participate in extracurriculars at Midd, tutoring, volunteer work. I was in like six bands or six musical ensembles at one point at Midd, like, I have to have something else that excites me outside of my work and Midd just gave me the opportunity to explore all of that. You should not be bored like a single second at that school. There’s so much to do. And so those are like the two things that I take with me. Yeah.

- Yeah. I think everything that people have said has sort of resonated in some way of being something that I take with me as well. But I think one thing that I can say is I really learned at Middlebury that you don’t get what you want, if you don’t ask for it and it seems like such a simple thing. But I consider myself to be a pretty passive, introverted person, I think generally in life. Right. And I had a habit of sort of, if I work hard enough and I follow the rules, right. Things will more or less come to me and that’s not really the case. And I think being in an environment like Middlebury has sort of helped me realize that there’s so much opportunity to occur. Whether that’s in your classes, with social relationships, with clubs, with internships, with study abroad opportunities. But one really has to take the initiative to ask first to pursue someone about their thoughts on it and what are the next steps to take, right, in order for that thing to become a reality. I think that’s one of the most valuable lessons I learned at Middlebury is fundamentally that you have to ask, right. If you really want something, if you have a passing interest, ask about it, right. And you never know where it’ll take you so…

- Great. We have about three minutes and I think one of the parting questions that I’m gonna ask you is, and Danny, you started to touch on this, but where have you been able to cultivate your connections during your time at Middlebury? Is it… Was it just in Vermont? Was it in new England? I mean, it sounds like, all of you who did study abroad, it was abroad. Is it reunions you come back to and all of a sudden you rediscover people? I mean, tell us a little more about that.

- I think so much of the Middlebury experience is rooted in the sense of place. And by that, I mean the state of Vermont and the town of Middlebury and its surroundings. Middlebury alumni go on to do a lot of different things in a lot of different parts of the world but I think one common thread that you hear all the time from Middlebury alums, young and old, no matter where they are in the world is that shared love and appreciation for the landscape and for the land and for the place of Vermont. It’s a really special part of the country and in the world, it was not a place that I spent any time in before going to college. And the possibilities of what you can do there are just endless. I think the remoteness of it helps cultivate a sense of community on campus. You can’t just escape to downtown Manhattan on a Friday night to go do other things. You are on campus in Middlebury, and most people don’t have a car. And like you have to… There’s buy-in to get to know your classmates and to get to know faculty and to get to know staff. So I think most of my… The vast majority of my relationships from Middlebury were cultivated there and were shaped in some way by the landscape around Middlebury. I studied abroad in Madrid, Spain I don’t have a ton of ongoing relationships from that time. I had a wonderful experience there, but I think as this panel has shown, it’s really kind of choose your own adventure and you can invest a lot in relationships abroad as well. But yeah, I just wanna stress how special Vermont is and how much that is the reason why so many people go back to reunion and so many people go back back to homecoming and I’m going to a wedding this summer with two people who are in the class of 2016, who are getting married in Vermont and that happens a lot too. So there is a real uniqueness about where Middlebury is situated. And I think that’s demonstrated through like the kind of activities you can do while you’re on campus, but also through intangible things like the strength of the community on campus.

- Yeah. I would love just to emphasize what Danny said. Before I ever went to Middlebury, someone told me, I can’t remember who it was, but like, oh my God, Vermont is a magical place. And I was like, what does that mean as a whole state? Like that seems like an… But then I went there and spent four years there and it really, I say verbatim the exact same thing when I tell people, oh yeah, it’s a magical place. ‘Cause it really is and I think it demands a sort of presence of mind that I haven’t felt anywhere else. And I think it’s the combination of the state as well as, as Danny was saying the environment of where you’re at in Middlebury. And as part of, I sort of alluded to it and saying, I think it’s… I always suggest that people do a summer at Middlebury, whether it’s a full summer or even just a small stint. And well, lastly again, even the reunion, speaking to that, that is something that I felt. I was a reunion host, I think two or three times during my time at Middlebury and seeing the people come back for their 50th year reunion, right. People who are 72, 73, have that same sort of intensity of connection that I see that I have with my friends now was really, really inspiring. And so it’s something that Middlebury really does create those connections and a lot of times they are truly lifelong connections.

- I am gonna have to say in the name of time, it is now 8:16 and this webinar is supposed to go to 8:15. So I am gonna wrap this up by first of all, thanking our panelists, Tony, Elijah, Julian, Danny, thank you so much for taking the time all across the coast, from coast to coast, I think to be with us tonight and to really just be authentic and be yourselves and share and just share your stories with us. I wanna thank the admissions office for hosting this on behalf of all of us here in the Center for Careers and Internships. It’s a pleasure for me to be able to talk about all the joys of, that we can bring to the students and to all you students and parents who are on the line now. I just can’t tell you how excited we are to greet you when you step foot on campus, hopefully in your decision making, but that we will maybe see you in the fall. So thank you again and have a wonderful, safe evening. Goodnight everyone.

- Thanks everyone, have a good one.

Making Middlebury Affordable

Join this informational session with Student Financial Services to understand how Middlebury strives to make the College affordable to all of our students.

- The aid webinar with my colleagues, Mike and Kristi, we are hoping that this session is really gonna be for you all. We want this to be a questions driven 45 minutes, so please have your questions and bring them. But we do ask that if you have very specific situational questions that you save those for individual meetings with Student Financial Services, but we really do welcome all of your general questions that could really benefit the whole crew. I would like to let all of you know that this session will be recorded and I believe that we’ll be able to share it as well. And I’d like my fellow panelists to introduce themselves. Mike, do wanna get us started?

- Absolutely, thanks Santana. Hi there, my name is Michael McLaughlin. I am Director of Financial Aid here at Middlebury College, and I’m joined by my colleague Kristi Jovell. Kristi, you wanna pop in and say, hello quickly?

- I do. Hi, Kristi Jovell, Director of Student Financial Services, Operations and Communications. And I’m gonna take a opportunity to not just say hello, but just acclimate you to a little bit of what Student Financial Services does. If you think about it, Student Financial Services, we assist students and families with most things financial here at Middlebury, from assistance with your financial aid awards and forms, to your student bill in options for making payments, education loans for students and parents, the student health insurance plan, and even a little bit of financial literacy in partnership with our relationship with iGrad. So we have a great team, we’re looking forward to answering your questions, both here and via Zoom, phone and in-person appointments. So thanks for joining us.

- Thanks, folks. So we all know that to find the right fit, a school that’s the right fit, you’re looking at culture, geography, academic offerings, but a school also really needs to be a good financial fit. And so we hope that you all are digging into your financial aid rewards, thinking critically about them, comparing offers, and I’d like to start with a guiding question to Mike. When a student opens up their admission, they’re so excited, “Yes, I’ve got a Middlebury admission offer.” Now, how do I go about understanding and reviewing my financial aid offer?

- Thanks, Santana. Yeah, so with our financial aid awards, for our September admits, I believe it’s a four page award offer that you receive, and Febs, I believe it’s also a four page offer and you will see a lot of information in there. The first page of the award is really an introduction and a welcome to Middlebury with a little bit of information, talking about cost of attendance and expected family contribution and number in college. I think it’s really important to understand those last two items. Your expected family contribution, that is a number that we are calculating to help determine how much financial assistance we’re going to be able to award to you. So it’s not necessarily the exact number that you will pay to Middlebury, but it’s the number that we use to help determine how much aid we can offer. And number in college, big part of how we calculate that expected family contribution, is trying to take into consideration other siblings that are also full-time undergraduate programs as well. When you get to the second page, that’s where we really get into the details of the financial aid award. We first wanna tell you what your cost of attendance is, and that’s going to consist of our billed expenses, our tuition, our room and board, which is our housing and our meals, and our student activity fee. Those are the direct billable expenses that you will have from the college. Then we also incorporate non-billed expenses, which we understand every student will have, travel, books and supplies, personal expenses. All of those items come together to create your full cost of attendance. We take that full cost of attendance and subtract your expected family contribution, and that’s how we come up with a family’s demonstrated need. And then the great thing about Middlebury is, we’re need based aid and we’re meeting full need as determined by our office, so that family need is met with a combination of student employment, either work-study or college job, which is $2,600 first year students. Some portion of subsidized loan, again is gonna be variable to upon family’s income, but it could be either $1,000, $2,500, or $3,500, and then the remainder of your need is met with grants and scholarships from the college, and there may also be some federal grants in there as well. So those are the three main components that make up our need based financial aid award. Then the third and fourth pages of our aid offer consists of glossary. What are the important terms that you may need to know, that you may want to ask questions about, as we get into this process. Because not every family may be familiar with, what’s a Federal Pell Grant, what’s the difference between a subsidized or an unsubsidized loan. One quick thing, I do just wanna add into that, is you may go back to the, okay, $1,000, $2,500, or $3,500 loan is part of my award, but I may be seeing more in there, why is that? And it’s important to know when you are eligible for federal loan assistance, that we have to make known what your full eligibility is, per our government regulations. So first year students can borrow up to $5,500 in their direct loan eligibility, maximum subsidized amount is $3,500 and then anything else can go up to $5,500 would be unsubsidized. Major difference between the two, subsidized loan is interest free while you’re in school, unsubsidized loan will accrue interest while you’re in school.

- And we know that family’s finances can really shift over four years, but when admitted students are in this position, they’re really trying to understand what their financial cost may be over the course of four years. So if a student’s financial aid package… Well, I guess my first question is, will a student’s financial aid package change drastically over four years? And if it changes in a way that feels to the family, that it’s not something that they can do, can an financial aid package be appealed.

- Sure. Yeah, so there’s a general message, we like to send to our families. If your financial situation remains unchanged, which these days is, you know, not as common a thing as it used to be. But if your family finances stay relatively unchanged, your family size stays relatively unchanged, and the number of children in undergraduate studies stays unchanged, your family contribution should not calculate drastically different from year to year. So in that sense, your financial aid award should be consistent in that, there are some variables to that. Obviously each year Middlebury will raise their cost of attendance by a certain amount. If your family contribution stays the same, you’re not gonna see any difference other than an increase in your grant award. So I think that’s important to know. We do reassess on a yearly basis because we are offering that need based aid and we understand family situations will change, it could fluctuate positive or negative. We wanna make sure we’re dealing with current information to capture where each family is, so we can update their awards on a yearly basis. That being said, there are are times, when families go through extreme changes, sometimes it’s from year to year, sometimes it could be in the middle of a year. It’s important to know that our office is here to work directly with those families. We’re working with some families right now who have seen drastic changes from the 2020 taxes, that are part of this application process to their more recent filed 2021 taxes. So, if your family is seeing that, and I’d like to say, it’s gotta be a significant change, not minor changes, but if your family’s seeing that significant change, then feel free to contact us, reach out to us and we’ll be able to work with you to try and get the most up-to-date and an accurate information from you.

- So what do you think, what is one of your favorite things about working for a school like Middlebury that is smaller, that maybe has this encouraging relationship or communication strategy with its admitted students. I don’t think that that’s necessarily something that’s gonna be the same for every single school, that these students may be looking at. Do you have some certain favorite qualities about Student Financial Services and the support that they can provide student?

- Absolutely, in our office, we have, I guess, the honor of being able to review each student’s file on a yearly basis. We’re not dealing with tens of thousands of students, where we’re letting computers, kind of do all the calculations in the awarding. We are reviewing each student and family information one by one, when we are able to make these aid awards. And then on top of that, we have, you know, the great availability to be able to have students pop in, make appointments, make Zoom appointments, to really connect with us on that individual basis. We do try to put on different programming with our other offices on campus, whether that’s through Student Life or Anderson Freeman Center, where we talk about reapplying for financial aid on a yearly basis. We have great collaborators in our Study Abroad Office because a lot of students who are planning to study abroad in their junior year, they wanna know how is financial aid gonna work when I actually step away from our campus. And I’m happy to say, you know, our Study Abroad Office sends students to us, which we find are the best in-person visits that we have, because we’re able to sit down and walk through, okay, you want to go to Midd Paris or you want to go to South America or wherever any of our 30 plus study abroad sites are. I mean, we’re able to sit down and walk through, how both your Federal Financial Aid and your Middlebury Institutional Aid can travel to all of our Middlebury programs. So we’re really excited to be able to do that work with students. Kristi, was there anything you wanted to add to that at all?

