Virtual Visits

Living in a dorm is just so much fun. There’s just endless possibilities, and you really have so many opportunities to really create connections and foster community in your dorm. And there’s just so many people who wanna help when needed and are always down to hang out with you. And you honestly get to get really creative with your living space. And you just make memories in your dorm that will stay with you for years to come. And there are just so many support systems in place, such as your RAs, which are student staff members, and they’re always ready to offer resources and supports for you. Like I’m an RA, for example, and I love talking to my residents, seeing how they’re doing, and just knowing what’s going on with their lives. And there’s also just so many opportunities just for different places to live in dorms here on campus. There are the townhouses, there are special interest houses, and academic interest houses, such as the gender studies, Spanish, Portuguese, and there’s also social houses here, which are really cool to live at.

As an institution, Middlebury supports inclusivity on campus. For example, first gen, low income first-year students have access to a preorientation program called First@Midd which specifically supports them in their transition into higher education. And beyond that, all year round, students have access to plenty of affinity spaces on campus, such as LASA, the Latin American Student Association, as well as BSU, the Black Student Union, and so many others. And beyond that, Middlebury has a financial commitment to supporting inclusivity. For example, right now, I am currently pursuing an unpaid internship in Costa Rica that I otherwise would not have been able to pursue had it not been for Middlebury’s commitment to inclusivity in so many different ways.

Name: Raghad Husni Sayyed, Arabic Teaching Assistant

مرحبًا! أنا رغد حسني وأنا معيدة اللغة العربية. نحن في البيت العربي، والبيت العربي هو بيتي. انا اشعر هنا بانتماء, شعور غريب حقيقة,عندما اتخيل أني في حياتي لن أعيش في مكان اسمه البيت العربي. فكرة أن هناك بيت اسمه “البيت العربي” وأنا أعيش هناك وأمثل ثقافتي  فكرة جميلة خيالية. أشعر بالحب في البيت العربي، و بالحرية لأنني أتكلم لغتي التي استطيع ان اعبر خلالها بدون أي قيود. وأنا أشعر بالفرح عندما يأتي الطلاب هنا للأنشطة ويجتمعون, وأيضا تكون مساحة آمنة لهم ليتعلموا أكثر عن الثقافة واللغة التي يهتمون بها.وحقيقة أن هذا شغف الذي عندهم يجعلني فضولية أكثر لثقافتي و أقرب نوعا ما. وأتعلم منهم أكثر من …أنا يجب أن أعلمهم وأمثل ثقافتي ولكن في الحقيقة أتعلم منهم و من أسئلتهم. ومن كل هذه الشعلة التي أراها في وجوههم وفي أعينهم عندما يسألون عن شيء بثقافة أو مزحة  أو كتاب أو كلمة.وخاصة الطلاب الذين أعيش معهم في البيت العربي: البيت العربي هو مكان سكني ومكان عملي أيضًا. أشعر أنهم عائلتي, نطبخ مع بعض, نضحك, أحيانا أيضًا  نتقاتل يعني طوشة لكن كل هذا يجعلنا أقرب, ونعيش الخبرة أو التجربة  العربية بحد ذاتها بدون أي قيود.

Welcome! My name is Raghad Husni and I am an Arabic teaching assistant. We’re here in the Arabic house, and the Arabic house is my house. I feel a sense of belonging here, a strange feeling indeed, when I imagine that in my life I have never lived in a place called the Arabic house. The idea that there is a house is called “The Arabic House” and I live there is a beautiful, imaginative idea. I feel loved in the Arabic house, and I feel free because I speak my language and I can express myself without any restrictions. I also feel happy when students come here for activities and to socialize, and it is a safe space for them to learn a lot about the culture and language that they care about. The fact that this is a passion that they have makes me even more curious about my culture, and somewhat closer [to my culture]. I also learn more from them…I should be teaching them and representing my culture, but in reality I learn from them and from their questions. I see longing in their faces and in their eyes when they ask about the culture or a joke or a book or a word. Especially for the students that live with each other in the Arabic House, the Arabic House is a residential space and a workplace as well. I feel that they are my family, we cook together, we laugh, sometimes we also fight, but it brings us closer, and we live in the Arabic experience itself without any restrictions. 