- Well, I am gonna add to that, Mike, and I’m really gonna shout out to you and your Financial Aid Directors that work under you. To Santana’s question about, you know, something that makes Middlebury special, I’ve worked in higher education for decades, but I’ve been just a little under two years here at Middlebury, and the scope and breadth of experience that you are getting in your Financial Aid Directors here at Middlebury is really immense. Michael leads that team, but each of the three directors, you will each have a director based on the first letter of the student’s last name, and that director gets to know you, and they’re gonna work with you for all of your four years. And generally you can make appointments and speak with the same director. But the great thing is if for some reason, Mike is out, Scott and Jane that work with him are just as good and just as qualified. And they love what they do, they’re very good at what they do, and we just all really enjoy working with students and families and helping them, not just through the financial aid process, but the other parts of funding in education, like your bill, or health insurance that can be confusing as well. And we ask you to reach out to us, that’s what we love to do, and it’s what we’re here for. So, you know, again, just a little shout out to Mike and the strength of his team, they are really, really good at what they do.

- Thank you, Kristi. We’ve got a question about being a Feb, if a Feb decides to spend part or maybe all of their Febmester working and earning money, will that shift their financial aid award in any significant way?

- I’ll speak from history. We have not seen that students who work during their Feb semester earn a significant amount that would impact financial aid in future years. I mean, you’d really have to go above and beyond, your typical say, summer earnings to see anything. I feel strongly that it would not have much of an impact in the future. And again, anything you earn, let’s say right now, fall of 2022, won’t actually show up in your application process for two years.

- And we also are going to have a Feb session later, it’s at 7:00 PM today. So if anyone has Feb specific questions about the experience or what that might look like, you can absolutely join that Feb session later, but yeah, we welcome all of those Feb specific questions for financial aid, here. I’ve got a question about the non-custodial waiver. As we were mentioning, family situations can shift over the course of four years, relationships can shift over four years, there’s a lot of a gray area when it comes to parents, parental relationships, financial responsibility. Could you give some guidance to folks who are wondering, if they should be filling out a non-custodial waiver and what kind of preparation they might need ahead of time to successfully fill one of those out.

- Sure, so I will start with this, cause if it’s a topic that’s gonna come up, it probably has come up already, and then we sometimes see it a little bit down the road. But most students and families probably have gone through this already. Our starting point is primarily by default, we’re looking at both biological parents to be part of the process. Now, there are some instances in the application process, that waiver for the non-custodial profile or what we call Household B, may automatically be waived and Kristi might be able to speak to this, a little bit later, cause we do have certain criteria, but for the most part, if a Household B profile is requested and family needs to file a non-custodial parent waiver, they can get that information, it starts right with the college board. It’s a three or four page document that you gotta fill out as complete as possible, be as accurate and update as possible. And then there will be some third party documentation that we will also look for, letters of support, it could be police records, court records, third party documentation, so that is the process. And again, we primarily see this, when students are entering into the college, once students have entered and they’re matriculating and they’re moving from year to year, we don’t typically see that request. Though, we have seen a few cause things do change. That being said, we understand divorced parent situations can be a real gray area, like you were saying, Santana. One of the great things I think we’ve been able to do over the past few years is only require that Household B profile, the year the student is entering college. We carry that information forward each year, so there is not that attempt to have to go back and regain or recollect that information cause we understand not every situation is an easy one. So we want to be as sensitive as possible when collecting or hopefully, and not collecting in further years.

- Great, thank you. We’ve got a question then about the loans piece, again. Could you clarify or just extend your answer to the loan piece, the subsidized loan versus the unsubsidized loan, how often folks are offered both of them and then they get to choose. I think there’s still little bit of confusion.

- Yeah. So it’s kind of funny. It’s deepened the weeds on our end, but we determine an institutional family contribution, but your FAFSA also determines a federal family contribution. So based on where those two line up with each other, you may have a subsidized direct Federal Loan in your award, or you may have a Middlebury College Loan. Those are the two versions of a subsidized loan you may have in your award. Subsidized direct loan would be, again, the amount would be either 1,000, 2,500 or 3,500 depending upon your family’s level of income. Our lowest income only have 1,000, our highest income have 3,500, you would see those same amounts in college loan. So there’s the balancing act that we do. Do we give college loan or do we do give subsidized direct loan? And then there’ll always be some type of unsubsidized loan eligibility. Kristi, I see you wanna jump in here, I could tell by your face.

- I do. I was waiting. Can you tell… I’m looking at the exact question that came in from Kara. So Kara, if the Middlebury College loan in particular, it does have deferred interest while the students in school. Let me make sure I get all your questions here. Oops, I just lost it. I think your points were, the interest is deferred like a subsidized federal loan while the student’s in school, deferred while they’re in Middlebury and until nine months after they graduate or leave Middlebury. So the Middlebury College Loan has a little bit longer of a grace period than the six months that the federal loans have. And I think the last part of your question is, can the Middlebury loan be deferred while the students in graduate school? And the answer is yes. So I think I got all the pieces there.

- Awesome. Thank you, Kristi.

- No problem.

- Thank you. So we’ve got a question about Opportunity Grants. I’m not sure if financial service actually is in charge of those funds, but can you talk a little bit about Opportunity Grants, what those may cover, and are book expenses one of those things, and I think it might also be a nice time to talk about the student support program for some of our students with the lowest DFSCs.

- Sure. So the Opportunity Grants do not run specifically through Student Financial Services, they’re more on the student life side. I would say the general purpose of that is to help support what are items not incorporated into our cost of attendance that we use for awarding financial aid. It should not be used for anything tuition or room and board related, even books, travel, again, for your typical… It’s a really meant for other needs outside of those traditional or typical purposes. That being said, there may be extenuating circumstances where some of those may apply, perhaps, you know, God forbid an emergency to travel home for something. I mean, I think those are where exceptions happen to that. You also mentioned the student support program. We do have and we’re very fortunate, I think, to be able to offer these programs for what we would term our highest needs students, where we are able to purchase a new laptop computer for them. That’s a one time purchase that students get to keep, and then we also are able to purchase their student health insurance, if needed, for all four years at Middlebury. I don’t know, Kristi, if there’s anything you want to add about the health insurance at all.

- Well, the piece that I would add about the health insurance for the student support program is that you would’ve received an email from Jane in our office and we will enroll you in the college’s health insurance plan. No action on your part, you’ll receive the welcome letter and the plan starts in August. And for anyone who wants to take advantage of Middlebury’s student health insurance plan, either choosing that coverage over an existing plan, or instead of any coverage that you would have that information will come out in June and you can either enroll or you can waive in the student health insurance plan. One note, some colleges will charge you for the health insurance plan and only waive the cost, once you waive the program, Middlebury does not charge for the plan upfront. So we do ask you go in and waive it, but you will not see a charge on your initial bill for the health insurance plan, unless you have actively enrolled in it.

- Thanks, Kristi. And I will just add, you did mention, we did send notifications out from our office last week to anyone who would be eligible for the student support program.

- And regarding this question about books, do you know if there’s any opportunities for students to charge their books to the bookstore and pay them back later after they’ve had a few paychecks, or if there’s a way for students who may not have that spending money at the very beginning of the semester to get those books on time.

- Absolutely, we do have a book loan program that we run. Again, we will identify and send communication out to our highest needs students, and it gives them a couple options. If students are receiving financial aid that goes above and beyond their billed expenses, where they would have a credit balance on their account, they can basically use that as a declining balance towards their books. Students who may not have a credit balance on their account can still purchase their books and it will charge to their account. And it gives them the availability, excuse me, availability to pay that off throughout the semester, hopefully by utilizing their work-study or college job earnings.

- Can you clarify the difference between a college job and work-study?

- Sure. So Federal Work-Study is a program that is funded through the federal government, meaning they’re subsidizing the work that students are doing on campus. Some students may not qualify for a Federal Work-Study, our undocumented students or international students may not qualify, but they still have that opportunity to work a Middlebury College job on campus, they’re basically the same type of jobs, it’s the funding source behind those jobs. Now in a typical year, there may be some programs funded through Federal Work-Study, where they may be able to work some off campus jobs that are Federal Work-Study in particular, but there’s a wide array of both Federal Work-Study and Middlebury College jobs on campus for students to work.

- I think it’s important to note that our work-study jobs on campus really do hold, like you said, like a wide array of positions. So there are work-study positions on campus that can really be resume building career related opportunities, as well as maybe more traditional work-study jobs, they really do run the gamut. And work-study students do get first opportunity to apply for jobs on campus. I believe there’s a two week hold at the beginning of every semester for work-study students to apply. And so you can get really a range of jobs that support you in your interests. There are also some great jobs, or maybe some hope, there might be some downtime, where homework is also being done after working. So definitely lots of opportunities on campus and I know that as an office, like both of us, both of our offices really love our student workers. And I think having a student job on campus can be a really personally rewarding experience as well.

- Can I jump in? One quick one, Santana on working on campus. Lot of times we’ll get questions, Middlebury College job, federal work-study, does that pay to my bill, how does that work? And I think, I just wanna clear that up, that students, when they’re awarded work-study or a college job, it’s their opportunity, though, they’re not required to work while they’re on campus. It’s their opportunity to earn that money. So they would get paid as a normal job would get paid in, most students probably opt-in and sign up for direct deposit, but it’s really an opportunity for students to work, earn money. And I always like to say, that’s really where students should be putting their funds, towards their non billed expenses that we incorporate into the cost of tenants. Travel, books, supplies that’s really where we see the earnings from their student employment going.

- And we had a question about winter clothes specifically, and I would like to speak to that one. Sometimes the Opportunity Grants are a great way to secure a great pair of winter boots or a great winter coat. There are also clothing drives and opportunities through the International Student Services Office, we’ve also got the Anderson Freeman Resource Center that both do winter coat and winter gear drives. You also won’t need your winter gear until mid… Sorry, sorry. Maybe mid-October, but definitely maybe by like mid-November, you’ll need them. So you will have some paychecks under your belt before you’re really gonna need those high level and more expensive clothing items. Okay. Is there any other additional process or documentation that students need to do with the Office of Student Financial Services in regards to the financial aid package, or is the financial aid package offered at admission final, for both domestic and international students. So can they provide any other additional information to maybe adjust that financial aid award?

- Yeah. I’ll start off with this because we have students who’ve gone early decisions, students who’ve gone regular decision. We say, everything from the get go is an estimated aid decision, for a couple different reasons. We may or may not have all the information that we will need for a final decision, meaning we may not have had your taxes. For folks who were admitted early decision, we did not have the 2022-23 cost of attendance yet, so we will need to update those student’s aid awards with our increased cost of attendance, which at the same time, as long again, as nothing has changed will mean an increase in grant assistance. We generally require that we have tax return information. There could be, depending upon, if you have siblings in school, sibling enrollment form, or a number in college form. So I would say this, if we had your taxes, when we were able to read and make the financial aid award, I don’t suspect much will change when we go out with our final aid awards, which is great. And I’d say probably 90 percent of families had their taxes in for regular decisions. So I feel pretty strongly that awards are gonna be accurate and probably not changing a whole lot. The only time you’re really gonna start seeing a change is that a, if we didn’t have taxes, or b, a family is appealing with a reconsideration request for a significant change in family circumstances.

- How does payment work? Can you have a payment plan in place, and Kristi, you might wanna take this one, do you feel like the student families can, can families have the opportunity to pay it over the semester or the school year? Do they need to do it all in one lump sum?

- Yes, that is a great question. And that allows us to veer in a different direction regarding the bill and timing and options, right? Because we do have a number of options for families to pay. Generally colleges are going to send a bill for the tuition and fees for each semester. So we’re gonna send you a bill and say, here’s this half due, unless you’re Febs, right, and then you only get the Spring bill. But generally we’re billing by semester for your charges. However, there are other payment plans available. We have monthly payment plans where you can break up the cost of the semester into a number of months. We also have, for families that are not on financial aid, pre-payment plans, where you can pay upfront years of tuition ahead. So we have a couple different options based on your family’s circumstances, as well as information that we can guide you through about education loans, should students or families need them. And that I should add one more piece, cause I think this is really important. We send out bills by email. So that is a really important thing, for those of you that when you get the information about setting up your Middlebury email, please make sure that you’re setting up your Middlebury email, that’s how Student Financial Service is going to communicate with you. Not only for finalizing your financial aid award, like Mike just talked about, but also for sending out information about the bill. And parents and guardians take note here, we’ll send to the students Middlebury email, and then during our onboarding process, ask the student to set parents up as an authorized party, so you then start to receive the billing emails as well. So I don’t know if you can say, Ugh or you’re welcome, from me giving you that tip. But parents make sure that your student will set you up that way you get the benefit of those billing notifications as well.

- And please make sure that you add sfs@middlebury.edu as a safe sender so that you are getting all of those emails. We do not want those emails going to spam, so be proactive, please. We’re still getting a lot of questions about whether financial aid awards can be appealed. And I think I’ll just say it. Yes, financial aid awards can be appealed. There is an appeal process set up in place at the Student Financial Services Office, they have seen appeals before, they review appeals and they can sometimes make adjustments if there’s new relevant information provided. And I would encourage you all to be proactive. If you feel like there’s a big piece, of your financial situation, that’s not being represented in the information you’re submitting to Student Financial Services, share that, send an email. These are real people like Mike said, who are reviewing your materials in a holistic way, in a contextual way. And so please make sure that you’re advocating for yourself, that you’re sharing all the information needed and appeals are possible and they do happen sometimes. So.

- Yeah, Santana, I’ll just add to that. Items that we may be requesting to documents, you know, we’re looking obviously, what is the change in the family circumstance to be able to write it down for us in an email helps us to be able to contextualize it. We may be asking if there’s, you know, been a change of employment, loss of income, whatever it may be. We’re probably going to start asking you to upload 2021 tax documents to the college board’s IDOC system. I do have to say, unfortunately, we don’t necessarily match offers from other schools. Some schools could be offering merit based awards and unfortunately we don’t work in that world, but it really comes down to what is, what has changed with your family situation, from your initial filling out of the FAFSA and the CSS profile and the collection of your 2020 taxes.

- If the student has an outside scholarship, how might that apply to their financial aid award?

- I’m so glad you brought that up, I had that bulleted as one of the items I wanted to talk about. You know, we’re in a little bit of a unique situation because we meet full demonstrated need, like most other schools out there. Most other schools are gaping you with your financial aid, they have a cost, they calculate your family contribution and they meet some of your need and there’s a gap in there. And a lot of schools will let outside aid kind of fill that gap. Because we’re meeting full demonstrated need, there’s no gap to fill. So what we do is we first allow outside aid to first reduce or replace what we call the self-help component of the financial aid award, which is that $2,600 work-study, neither $1,000, $2,500, or $3,500 need-based loan, that is part of your financial aid award. So for first year students, I would honestly say the majority of our students have probably that $3,500 loan in there. So students could earn up to $6,100 in outside scholarships before it would ever start reducing your Middlebury grants assistance.

- And you’ve mentioned that the number in college is a defining feature of a financial aid award, one of those critical bits. And if a student has an older sibling who’s in graduate school, that still count in their financial aid award calculation.

- Yeah. So while it may impact your eligibility for federal aid, meaning the way you fill out your FAFSA, it will not have a positive impact on our distribution or rewarding of institutional funding. Once the older sibling gets to graduate school, they’re oftentimes considered independent or self supporting students. So that’s why it’s always important to know either when you’re going to lose an older sibling out of undergraduate studies or even gain more younger siblings into undergraduate studies, because that will have an impact on your family contribution, both ways. And we see it each year, some families are losing older siblings and others are gaining younger siblings in college.

- Okay folks, we are winding down, we’ve got about seven more minutes left in this panel and we want you to ask any of those final lingering questions. I’ve got a question about, oh, I just lost my question that I had but I will go ahead. But we do have, shoot, any opportunity for you all to share anything that you feel like you haven’t had a chance to share yet. Any parting advice from Kristi, Mike.

- I’m gonna let Kristi go with, see if she has any of her fun facts ready to go.

- Oh, I had a whole page of fun facts and we have gone over most of them. But I will give just a couple of tips that I’ve mentioned before, but I think are really important. One is we always get lots of questions, I know we talked a little bit about it, but around getting a job on campus. So just a reminder that, you know, it’s the Student Employment Office at Middlebury that will post jobs, they’ll start to do that in August. So just put that on your to-do list for August to start checking that job board, and then that way you can kind of be the early bird applying for some of those jobs. And again, just the importance of watching your Middlebury email. And as Santana said, yes, please accept SFS as a safe sender, we would really love that, we send nice emails, you don’t want us to go into spam. But those I think are two important things. The other thing I will say is, this is a while out in all of your minds, but remember that applying for financial aid is an annual process. So this year you have your financial aid award, next year, for April one is when we’ll be asking you to do your FAFSA and your profile, again, assuming both of those forms apply to you. So hurray, we’ve given you your financial aid award for this year, we can’t wait to welcome you here. Don’t forget that you will reapply. But as Mike said, if you had a Household B, you only need to do that one year, so that is one and done. And those were maybe the tips I would want to stress, Mike, and I know you probably have some too.

- Yeah, absolutely. I wanna talk about finalizing financial aid and how that looks. You know, once we have our matriculated class, we will start working on finalizing our first years and we’ll also get into awarding our returning students as well. And we anticipate that to probably be, or start at mid-to-late May timeframe, and then through the month of June in time to get our billing out for early July. I think it’s important to know, you got your initial aid award through the admissions and their Slate portal. Once you are matriculated, you will then transition over to what we will call your BannerWeb accounts. And BannerWeb is where you’re gonna go to see your financial aid, you know, basically going forward during your time at Middlebury, your financial aid will go through BannerWeb. And I know there are other areas of the college that are also using BannerWeb, I think you’ll do your onboarding through BannerWeb as well. So first time you’re working with Slate in admissions, as you matriculate, everything will work through your BannerWeb account. So I think it’s important. You’ll get an email from us when a decision has been finalized, it’ll direct you to BannerWeb. At that point, you’ll see if you have work grants, scholarships, those are already automatically accepted for you, you have to take no action for those. So the only thing you’ll have to do is determine, do you wanna use any of your loan eligibility, and that’s the part that will be in your hands.

- I do remember my final question, which is we know that life happens maybe more so in the last two years, extenuating circumstances are real. If a student goes halfway through the semester has to pull out for whatever number of reasons, is there more than eight semesters of financial aid available to a student so that they can complete their Middlebury education or at that point after their eight semester, are they looking at funding that semester on their own.

- Yeah, so I mean, our starting point is, we’re hoping students, and expecting students to graduate in their eight semesters and get eight semesters of assistance. If a student is withdrawing between semesters, that’s not really an issue cause you’re not utilizing that aid. If a student does have to withdraw mid-semester, that will likely count as a semester of aid. There is a process to go through the admin committee, where you would petition for a ninth semester of being able to continue academically, but then also receive financial aid. To be honest with you, as long as it is a circumstance that, you know, seems reasonable, we haven’t turned students away from that.

- I feel like that’s just another great reason to go to like a small residential liberal arts school that has that holistic approach. All right, panelists. Thank you so much, Kristi, thank you, Mike. Thank you everyone who viewed us, we know that we only had 45 minutes together, but know that we have inboxes open and plenty of advice and willingness to connect with you, one on one, so please do. We’ve got a great diverse experiences panel starting at six o’clock, so take 15 minutes break and then come in and join us again for that. And just thank you all. If you didn’t get your questions answered, connect with us again and take care.

- Thank you all very much.

- Thank you.

Research at Middlebury

Research opportunities are abundant at Middlebury and available across all class years and academic disciplines. Our students conduct independent research, work alongside faculty on campus and at other institutions, and present their work at professional conferences. Join us to find out more about undergraduate research experiences from Middlebury students and faculty.

- Okay, good evening all. We have listeners tuning in from all over the country and in fact, from around the world. I think our furthest listener right now that I see has registered is tuning in all the way from Ukraine. So welcome if you are someone who is east coast or west coast, thank for joining us for our session on Research at Middlebury. My name is Carly Hernandez and I work in the office of admission. I’ll be moderating our session tonight for about 45 minutes and taking questions from our listeners and asking this panel of professors to chime in from their various departments about some of the very interesting thing that their, things that their current students are working on. And some of the options and opportunities that you’ll have available to you if you do decide to be a Middlebury student. That said, I wanna congratulate the admitted students from the class of 2026, who are listening again from all over the country and all over the world and deciding if Middlebury is that perfect fit, that perfect college home for them. Our session is going to be driven by your live questions. So please do submit those to our Q&A, if you would like to hear something very specific to your interests, we’re happy to answer that’s why we’re here. All right I will ask our professors to tell us a little bit about themselves and their area of specialty, and an interesting fact, because of course you will be getting to know professors closely and personally in a setting like Middlebury, where the student faculty ratio is eight to one. You will see these professors as colleagues by the time that you are a senior or a graduate. And so I’ll ask them to share some of those interesting pieces of information about themselves. Lisa Gates, if you’ll kick us off first.

- Sure thank you welcome everybody. My name is Lisa Gates. I’m associate Dean for fellowships and research here at Middlebury. I guess fun fact for me, my academic background is actually in the humanities. My PhD is in German, but the work I do is largely different, but I have a great understanding of research in the humanities. So at the college, I predominantly work with students and faculty seeking support for undergraduate research. I help students work with Middlebury faculty, help them identify opportunities off campus. We also provide funding for faculty to work with students during the summer. Funding for students to participate in academic conferences, as well as providing senior work funding for students pursuing a capstone experience in their major or minor. And lastly, I am a co-chair for our annual spring student symposium, which is coming up really soon, just a couple weeks. Which is a marvelous day when classes are canceled and students share the academic and research and creative work that they’ve been doing. And everyone from first years to seniors participate, faculty, staff, friends, come out and show support for you and also learn an incredible amount about the really exciting and diverse work that happens in the undergraduate community at Middlebury. Thank you.

- Thank you so much. Professor Crocker. I’ll ask you to go next.

- Hi, I’m Amanda Crocker I’m in the neuroscience program. I’ve been at Middlebury college since the fall of 2015. I study behavioral neuroscience. I look at fruit flies. I study traumatic brain injury, stress and pain behavior. I also do a lot of sequencing and molecular biology work as well and bioinformatics. I’d say my fun fact is I guess I was a dual collegiate sport athlete as an undergrad while also pursuing a stem. So yeah, and I have on average about, I would say 10 or so students in the lab and they ran from paid positions, volunteers, and then they can also take classes for credit, to work in the lab.

- Out of curiosity what two sports, because you must have been a very busy lady.

- I did track and field and I did, I was a springboard diver.

- Wow, wonderful thank you. Professor Poppe I’ll ask you to go next.

- My name is Nicholas Poppe I’m an associate professor of Luso-Hispanic studies, which in my case means that I teach courses in Spanish generally, either in area studies so I’ll teach a course called ideas and cultures of the Southern Cone or in film and media studies as well. I teach lots of cool courses on movies and other types of media. Research I’ve just finished up a book that was published in and with some help from research assistants that deals with the role of foreign film workers in the emergence of Latin American film industries. And right now I’m working on two projects one’s kind out of it comes out of, it’s a shorter book that comes out of the previous one on stardom in Argentina, in the 1930s and 1940s. Another one project that I don’t know what it’s gonna become, but it’s on Mexican film cultures in San Antonio, Texas, my hometown, in the 1930s to 1950s or so. So I work generally with one or two research assistants per year. And I see it not only as a moment as a way to kind of advance my research, but it’s a really, really fun way of teaching to be honest. It’s one of the most rewarding ways in which we come to know our students and we help prepare them for whatever their futures might be. So I’ve, I don’t know if we have time, we probably get into this later, but some of my students go on and they’ll, I’ve a student at Harvard law right now and then I have a student who is running a coffee company in San Francisco, all sorts of different types of things. It’s really cool to be able to see our students paths as they kind of develop over the years. My fun fact is again, I’m from San Antonio, so I’m not generally used to the Vermont winters. So I have recently after we bought a house, we bought a house that uses wood as its primary source of fuel. So in my free time, I fell trees on my property, cut them into logs and then split them and then stack them. And then later on, bring everything down the house to burn. So everything’s coming from our land, the heating wise during the winter. And this is my hobby. I don’t know what this says about me as a human being, but this is what I’ve gotten into recently.

- That is so Vermont and I wanna give you like a Northeast Northern new Eastern merit badge for having that as a hobby. It’s like Vermont CrossFit. Professor Ayoub can I ask you to go next?

- Hi yes my name is Dima Ayoub I’m a professor in the Arabic Department. I’m working on an ongoing project that has two sort of products. The one is one of them is a traditional book project and adjacent to that is a kind of digital archive that I actually is the archive for my book, so to speak. And one of the ways that I’ve really tried to engage students is to, think about I’m very much based in the humanities. And so I really try to kind of cut across this kind of supposed division between traditional humanities and, cutting edge digital technologies. So the project I work on is called Paratex and Arabic literary translation. And so Paratex are basically anything around the text. So introductions, glossies, footnotes, forwards afterwards prophecies. And these I’ve identified these as kind of, very digitizable kind of marginalia. And so, so that’s what I’ve been working on with students since I actually arrived here in 2016. I think since then I’ve probably worked with about 10 students. And same as Professor Poppe, I worked with about one to two students every year. It is really one of the most, it is very rewarding because you learn so much also in how you kind of teach students to do research. You learn a lot more about kind of research methods. So, and then also I teach courses in gender studies and black studies. I also teach courses on film, all of this in addition to Arabic and Arabic literature. And fun fact is that I, I got into culinary school before I started my PhD and I almost went, so would’ve had a very different path. But it’s still a possibility.

- Or you can still be one of Middlebury’s resident foodies and endorse both those interests. Professor Repka, I’ll ask you to introduce yourself next.

- Thank you, Carly I’m Lindsay Repka. I am in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department. I’m also part of the molecular biology and biochemistry program here at Middlebury. And my research group does work in the area that is known as chemical biology, which is often defined as using chemical research and chemical reactions to help us better understand biology. Specifically, we’re trying to develop a new chemical reaction that can help with drug development specifically the step in drug development, where the biological target of drugs is identified. And also they’re off targets, which lead the side effects. Those are identified in this process too. And one of the things I really like about that research area is that it allows us to use both chemistry and molecular biology. We bring them together and we use both those techniques in the lab and that also I think is really interesting to the students having that combination of techniques. And I work with at the moment five students and that’s about the number I usually have. Some of them are working on independent study, so not a specifically a thesis project, but some of ‘em are also doing a senior thesis and they all have their own unique piece that they’re contributing to the work, but together we’re working toward one big goal. Oh and my fun fact, I almost forgot. I also play tennis, which is not a very Vermont specific activity, but it is done in Vermont. And that’s me.

- I appreciate our professors who balance their Vermont CrossFit and their athleticism and their academic interest that’s so commendable. That’s so very liberal arts. Professor Kimble let’s hear from new you next.

- Hi good evening, everybody. I’m Matthew Kimble, I’m in the Psychology Department. I’ve been at Middlebury since 2004. I’m a clinical psychologist by training. I got my training at Boston University and I teach courses here at Middlebury in introductory psych, psychological disorders. The senior seminars I’ve done are on topics like happiness, resilience and psychological trauma. My research focuses on a wide range of issues associated with individuals who struggle with psychological trauma. I have an active clinical psychophysiology lab where individuals and community members with trauma histories come in and we run EEG and eye tracking protocols. In addition, I’ve done some collaborations across the United States with colleagues trying to understand the effectiveness of trigger warnings and content warnings on readings that people do or a visual material that they see that’s been a recent interest of our lab. I can vouch for what Lisa said in the support that her office gives to the work that I do. This summer I have two students supported by her office working in my lab the entire summer. I always try to encourage students to do that whenever possible, because they always leave in the spring just when the weather’s getting good, right. So, they get a really nice September and then, it’s pretty rough for a little while and just when it really starts getting beautiful students leave. So it’s really great to have students in the lab where they can work full time in that capacity. I often have a couple thesis students, a couple students who are working as research assistants, some students who are just volunteering, kind of observing and getting a sense of what’s going on in the lab. So those are the different ways that students work in my lab is. As for fun facts I’ve and this is embarrassing compared to Amanda and Lindsay I’ve picked up pickle ball, right? So of late I’ve started playing pickle ball. So that’s been interesting. And the other side thing related the Amanda’s interest is I have a signed autograph picture of Roger Bannister hanging in my office. And Roger Bannister was the first man to run a four minute mile. And so if anybody wants to see a signed autograph picture of Roger Bannister come to Bicentennial hall, happy to show you.

- Definitely stop by during office hours. Wonderful thank you. And last but not least Professor Spatafora, please go ahead and introduce yourself.

- Hi, I’m Grace Spatafora. I’m a professor in the Biology Department here. I’m also the director of the molecular biology and biochemistry program at the college and this year is my first year serving in the administration as the Dean of the curriculum. By training I’m a microbial geneticist. So some of the courses that I have taught in my 30 years here at the college, I came here in 1992, which is a long time ago. I teach microbiology with a lab. I teach molecular genetics with a lab. Immunology that’s a course I’m teaching currently. I’ve taught a course for the, the general college community called key issues in genetic engineering. And I also teach a course on mechanisms of microbial pathogenesis. In terms of my research, I’m sort of a gene jockey. I use DNA and RNA approaches to better understand how bacteria make you sick. And my focus specifically is on the human mouth. There’s more than 700 different bacterial species that live in the mouth and on a particular group of organisms that belong to the genus Streptococcaceae. So I guess you can call me a streptococcal geneticist, and I have NIH funding that supports in particular on the organism that causes dental cavities. So I have a research technician who’s a former Middlebury student who’s employed in my lab right now. Who’s helping me keep things going in the lab as I serve the administration. Currently, I have three students who are working in the lab in addition to my technician. We’re going to be traveling again now that we’re kind of coming out of the COVID era. Pre COVID, we traveled to London and Iguazu Falls and all around the world with students to deliver their research findings that they revealed at the college. We’re just now getting back on track. We’re gonna be traveling to Washington DC this summer. It’s really fun to travel with students. They present their work at national and international scientific conferences. They co-author papers with me. So we have a very active research group. In terms of my fun fact, I have two, and I’m trying to decide which one to present. I guess I’ll tell you that I went to Duke university. So as some of you may know, I’m rather depressed that Duke lost to Carolina in the final four March Madness. On Monday night, it was the final two it was Carolina versus Kansas. And I watched the first half of the game and Carolina was up, that’s our rival big rival. And I just got so depressed I turned it off, assuming that Carolina won the whole thing. And I dragged around all day in on Tuesday I went into class and I heard some students talking about how Kansas had won and I thought they were just pulling my leg and I found out that actually Kansas did win and that I really should have stuck by them and watched Carolina lose. I hope, hope I’m not offending anybody. It’s just sort of a rivalry like Alabama, Birmingham, Duke, Carolina, and I was quite happy to see Carolina lose. That’s my fun fact.

- Thank you. I want you to know that because of your description of some of your areas, specialty in oral bacteria, I’m going to immediately be brushing my teeth twice after our session concludes just thinking about some of that. But thank you all for your introductions, your personal fun facts. I’ll tell our listeners now that the floor is open for any of their questions that are specific to a particular department, or just something very general, perhaps about how to approach research. We’ll be touching base with Lisa about that. Either way our first question is in, it looks like it’s going to be for our professors who work with some students who are interested in pre-med studies or perhaps going on to medical school after graduation from Middlebury. Since Middlebury is not one of the institutions that has its own associated medical school or hospital, are there ways for Middlebury students to get involved with medical research? Lisa what’s your .

- Just to kick this off I have two fabulous colleagues in the CTLR Mary and Hannah Benz, who are assistant deans for health professions. And they are fabulous advisors to our students and help them connect to faculty here, help them figure out what courses to start with, how to stagger lab courses. So they’re not overwhelmed. How to connect them to different research opportunities, as well as running a January EMT course for students who wanna become EMTs and work with the community and the campus in that way. So that’s just a really important resource I want all of our prospectus students to know about.

- Thank you. Professor Spatafora, have you worked with some of the students who are interested in going on into medical programs?

- Yes, I have. Many of my students go on to medical school, some go on to dental school, veterinary school, but medical school is a very popular postgraduate career for a lot of students who work in my lab because it’s, relevant to the clinical condition of the oral cavity, which is sort of the gateway to overall health.

- I would say the same is true for my lab as well. I have number of students often who are Northsight students who work in the lab. One of the advantages is we work with humans with clinical disorders. And so they get that experience in terms of working with those individuals, learning the ins and outs of ethics and confidentiality and the context of that type of research. And I think it puts them in a good position when they’re heading off the medical school or joining the interviews to talk about some of their experiences, some of the work they’ve done with the EEGs, in which, in some cases they’ve seen those projects from their inception to eventually often after they graduate, publication.

- Thank you. Okay I have another question that has come in from someone who’s interested in environmental studies. And so Lisa Gates, this may be a question for you if you have worked with some of these folks. If someone is interested in environmental studies, but wants to try out some different field work and opportunities to figure out where exactly their interests land, is there a way to get advising and some experience in those areas to learn where someone really wants to focus their career?

- Well, I think that’s a really big question and I think there are a lot of different resources that can be helpful. For starters I think taking some courses that sound interesting in the environmental studies program is a great way to start. That department really runs the gamut from more social science approaches, humanities approaches, thinking about literature, to things in stem fields, chemistry, geology, are two that immediately come to mind. We have very active programs, both through the department and faculty who are working with students in research. Again, there are opportunities regularly with colleagues in stem areas like chemistry and geology, but also periodically with other colleagues, biology, doing field work, working on the lands around us. There’s also a very active sustainability program and that Jack Burn is the director for that. And there are a lot of students who work with him and his colleagues during the summer. There’s also really marvelous stuff students can get involved with on campus. I’m thinking of our Energy2028 program, the campaign to become carbon neutral by 2028. And there are a lot of ways that students are driving that work and working collaboratively with the administration in moving that forward. There’s also our Sunday night group, which was origins of 350.org. And they’re very active, both in initiatives on campus, statewide, nationally, internationally in terms of climate activism. So there are a lot of ways to get involved both through the student community administrative partnerships, courses, field, work research with faculty and I think through, by sort of dipping your toe in the waters, again, start with a couple classes. You’ll get a much better sense of the rich array of opportunities and then figure out a path that is, is really right for you. And then we also have colleagues in our center for careers and internships who work specifically with students with those interests, identifying organizations where they might have fabulous experiences. And I’ve worked with students as well on my, my fellowships hat as well. I am the point person for nationally competitive fellowships. And so I’ve seen a lot of, of these students. I’ve worked with them on Truman scholarships, scholarships, Watson fellowships. So there’s just a array of opportunities, frankly.

- Thank you. And our next question may naturally fall to Lisa you as well. It is one of the most common questions that at least we in admissions see about research because Middlebury is admitting a class of such driven, passionate, interested students who are so curious and so anxious to be actively engaged in research. And that question is, if freshmen are allowed to conduct research and whether research necessarily falls more in the fall or in the spring. And that’s Lisa’s area of expertise, but I would also invite any of our panelists, our professor panelists, who have advised students before to chime in as well.

- Yeah, I’d say it varies. I think it is hard when you first step foot on campus to find a research opportunity, but there are ways to go about doing it. And I have seen students be very successful identifying opportunities, particularly for that first summer, between first year and sophomore year. And often it’s possible to develop relationships through your courses, even in your first year with faculty and see if there are some opportunities. There are going to be more regular opportunities in stem fields than in other fields. Simply because, as Professors Repka, Spatafora, Kimble and I’m missing Crocker, I’m looking at the faces, all of these folks run labs. And so it’s an ongoing process and other faculty like Dima and Nick, have projects that perhaps are a little more sporadic. So there are definitely ways to do that. It can be a little harder your first year, but with some persistence, we will find a way to make it happen. And I know for example, Professor Crocker has worked with students early on. And so there are efforts I think, to try and get student engaged earlier because it’s actually also a wonderful way to help students do a deep dive in and learn a tremendous amount. I think a number of my colleagues spoke to that. This is pursuing research, mentored research with a faculty member is a tremendous learning experience. It is unrivaled, I think, by anything else that you’re gonna do here, because especially during the summer, it is what you’re doing 40 hours a week and you learn an incredible amount. So I’ll let some of my other colleagues speak to this, especially those who’ve worked with newer students.

- If I may add to what Lisa said, I’ve certainly been, interested in working with, freshmen because of for reasons of continuity. You invest a lot of time in training students and working with students. I think absolutely the first, basically the first summer is that perfect time because you’ve made that connection or even, at the end of the fall semester, that’s really when you wanna be thinking about creating those kinds of connections, if you’re interested in research. But certainly by the summer, it’s very possible. I’ve done it a lot of times and for me as somebody, who’s directing a project, I want, I want students as early as possible because of the, because for reasons of continuity, I want students to stay on until they’re seniors. That’s ideal for me. And again, as the kind of investment of time for the professor. And in my case, you know, a lot of the students, once they’re seniors, they’re actually the ones training, the students who are freshman. I’ll have a shout out here to, Sally who was my former, who was such a student. I think she joined my team as a sophomore. So again, this is, it’s quite an asset actually to have students come in as freshmen.

- And I will also echo that I currently have, I think two freshmen in my lab and I regularly take at least one freshman, mostly because of this continuity thing. It’s really nice to have that. Often my, so we can get funds as faculty to help offset the cost of having basically like a lab technician. And so usually I will hire a student and I usually try to hire a freshman for that type of thing to sort of get them into the lab and working. But being able to have a student for multiple years is really, is really great.

- And so you’ve mentioned something there, an opportunity for some students who are working as a paid student position, is that what you’re describing, some folks are going to work with academic departments, just the same way that they might work in the library or the fitness center or other places like that on campus. And so that’s a different and unique way to have an hourly wage to work closely with professors and be involved in this academic department. Okay I think our next question is going to fall to Professor Kimble. One of our listeners is curious about some of the research in the social sciences and as a professor in psychology, I think that might fit you best. I know you outlined some of the things that you’ve worked on. Could you expound a little bit upon the interesting things that students are doing?

- Great I would first just state that I’m one of tall professors in psychology. All those professors have labs, all those labs have students in them. So there is a wide range of opportunity. Following up I also have first year students often given the nature of my work, they often kind of serve in a role of a volunteer, for example, just to kind of observe or get a feel for it and whether it’s something they really want to spend more time and commit to. But in the social sciences, in my lab, you can really find a great range of studies that crosses individuals like me. There are a couple faculty members who are clinical psychologists, but they’re developmental psychologists there are social psychologists, there are organizational psychologists and all of those faculty members have labs. And so the Psychology Department as is the case with most, social sciences do feel as if research is an integral part of the learning experience that the data that we teach in the classroom and the information comes from the process of social science research. And so we think it’s really important for students to be part of that process. And so there are a number of ways that can happen, whether it’s working in the summer, whether it’s being a research assistant, whether it’s being an independent study student where maybe just for a single semester, you get credit to work in a lab and produce a significant academic paper. Or you do in our case, a three semester thesis. I found students who’ve done either the independent studies or the thesis have really valuable experiences. They always seem to do really well at the graduate school or job on the job market, because they can talk articulately about something that they were involved with in really substantial ways. And so, yeah, so I think that’s probably a good summary of some of the stuff that we have .

- Thank you very much. Our next question is regarding engineering. Lisa, this question may fall to you. Though Middlebury does not specifically have an engineering department. Are there research opportunities involving research and an engineering application as a solution?

- That’s a tough one. I would say to a certain extent, yes. I’m thinking about some projects that have been done in the past, working with our faculty, trying to come up with designs to solve a particular problem. But you’re correct we do not have an engineering department we’re not a school of an engineering, but we do have opportunities for students to do three, two degrees with Dartmouth and with Columbia. Although Dartmouth is technically, I think it’s a two, one, one, one. So you spend your first period of time at Middlebury, then you spend a year like your junior year, away at Dartmouth come back for your senior year and then complete a fifth year and you receive a BS as well as your BA from Middlebury and Columbia is a three, two program. So those students can apply to and have both of those experiences if they choose to. And other ways, I would say there again, you would wanna look for related fields of interest. I’ve seen students seek opportunities. Often students may also have interest in areas like physics or computer science, and I’ve seen them do work in those areas as well.

- I’d actually also add that the beautiful thing about studying at a liberal arts college is that you’ll have, you’ll be able to explore a wide range of interests. So I had a student who was one of my research assistants who went on to do the program at Columbia. And he’s in yeah to use sort of some of the research tools in from the humanities. He got to use his English and his Spanish really well. And then kind of prepare him for more focused graduate study at Columbia as well. So we see students who kind of come in, maybe thinking they wanna do one thing very specifically, and actually do that. We have other ones that diverge completely from that path, but they also find other moments where you just really wanna do something for your own enrichment, right? So there’s no actual specific need for this particular student to study Spanish, but he studied abroad in Chile and then was able to then go on to finish the rest of his studies at Columbia New York. So, yeah so I think you’ll see a little bit of everything when it comes to research opportunities, you might have an idea of what you wanna do right now. That’ll change as soon as you arrive on campus, you have different exposure to different people and ideas, both your classmates and professors, and then your paths might take you different places.

- Professor Poppe, this next question might be a little bit related to that, that general truism, about being able to pursue a passion or find that niche, regardless of the exact department. We have a listener who was wondering about being able to continue research that they’ve already done or started and initiated in high school. This is a specific project that has to do with honeybees and the viruses that they can contract. Which sounds like such a Middlebury kind of pursuit, but maybe applicable in any department can high school students come in with something that they’ve already started work on? Go ahead.

- I mean, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think it would be making sure that you find a professor who has similar types of interests. I can’t dealing with honeybees. We have a wonderful entomologist, Greg Pask in biology who will talk your ear off about the neurology. I’m sorry this is when I get into making errors that make me feel very bad in front of my colleagues, especially Amanda and Grace. But yeah, absolutely I think that’s definitely a possibility it’s finding out how to pursue those interests, within those of your professors. But I know for example, one of the things that I attempt to do always with my research assistants is forge out a certain amount of space every single week for that student to find their own interests with what, within what I’m studying. That often have no immediate consequence to what I’m doing, but allows the student to again, find their own voice within what our project is, right. So they, of course, I cite my students and include them in acknowledgements and things like this. But at some point in time I also want them to, to at least for a little bit of time to carry those ideas with them. So I think that there’s ways of bringing your project to professors then also finding space within your professor’s projects to find your own interests as well. I mean, it really does become a kind of a real collaborative relationship between student and professor where our research of course will drive everything. But at the same time, I don’t know of any of my colleagues that aren’t receptive to maybe taking things in slightly different types of directions.

- I have to say that one of these things does comes up. So an independent study, I like to believe that, for some students this is an independent study. And so being able to foster these types of projects I think is really important. And so I’ve had students who’ve done very different things and I’ve been their faculty sponsor and they’ve done it a as an independent study. And I think that’s one of the great things about Middlebury and the way they have it set up that you can get credit for doing an independent study, even if it’s, outside of my specific field cause I think there’s value in that.

- And I think another element of this would be senior work as well, right? So I’ve just finished processing paperwork for a senior who’s in Buenos Aires right now who will be working on feminist movements in Argentina, more specifically reproductive justice. An idea that she had well before going to Argentina as well. So I mean, it just kind of depends on, on how your own interests develop as you’re here at admin.

- Thank you. Another question about data science. Are there some examples of research at the college where data science was applied such as the use of R programming? And we don’t have a computer science professor on our panel tonight, but are we able to speak to that question?

- I can jump in here. So I use R all the time. I should tell you our, I think two of the departments at least teach statistics in R so if you were to take statistics, it will be taught in R. There’s Middlebury has put together a nice sort of sort of how to, how to use R for data analysis, even to just give a crash course, if you didn’t take your statistics class in R, which I think is very useful. And that has sort of, for me I deal with large amounts of data and I use a combination of programs R, MATLAB and then also, have some experience with Python that just to sort of get a handle on all of it. And I think that we have really good resources here at Middlebury in order to basically if a student needs those skills and let’s say they didn’t take the statistics they learned R. I have students in my lab who are learning it and we have the resources for them to do it if they didn’t do it in a class. But I think it’s pretty, it’s becoming very common across the campus that you can develop those skills.

- And I’ll just jump in and say, actually from the humanity side of things, I’ve also worked with students. I myself don’t know how to, how R works, but I’ve worked with students who have used R to actually again, because of, because I work with such big data on Arabic literature. One of my students developed an entire library catalog on translations of Arabic literature in R. So I just wanna say also those possibilities exist in the humanities and our data science, we’re very well resourced. Also, there’s, a number of faculty that really are excellent mentors and we have also data science classes. Professor Alex Lyford offers those. So that’s, I just wanna add also from the humanity side, these are, very applicable skills across disciplines.

- Thank you. We just have a last couple questions as we come to the end of our session. This one would suit any of our panelists I’m sure. Regarding interdisciplinary research, how easy is it for students to design programs of study that are going to involve two or even three departments?

- I guess I can start. I mean, in some ways there are interdisciplinary programs already in place that bring different departments and disciplines together. So for example, and Amanda could speak to this better than I can, but neuroscience draws from philosophy from psychology and from biology. And there are all kinds of research opportunities that bring those disciplines sort of together into the context of neurosciences. Director of molecular biology and biochemistry we’re very interdisciplinary with big data, computer science, biology, chemistry, even physics. So we’re quite interdisciplinary already and have lots of interdisciplinary opportunities to offer. I have engaged in interdisciplinary research that was initiated by students during my career here that reached outside of my box. And it’s a more challenging to get that to happen, but if you can find the people you need who are happy to oversee the work as your sponsors, then, anything is really possible. Interdisciplinary is, really the name of the game these days. We’re not siloed, we’re very much interconnected and our research is already, but it can also be sort of created from a student’s perspective as well. If you can find the faculty who are in a position to oversee it.

- I’d say there’s lots of different paths this could take. I mean, it could be as simple as just having a double major of a student in Spanish right now who wrote his senior thesis on Bosque identity and on the club Athletic de Bilbao. And in it he’s using theoretically and sort of conceptually and practically a lot of the skills that he learned in his other major in geography. It just so happens that I’m an enormous soccer fan and I also did lots of work in human geography in my dissertation. So I’m actually like surprisingly well positioned to direct this particular senior thesis. So it might be something like that. It could be participating in one of our many interdisciplinary programs, international and global studies, environmental studies. And it could also even mean creating your own major as an independent scholar, something that is relatively common as well. And there’s a path that’s fairly clearly delineated about how you can create your own major on campus. Sometimes there are students in linguistics, for example, who have kind of a formula for this. And then other times students come up with their entire, like, they develop an idea for a totally different type of major. So there’s lots of possibility to find, I think your own intellectual interests within the curriculum here at Middlebury.

- Thank you so much. One other question we have is regarding how students earn credits for their independent studies work. How that factors into their graduation progress.

- I think I can address that. I think it differs a little bit by major how it fits into that particular major, but in general, students are welcome really in any department to do an independent study. And in that case, it would often replace a course that you would otherwise take. And in psychology for example, that would mean taking a doing an independent study, working in someone’s lab, and then that could fulfill an elective credit for a major of what you need three. You could do in our department. And I’m sure there’s variation across departments as many as two and get a couple elective credits. I highly encourage students. I like to say students that are working in someone’s lab and getting credit for that in that, doing that substantial research and getting academic credit, probably beat sitting in a 36th class right after you’ve been in 35 classes in Middlebury. I think it’s a really, really valuable experience. And so many of our students take advantage of the opportunity to get a credit, by doing research.

- Thank you. Now for our professors who specialize in areas involving language. Middlebury college is of course known nationally and internationally for immersive language experiences and a very global perspective on learning and internalizing a second or third or maybe fourth language. Can you bring up a couple of the very interesting projects your students in recent years may have worked on that our listeners would be very curious to hear about something that is unique and specific to language studies, Professor Ayoub or Poppe.

- Sure I’m happy to go. I wanna also mentioned that I’m, I am also, I co-author work with students on Arabic literature and one of the, actually one of the pieces I’m working on right now is about gender fluidity in the Arabic language. Arabic is a gendered language. And in sort of keeping with the challenging the gender kind of binary, exploring the ways that the Arabic language can be sort of receptive to gender fluidity. This is a topic that is of, interest to a lot of our students. And so out of conversations in the language classes and you know I also held a symposium before COVID on the topic in the Arabic department this is the, this is really where, a lot of our research interests kind of come from, these very kind of, you know lived experiences in the classroom and language classroom. So I’ll just mention, those two in relation to Arabic.

- Yeah, I would say in my case, my students do well, I guess it kinda just depends on what project I’m working on at the time. As I said earlier, one of my projects right now deals with, with stardom in Argentina in the 1930s. So I have digitized from archival research that I did in Buenos Aires several years ago, the entire print run of several really important film magazines. And I have one of my students is going through finding articles that deal with female stardom more specifically, and kind of ways in which the stardom itself came to be a way through which Argentine women understood their own femininity at at the time. So that’d be one sort of example of the type of research done in Spanish that my students do. All of our meetings are in Spanish. All of the work that they produce to me is generally in Spanish. My writing is between English and Spanish. Another thing that students have done in the past is helped me with other types of projects that I do. So I’m part of a group of Middlebury professors who practice videographic criticism. Which in film and media studies is using the materiality of sort of digitized materials of film moving images and sound and kind of reusing them in different types of ways to talk about the movies, right? So I have had students digitize records from the 1910s for me, I’ve had students do all sorts of different types of research and tasks associated with this type of really cutting edge film criticism. So it kind of it varies pretty widely, but I think what we see, it’s always kind of a binary projects with project with our students in the languages and so far as we’re sort of laser focused on our areas of research, but we’re also making sure that students are continually developing their linguistic and cultural competencies at the same time, right? So my student through this exposure to the film magazine for example, comes to have a very good idea over the course of, of a couple years of doing research of, of ways of how Argentines understand themselves in some ways.

- Thank you for providing all those specifics. It looks like we’ll be able to fit in maybe just one more question that was sparked by that language discussion. One of the students listening is interested in doing a study abroad in the language programs, in addition to research, is that something that students are encouraged to do concurrently? Can they do research while they are also physically in one of the schools abroad, or will they be able to fit it in sequentially and be able to take advantage of both opportunities, maybe one after the other, during their time at Middlebury.

- I can chime in on this one. Just as an example, in the chemistry department, I’ve had several students who have done research with me and who have also studied abroad. That’s very common in the chemistry and biochemistry majors. And for example, one of them was in, in Denmark studying abroad for a semester, there are also research opportunities and programs in Denmark, among others I’m sure. And they also worked for me on summer research one year and for an entire academic year. So absolutely possible.

- If I can just add to that, I think it’s also wonderful because it also builds for the student on their interest and it creates opportunities for new relationships. This is absolutely true in stem fields. It’s true in other fields as well. And based on the research experiences that are possible through the schools abroad, students are also able to develop good connections so that they may be able to pursue postgraduate opportunities, continuing that kind of research trajectory as a result of that.

- I would only add that if studying abroad and doing research is something that, you know you want to do, then it takes a planning and you’ll want to start planning for those experiences early in your career at the college, so that you’re sure to fulfill all your distribution requirements for graduation, as well as potential major, as well as do research and go abroad. It just takes a bit of planning and foresight and it’s done all the time, but it’s good to start sooner rather than later.

- I would add that the administration, a number of years ago, I would say a little over five years ago, really did encourage departments to look at their major, to try to maybe consider reducing the number of courses in the major that is required to give students that type of flexibility. There are definitely students of ours in psychology who’ve gone to abroad to like Stockholm and have been involved with research projects, but it’s also true that someone can go abroad as a psychology major to Buenos Aires and study four courses in Spanish and not do anything in psychology for that particular semester and have no problem completing the major I’ve seen that happen as well. And then you’re looking at a student who has proficiency really in psychology and Spanish. And that only is really helpful in enriching to their experience.

- And actually, it’s funny that you mentioned that Matt, because I’m thinking of a psychology Spanish, double major who went to Uruguay actually. And then she did actually an internship as one of her courses in Uruguay at a law firm that dealt a lot with immigration into Uruguay. And then after graduating, she returned to Chicago and worked in a law firm that deals largely with immigration as well. Having had this previous experience as, as an intern, actually in Uruguay. So is, is a very kind of interesting way of continuing to, to pursue sort of professional or just personal, maybe intellectual interests.

- Thank you so much. All right and at this time I want to thank all of our panelists for sharing your time, your thought, taking the effort to share some of this information for our admitted students who are really thinking about out whether Middlebury is the best fit, that best college home for them for the next four years, whether they’ll be able to access all these opportunities that you are able to share regarding research and study abroad and access to professors and opportunities for advising. I’ll ask if our professors are available to answer questions via email sometime throughout the month of April, if you’ll go ahead and share your contact information in our chat box, then students may be able to follow up with something specific that you mentioned during our conversation tonight. And thank you also to our students who have tuned in. I know that we have folks who are from all over the United States and also listening citizens of Bangladesh and Ukraine and China. I’ll mention in that case, there is an international specific Q&A coming up that’s on the 12th. You’ll see that in the menu of events that you’ve likely been hearing about from Middlebury’s office of admission, there’s also a program regarding the campus resources, how the full student is supported that’s on the 13th at 7:00 PM if you’d also like to join that event, to be able to do some more specific questions in that area. We’re also hosting in-person visits if you’re an admitted student who is interested in traveling to Middlebury, we would love to host you. We can host you during the week we have some Saturday opportunities opened up specifically for folks that have learned that they’re admitted to the college and are deciding among their options. We would love to see you in admissions we would love to be host to you. Thanks again to our panelists. Thank you to our folks in admission who have been behind the scenes, answering questions and offering information for very curious listeners. And with that, I’ll say goodnight.

Supporting the Whole Student: Campus Resources at Middlebury

Middlebury cares about the well-being of our students. Join us to hear from some of the folks who spend their days supporting students in multiple ways.

- Start off with some introductions. My name is Santana Audet. I will be moderating the event today. I am an admissions counselor. I’m also a proud Middlebury graduate, first-generation college student, Class of 2013. And I have been in the admissions office for nine years. I’m so excited to be doing this webinar because student support is one of my favorite things to talk about. I think it’s one of the great benefits of going to a small residential liberal arts school, the level of support that you can get. I’m so excited to speak with my colleagues today about all the ways that we can support our students. And I’ll hand it over to Barbara.

- Thanks, Santana. Hello everybody. My name is Barbara McCall and I serve as the executive director of our center for health and wellness on campus, which is a group of student health focused offices that includes health services, counseling, health and wellness education, sports medicine, and a brand new office this year integrated care. We are really excited to work with and for students around health issues of all shapes and sizes. We are available to students who have things come up unexpectedly. And for students who are looking for preventative care or managing chronic illness or chronic conditions. Our health services, counseling, health educators, and athletic trainers are available during the week. We also have an after hours option that I think is really important for new students and families to know about called MiddTelehealth. We know that things come up after hours and we want folks to have that support that they need after hours. So MiddTelehealth is available 24/7, it’s app-based, it’s no extra cost to students and they have options for both scheduled and on-demand services. The average wait time for on-demand services is about four to six minutes. So that’s from the time it takes to open the app, put in the problem that’s happening that day and get connected to a licensed clinician, which is really great. Our students have access to that telehealth service while they travel on the weekends or go away for spring break. And even during the summers in between times where they may not be with us here on campus in Vermont, which is really, really wonderful. We also have lots of programming. There are groups, workshops, health coaching, lots of opportunities for folks to do skill building proactively around healthy relationships, how to manage stress, tips for sleep, all kinds of things that are great lots of students to do before anything else gets too hard or a problem crops up. And then the last thing I’ll say is that for our student athletes, we have an amazing team of athletic trainers who are really excited to work with our varsity athletes to support them in injury prevention and injury response if something happens during competition or out on the field. Really excited to be here with you all tonight, and to answer any questions that you have about student health and support of all kinds. So with that, I’ll turn things over to my colleague, Robert Mueller.

- Barbara, thank you. So hi everyone. It’s good to be here with you. I’m Robert Mueller, I’m a professor in the Psychology Department and the director of residential education at the College. In my wheelhouse of things I work on at the College is thinking about how you get the absolute most from your experience here. So at Middlebury, we have a program called Compass. When you arrive on campus, you’re gonna have a mentor, you’ll meet with really in the first couple days, this will be a faculty staff member who you’re gonna get to know over your four years at the College. Your Compass mentor will help you identify interest, values, goals, and then help you think through and connect with opportunities to pursue those interest on campus. So, as an example, we had students who arrived in September, said they were interested in sustainability. They worked with their Compass mentor to connect with the sustainability office, learn about some of the programming there, connect with the career center, where they were able to connect with alums, doing work in the field and then do summer internships through the Climate Action Fellowship Program. Another student working with their mentor, again, really interested in sustainability did the MiddCore Leadership and Innovation Program this January, they got to work with Patagonia. Patagonia came and worked with students on a big project on how they repurposed clothing through their worn wear business to reduce their carbon footprint. So these are just a couple different pathways. We want you to have your own path. We want you to explore. Our goal, again, is to help you get the most from your Middlebury experience and to make the exploration both fun and as easy as possible. I’ll throw a couple links in the chat, and if you have questions, feel free to reach out, but welcome.

- Hi, my name is Jim Ralph and I am a history professor as well as a Dean for faculty development and research. And I am the director of the center for teaching learning and research. And long ago, I was a Middlebury student who graduated from the College. So it’s good to be talking to all of you. The center for teaching, learning and research offers a range of services to students, faculty, and staff is professional staff and student tutors support academic skills enhancement for students in many areas. CTLR also sponsors faculty development programming, and it is the CTLR work with students that I want to emphasize here this evening. We know that we can help students learn by offering peer tutoring and writing, stem quantitative fields, foreign languages, and other subjects, and offer professional tutoring in writing and stem quantitative fields. Our peer tutors can be accessed by students in many ways, including through course embedment. We can also work with you on developing executive function skills and time management through our learning resources professionals and our peer academic consultants for excellence program. We all offer funding to support you in attending academic conferences or conducting research. Particularly when you’re a senior, we supervise a thriving program of summer research assistance. And through our professional staff, we can help you gain external fellowships and offer guidance on the health professions. Finally, the CTLR is the engine behind our annual spring student symposium, which is coming on Friday, April 22nd , is a day free of classes. So students, faculty, staff, as well as community members and other visitors can attend presentations by students from first years to seniors on their own research. Where to find us, the CTLR is conveniently located in the Davis Family Library and it also has an office of stem quantitative support in McCardell Bicentennial Hall. We have a helpful website as well, full of resources and pathways to connect with our programs and services and I’ll drop that in the Q&A in a bit. Our people are our strength. We have a great team of professionals composed of the faculty and staff and around a 100 student tutors. That is your peers to work with you across the campus and sometimes on Zoom as well. And so we’re all here for you. And now I’ll turn it over to Derek Doucet.

- Thank you, Jim. And hello everyone. My name is Derek Doucet. I use he/him pronouns and I serve as the Dean of students. And what that means is I oversee a portfolio of student affairs offices that include residents life from whom you’ll hear a bit more in a moment. And the most pressing concerns around residents life for each of you will be things like your housing assignments, your roommate pairing, but also community build and general life in the residence halls. New student orientation is also part of my portfolio, and you’re gonna hear a bit more about that. And then the student life deans as well, student life deans are dedicated student support professionals who can help you navigate college policy, can help refer you to the of resources that we have here for student supports. And in general can be a first stop when you’re wondering how to access other resources on campus. And then I also oversee the office of care management, which is a group of professionals who help students set priorities, set goals, and connect with resources in moments when they’re struggling or encountering challenges. Many of you will, it’s completely natural and understandable that that will happen. We have people here to help you when it does. So I collaborate closely and my team collaborates closely with Barbara and her team in the center for health and wellness, we work together closely. So I think I’ll pause there and hand it over to Paul.

- Yeah so hi everyone. My name is Paul Flores-Clavel. I’m a senior Class of 2022 and hailing from historian Queens in New York city. I am a religion and English joint major with concentrations in the Americas and creative writing. I’m speaking to you today about Res Life, but when I’m not doing Res Life, I have had some roles in the student government. I’ve also had a role in the activity board of the College, MCAB and I also participated in MiddCore this January. So I got a chance to work directly with Rob Mueller. And it was a great time, but yes, I’ve been on the Res Life team for the past three years. So I started as a sophomore. I coincidentally am the only person I think now to have worked in the Ross complex for like three consecutive years. I take as a moment of pride, ‘cause I’ve lived in the same place, essentially my entire college career, but it’s obvious I don’t like change. So I’m not gonna like graduating, but yeah, I am basically the go-to, you know, the person on the hall, who’s supposed to know where things are, the person who gets to meet, you know, Barbara and Jim and Derek and getting to connect students with all of our resources, but on a very peer level, someone who’s been through it, has understood what it’s like to come to college for the first time. I’m a first gen student. So I like did not have any like idea of who to speak to. And my first year allies were like, absolutely the people that grounded me and helped me figure out what I was doing and, you know, asking them, “Hey, like is a religion class too risky? Should I even pursue that?” And then, well, here I am as a religion major, but it’s just been so fantastic to get to work with students as a student, myself, and kind of taking on that leadership role and helping contribute to the community. So I’m going to end there for now and I’m gonna pass it off to Natalie.

- Hi everyone. My name is Natalie Tran and I use she/her pronouns. I am originally from Pensacola, Florida, but I currently reside in Orlando. I’m a junior and I double major in education studies and political science. So I’m working on getting my Vermont teaching license and social studies. And that’s been a really rewarding experience because I didn’t come into college thinking that I wanted to be a teacher, but the Education Studies Department was just so wonderful and I loved being there. I’m also a first-generation student, also very scared to come into college, wondering what it would be like, especially ‘cause I didn’t have a chance to visit the campus. I really just like do right in. And I was just hoping that I would have the support I needed to succeed. Thankfully, I quickly found my place in the Middlebury community. There’s a program called First@Midd, it’s a pre-orientation program that specifically tailored for first-generation students that really provided the support structures I needed to transition into college life on my own. And this experience really inspired me to become a MiddView orientation leader in fall 2020. This is where I facilitated an orientation group of 12 students, had a really fun time bonding with incoming students and just introduced them to all the campus resources that Middlebury offers. And following this experience, I got a job at this with the student activities office specifically as an orientation intern. And this is where I have helped organize the past three orientations, both MiddView, which is the September orientation as well as February orientation. And it’s yeah, it’s super fun. Just like really enjoyable getting to see incoming students come in really scared about what campus and student life will be like and how then really get comfortable and just like blossom under their next years at Middlebury.

- Thank you everyone. Everyone today who’s viewing this, we really wanna encourage you to use the Q&A function in the chat feature. We wanna make sure that we’re answering questions that are of interest to you. And so we wanna really make this time yours. So please use that well, and we also have one panelist who has to lead to teach a class in about 15 minutes, Rob. And so I wanna make sure that we get to hear Rob’s voice and we get to hear a little bit more about residential life leadership and innovation, and so Rob, could you talk to us a little bit about what it looks like to enter Middlebury as a first year? How do you figure out who your roommate is? How do you get your first year seminar? And also if you could touch on Compass, that’d be great.

- Sure. So I’ll pass part of this over to my colleague Derek but when you decide to come to Middlebury, you will have an opportunity to look through all our first year seminars. You’ll be able to rank order them. The first year seminar is very special at Middlebury. The professor that you work with in this very, small class will be your advisor likely for about two years until you pick a major. So from the get go, when you come to Middlebury, you start to get a lot of support. You are connecting with a professor who you’re gonna see multiple times a week. Who’s also gonna be your advisor. And then you also have a mentor who’s helping you think through what are your interest and how do you really explore the co-curricular side of the college in more detail. Derek, do you wanna answer the question about roommates and how that gets sorted?

- Sure. So when you start the housing process, the first year housing process, you’ll be asked to complete a questionnaire that talks about a number of predictable factors that seem to help us figure out who will be compatible roommates. We don’t always get it right, but more on often than not, we do. And you will be paired with someone with whom we believe you’ll be compatible based on that questionnaire. Now there’s a little more to the housing situation for first years as well. And it’s tied directly to the first year seminar program that Rob was speaking about. When we place students in first year housing, you’ll be in one of two first year and as it happens, there’s one on the north end of campus and one on the south end of campus. And we place students in those first year communities clustered by first year seminar. And the idea is that you’ll always be living in close proximity to the other students in your first year seminar. And the idea is that you get to know them in an academic setting, and then you can continue those relationships in the residential setting after you’re outside of class. It doesn’t mean that your roommate will be in your first year seminar. It just means that your students with whom you’re in a first year seminar will all live in close proximity to you. So that’s how we think about first year housing.

- When you fill out that survey about your housing preferences, make sure you’re honest, it is not your application. Okay? This is a time to be very self aware because if you say I go to bed at 8:00 PM and I keep my room spotless and you really stay up till 2:00 AM and you could care less whether your room is clean or not, you’re not gonna get a good match. So we really encourage you if you decide to come to Middlebury, to be honest about that. So you can let our algorithm do its magic. Thank you for that. The other question about entering into this first year as a first year student is around whether you could apply for all gender housing or whether you would automatically be placed in a room with a specific gender or sex, or if you can kinda make that a more expansive view.

- So typically students are placed with a roommate that identifies as having the same gender as their peer, but you can also speak to the Res Life office. If you have particular interests or concerns about the gender pairing of your roommate, you can certainly speak with our Res Life team and they can assist you with that. But the default will be that you would be placed with someone with whom you share a gender identity. It’s not a requirement, but that’s how we begin.

- And Natalie, maybe you could take this question. We know that you rank your first year seminar choices the summer before you attend, but when do you pick your other three classes?

- Yeah so throughout the summer we have a pre-orientation checklist to help incoming students organize the numerous things that they have to complete before they come onto campus. And in one of those, you will have information about your first year seminar, but we always get that question of like, when you always like register for the other classes, the answer is during orientation week. So you will have support from both the registrar’s office, which is like the hub of like courses and like all the information about all of the different departments on campus. And then we also offer support specifically about registration and the logistics behind that. And then registration occurs with your orientation leaders who will answer any questions to kind of help you navigate any fears that you might have about registration.

- I will note that there is an ad drop period. So you choose your three classes, you begin those but you have a two week period where you can decide if that class is gonna be the right fit for you or not. Or if there’s something that you’re very excited about. Jim, do you wanna add something?

- I do. I wanna say a little bit about a program that I help with some others to organize, which is called the Academic Forum, which takes place during the orientation period. And it’s after the first meeting with your first year seminar. And therefore you’ve gotten to know your advisor and you’re talking about, you know, what’s ahead and what’s gonna be the sort of landscape for opportunities in classes. But what we do is bring representatives from every department and program. So you get to see the whole academic spread really of Middlebury in one arena and people are there. And, you know, as first years you’re able to come through, ask all sorts of questions and it’s better than any kind of catalog ‘cause you’re seeing people and you’re saying, wow, here’s subjects that I never had a chance to explore while I was in high school, but they’re offered and I can now ask some questions. And so just wanted to add that piece that I think is very helpful and making sure at the outset, all of you are aware of the vast opportunities Middlebury offers.

- That’s a great point. And I would say there are so many Middlebury students who have one conversation with a professor and choose to take class they may have never thought to take and it really changed their whole trajectory. So that’s good, yeah Paul, for sure. Natalie, we also have a question about First@Midd and just what it is and how you can be a part of it. Could you explain a little more about that?

- So, I mean, I did First@Midd three years ago, so it’s probably different now, but when I did it, it was a four day orientation program. And so first-generation students came to campus early and we had first, what do you call peer mentors? And it was really just like a place for like students to kind of ask all these questions and like get to know campus before everyone else did. And so I just like really valued the program because I just felt valued as a first generation student. I’d have to feel bad for like not being in a place that was just, you know, new to me. And so I know that our MiddView program will be beginning on Monday, September 5th. And so I don’t believe that the date for First@Midd has been set, but if you visit their website just by searching up First@Midd Middlebury college, you can find more information there and you do have to sign up in advance. So would stay checking in with that.

- And I would also add to that, that for us, the First@Midd program is for first generation called students who reside in the U.S., who are U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents, or undocumented, or have DACA status. It’s not currently for international students because international students are doing an international student orientation at the state pre-orientation program at the same time. So know that that is a piece to that. And then yeah, I would definitely encourage you all to check out that link about first admit it’s a great way to get an introduction to campus. Before we move away from first year housing, can we talk about what first year housing looks like for Febs, who are students who are beginning in February. Derek, would you like to take that question?

- Sure, I’d be happy to. So we approach first year housing for Febs from two perspectives. The first is that some Febs tell us they wanna be clustered together with of other Febs. They feel that that’s creating a community right with a shared experience, right when they arrive on campus. And so we typically have space reserved in Forest Hall, which is a really nice residence hall, right in the middle of campus where many Febs are placed. We may change, which hall we use for that purpose, depending on what our housing needs are as a whole institution. But Forest is one place where we frequently place Febs. Some Febs tell us that they prefer to live in first year residence halls with their fall admits. And sometimes we place students in openings there, on occasion, we place them in openings with sophomore roommates, but by and large, we do what we can to make sure that they are near other Febs. And then of course they have their own orientation experience. So they’re connected to a group Febs, a community of peers, so that regardless of where they live on campus, they’re not socially isolated. They’re connected from day when the arrive.

- Thank you. For students who are coming in with an IEP, a learning difference, a learning challenge, what are some supports that are available to them? And should they be reaching out to folks about those ahead of time is orientation to find time to talk about it, or can they do that? You know, at any point within their first year or their Middlebury career? And Barbara, do you wanna take that?

- Start it off. But I think I’ll tag team with probably Jim and maybe Derek as well. So students who have documented disabilities are welcome to share those with Middlebury through the disability resource center, there are lots of deadlines and forms online at the DRC website, and we can make sure that that goes into the chat for everybody. That explain the process and it’s really about providing all the kinds of documentation that the student has and figuring out what kinds of accommodations will help them be successful at Middlebury. I will say that one thing that’s different about college compared to certainly high school or the K12 system, especially in the U.S., is that in those settings, it’s up to the school to figure out who might benefit from resources and in college, it’s actually the opposite. Students need to come to the disability resource and say, “Hey, I’d like some assistance. Here’s the information they have.” And then they can work together to figure out what might be best. That being said, there are a lot of resources at Middlebury that don’t require any documentation or any diagnosis in order to help student of all different kinds of identities and abilities. And so asking for help, going to see a tutor, engaging with all of the amazing professionals and peer staff at the CTLR with Jim, that’s open to everybody. So if students have an IEP or a plan or documentation, disability resource centers, the place that they wanna go to at and talk about their options and a reminder to everybody that there are lots of resources available for every student. So I wonder if Jim or Derek might have anything that they wanna add to that.

- What I’ll add is that in Middlebury, there’s a high percentage of the students who will be seeking accommodation. And so it’s, our faculty are quite aware of the students will be reaching out to them and, you know, coming up with good strategies, if it involves, for instance extra time on exams. And so those kinds of conversations happen between, you know, faculty and students. So wanna just rest, make sure everybody feels confident that we are very much sensitive and aware and also very experienced in that regard. And then at the CTLR, our learning resources area, I think is particularly helpful for many, many students because college is a place where your schedule isn’t necessarily as set as it has been when you were in high school and our Jennifer Bates and Jenny Orton, who two professionals in learning resources really do an excellent job of talking about time management and more broadly for all of us talking about executive function and how we can do things to strengthen our executive function and therefore make the most of our college experience.

- Thank you for reiterating that piece. I think as a first-generation college student, I did not expect a college to offer support staff who are supporting students in executive functioning and time management skills. And it was one of the best pleasant surprises as a student I had. So I would really encourage everyone in the audience today to normalize those help seeking behaviors and to just ask and self advocate, because there are so many resources available to you, resources that you may not even know are available to you.

- I think I will add on that is just that, you know, the CTLR knows that a very high percentage in a given year of students will be seeking out our services. So to your point, you know, I think that’s just nice for everybody to know that these are pathways and lots of students are taking advantage of them.

- Another question we have is around mental health counseling, what’s available? If a student is already on a good regimen, perhaps they have a provider that they have a good relationship with, but they’re looking to transfer their care. Perhaps they’re looking to transfer medications, what kind of protocol or supports are available for those students? Barbara, do you wanna take that?

- Great, thanks Santana. This is a really good question. So the first thing I would say is that new student health forms are due June 15th and they get uploaded into the student health portal. And that’s a really important part of coming to Middlebury because it’s something that students get to fill out themselves. And it’s an opportunity for you to tell us about your health history, your physical health and your mental health. And so if there are questions, concerns, or things you wanna make sure that you follow up when you get to Middlebury, helping us understand a little bit more about them ahead of time, can really smooth the way for engaging in relationships with any of our providers. In terms of mental health, we have a lot of mental health support resources. So for students who are looking to establish relationship with a counselor, we have counselors on campus. We also have counselors available 24/7 through MiddTelehealth. And so students can choose if they’d like to see somebody on more of a planned basis, if they wanna see somebody sort of on-demand. And we also offer same day and next day appointments, the research around student mental health shows us that it matters how long someone waits to get an appointment. And so we use a clinical model for mental health that ensures that people have rapid access whenever possible. And so at the beginning and the end of semesters, we focus on same day and next day access because that’s usually when people are getting used to whatever their new schedule is. As Jim mentioned, your schedule’s going to change every semester and you’re gonna be with new people, learning new things, and things can sort of seem upside down when your schedule has changed. So we wanna make sure that we have rapid access for those who need it. And that we also have a lot of other kinds of mental health resources that it isn’t just about one-on-one counseling or treatment that we have opportunities for people to engage in programs, groups, workshops, speakers, and events that promote things like belonging, resilience, build mental health skills so that when students face challenges, they feel prepared, ready, and able to ask for help. Some of those are led by professional staff and some of those are actually led by students. We have peer mental health educators who run something called Project Connect, which is sort of like a friendship lab where especially new students are welcome to join and get to know a cohort of students that are outside of their first year seminars or outside of their residence halls and meet students from across campus, different ages, different identities, different stories and backgrounds. And then we also have plenty of workshops talking about how to manage stress, mindfulness techniques, all kinds of really good tools for an adult toolbox to navigate college and beyond. So those that’s sort of a snapshot of some of our mental health services, but I’ll reiterate those health forms are so informative and so important. And we are here all summer. So if someone has a question or a concern or wants to follow up or start the beginning of a plan for what might be needed when you come to us and in September, give us a call this summer, we’d be happy to hear from you in counseling or health services.

- Thank you for that. We’ve also got a question around what the social scene looks like. What does the substance use seen look like? What does substance use education look like? Paul, as sort of a head RA who has seen a lot of residential life, what would you say the social scene is like at Middlebury?

- I think it’s, well, I think that’s a great question because I think it’s so varied for such a small campus. There’s really a lot for people to do and to find community in. So for example, you know, as Natalie brought up for that First@Midd and international orientation tends to kind of create these little pockets of community for people to kind of float along with until they kind of disperse and find people through classes and through events. But I would say that it’s really just up to, you know, as much, or as little as you like to engage with large amounts of people. Granted, I am from a time from before COVID. So I also have a very different first year experience than probably what will be the norm for a while. And so I would say that with that challenge, we as in, you know, being a part of SGA and being a part of MCAB while I’ve been here have done a lot to kind of mediate that barrier that can be so apparent when it comes to COVID. But I will note that last year in particular, I was on the board that did get recognition because during the pandemic MCAB actually put on the most programming it’s ever done in its history and MCAB is the longest serving organization on campus. So that’s, we’re looking at our 99th year and to be able to kind of have this recognition of how do we bring community to our students, we’ve just kind of picked up the challenge and have started running with it. So I’m really proud of the social scene. We as an institution, we do what we can, but also just students, you know, MCAB is run by students and students are taking the money that we get from our student activities fees, and putting it to use in ways that people are engaging with. So that’s to say there’s a lot to do. It just, you know, depends on what you’re looking for, but you’re probably gonna find it.

- Thanks, Paul and Barbara, could you add on to that, about what healthy education looks like for students?

- Absolutely. So as a requirement, all new students will take a course on alcohol and other substances online, and you’ll get access to that in August before you arrive. And that’s really just a way to jumpstart a conversation about community expectations, about understanding benefits and risks and making choices that align with your goals for your time at Middlebury, whether they are academic, social, athletic, career-focused. We also have ongoing educational opportunities. So there’s one-on-one coaching for students who have some questions about their relationship with substances. It’s completely judgment free, confidential, and students will get to develop an action plan if that’s what works for them around nicotine, tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, or any other substances that they’ve got concerns about for themselves or for friends. It’s also a place to troubleshoot how to share worries and concerns with friends. We also provide a substance use education to students who find their way to our office of health and wellness education because of a policy violation. Again, that education is still confidential and judgment free. It’s a place where we’re trying to create community to ask good hard questions, talk about what it means to be community members, talk about the community impact of substance use. And then last, I would say we have a really exciting sort of burgeoning substance free or low or no use. Sometimes a recovery community also can be what it’s called. We have a number of students who are choosing not to use substances for a lot of really varied reasons. And we actually have a staff member who’s our dedicated alcohol and other substance educator who works with that community, providing them funding, resources, to have community events, to build connections and to share their stories and experiences. I’ll drop their contact information into the chat. And if you identify as someone who is low use, no use, sober, in recovery, feel free to reach out to Liam this summer or when you arrive on campus and they can help get you connected to other students who share similar identities and stories.

- Thank you for that. Derek, this is a question for you and it’s a two-part question. One is are emotional support animals allowed on campus and what would that look like to have an emotional support animal on campus? And then the other question is about students who may not be able to go home or may not have a home to go home to over scheduled breaks. What kind of support is there are for students who may need some place to be over breaks?

- Both really good questions. So in terms of support animals, those are considered an accommodation through our office of disability resources or our disability resource center I should say. So you can work with that office. And there are folks with support animals on campus. Absolutely and in terms of places for students to go when classes are not in session, it depends on the break, how that is managed. So the longest break, the winter break students may request permission to remain on campus. And we absolutely take into account some of the circumstances that you’ve described and no one has turned away if they don’t have a place to go. I wanna be really clear on that. During all other breaks when the campus really remains fully open, students just need to tell us if they’re staying here over break. So there are good student supports in place even while the college is not in academic session. And then just to reiterate, there’s a permission process for the longest winter break. And that’s just because that’s the time when the fewest campus resources are available, but we do again, take into account students, individual circumstances, and no one has ever turned away because they don’t have another place to go. And then the other breaks, it’s simply a registration process. So we know who’s year.

- Thank you for that. Okay, so we’ve got just five more minutes left, time for maybe just one quick piece of advice from each of our panelists about, for these students who are about to enter into this big, next step of their lives. I’ll call you out as I see you around my screen here, Derek you’re in the top left corner, you have quick advice?

- Sure. Pace yourselves. You’re about to come into this incredibly exciting engaging environment. And there are going to be millions of things you wanna do, millions of opportunities you wanna take advantage of. And my recommendation to you is to ease into this wealth of opportunities. Pick a few interests, pick a few outlets for your enthusiasm and give yourself the time to settle in. There is four years ahead of you and you don’t need to pack everything into the first semester. And in fact, when I see students trying to do that, those are the ones that tend to get pretty exhausted and tend to struggle a bit. So take your time, pace yourselves.

- Barbara, what about you?

- I would say in terms of health and wellness, reach out early, reach out often. I think sometimes we get the message that we need to wait until something hurts or is really wrong, or is getting unbearable to reach out and ask for help. I know those are messages I got as a first-generation college student, whether it was health related or not. And so I wanna say reach out early, reach out often, we have an amazing team of health professionals who are here because they love working with college students. There are no silly questions. There are no stupid questions, all questions and concerns are welcome. And we are ready to meet you and greet you and work with you.

- Natalie.

- I would say, be open to trying new things. Just wanted to emphasize, like in the beginning when I said, I didn’t think I was gonna be an education studies major and now I am. And so even if you think you know what you need to take, like be open to trying out new thing ‘cause you never know when you’ll like something you’ve never tried it before.

- And Jim, what about you?

- I’ll follow up on Natalie’s really good advice because as an advisor to many students over the years, I really do think it’s, especially when you’re in your first year, to be curious, adventurous, to stretch yourself, try new things, and don’t hesitate to take on a new language or move into an area that you haven’t studied before. Because one of the things you’ve heard today is we have a lot of folks who are ready and able to help you in that endeavor because it doesn’t always go smoothly right at the outset. And just as be assured that there are folks who are right here, this is what they do. And they do very well to help you. And as you go through that experimenting and trying the new parts of the academic program.

- And Paul.

- So I think it’s really funny that I’m going right after Natalie and Jim, because I’m the embodiment of that, you know, try new things, but also know sometimes when you try new things, you might not be great at it and that’s fine. I came in thinking political science, econ, Chinese. Now here I am religion and English, and I’m having the best time. And it’s because of exactly having these resources, like the CTLR. And so actually someone asked if I wish I took more advantage of it and I do, I do. I definitely started looking to the CTLR in my junior year. And that’s when I kind of became really invested in like executive function and time management. And boy do I really wish that I had gone to them sooner, but that is to say in that advice, you know, reach out to the support networks because they’re there, you know, that’s what they’re here for. And if they’re doing it, it’s because they care. And I think most important that I would pass along is really prioritize the relationships. You’re only here for four years and sometimes put it frankly, like my grades don’t matter as much as it does to like know that I’m building a relationship with my peers and with my professors and people that I hope to have in my life for a long time. So don’t ever beat yourself too much if you don’t get the grade that you want, but as long as you have the solid foundation for relationships, you should be okay.

- Derek, Barbara, Natalie, Jim, Paul, thank you so much for joining us today. Viewers, I hope that you feel the warmth because I certainly do. There are so many people at Middlebury who are here to support you and all the different ways that a student needs support through their college years. We hope that’ll reach out with any questions and panelists, thank you so much for your time and everyone have a good night.

To You. Vermont. The World. Middlebury.

Deposit by May 1