So, here at Middlebury, weekends consist of many different things, but not really anyone is specifically the same. But still, I’m gonna attempt to try to give you what a typical weekend looks like. For a lot of people, weekends actually sort of start Thursday. A lot of people only have one class, or a discussion section on Friday, and so Thursday night, usually there’s live music at one of the social houses called The Mill. And also there’s a bunch of just sort of student-run activities. Specifically, there’s an international film club that I like to go to with my friends. And I like to go to bed early and sort of wake up and get a good start on Friday. Friday is one of the bigger days of the week. A lot of people will go on a hike Friday and then come back, have a big dinner with their friends, and then after that, hang out in someone’s room, listen to music. And then maybe they’ll attend a campus event, something that a club or the SGA is hosting. And then they’ll maybe check out one of the, you know, if a social house is having a party, or an interest house is having a party, and they’ll go and sort of see what that’s about. Saturday night is more the same, but it’s also the day for sort of doing big things. And so, if it’s the winter, people will go skiing, and if it’s the fall, they might check out the TAM, or one of the awesome trails we have around Middlebury, or they might go swimming in one of the rivers and waterfalls we have around here. Sunday for me tends to be a lot chiller and I think a lot of people take Sunday as a day for relaxing, you know, catching up on some work, spending some time in the library, and, you know, having just a day for yourself. And, yeah, that’s a typical weekend here at Middlebury.

The Innovation Hub is where ideas come to life, whether this be through Oratory Now, MiddCORE, or any other funding event. What this looks like is, and at least Oratory Now, is where students can take a credit class or completely extracurricular activity where they are tutored by their peers or a professional in how to really engage in perfect public speaking abilities. It’s a really great program to help students develop their confidence and talking in front of crowds, and it’s a great way for students to engage with the community. MiddCORE is a class where students get to really develop their career goals. Panelists come and talk or in person and virtually every morning and tell them about their career path, what they’ve learned, and really how to maximize their time at Middlebury. It’s basically starts off with a TED Talk every day, and in the second half of it, students get to work on a strategic challenge where they help a company solve an issue. This year it’s Lego. All in all, the Innovation Hub is a great place to really learn a lot.

So my favorite class at Middlebury is Inequality and the American Dream with Professor Matt Lawrence, and I actually took this course before I even came to Middlebury. I sat in on it during Middlebury’s Discover Midd Program. And I fell in love with the course, I fell in love with the professor’s interaction with the students and the material that they were covering. And for me, as a first generation student, covering the idea of the American dream and socioeconomic mobility just felt really relevant to why I was here at Middlebury, and so I knew that I had to take that course and really come to Middlebury to really learn about that with a professor who’s really well-known for his studies on socioeconomic mobility and education.

Name: Kai Zhang, Lecturer in Chinese

出色的原教学是明德大学的一大特色这里边有一个重要的原则这是做中学learning by doing。 那，作为老师我们就会想各种办法为同学们提供一个在正式的生活中能够用这个语言跟大家交流的机会。语言桌子就是这样安排。 在每一个工作日的中午在我们的proctor餐厅，就是我给大家看得我身后的餐厅， 这个Proctor餐厅我们会提供十种语言桌子：中文，日文，西班牙语，法语, 意大利语， 等等，等等。那如果你学法语比如，你就只需要提前做一个登记然后到那一天你就在这儿来吃。法语桌子在吃饭的时候跟同学用法语交流。有老师有服务员大家都会用法语。这样一个安排有很多好处你可以想想一下。首先是对于言学习者来说你有一个在教室之外的真实的使用这个语言的环境. 那跟在教室里面单纯的练习会有很大的不同,对不对.另外呢对于老师来说，我就在教师之外也有跟多了解我学生机会. 当然我越了解我的学生,那我的教学就会更有针对性. 另外还有一个好处就是对服务员因为这些服务员其实我们学校的学生。那他们当然也长了高水平了语言的学习者。那他们就会起来一个很好的示范作用。就是给刚刚开始学语言学生一个例子说啊你看只要我很努力的学习那么可能过两年三年我可以到在他的水平这个激励作用非常强

An outstanding teaching method used at Middlebury is, learning by doing. As a teacher we consider what methods can simulate real life scenarios for students to use their language skills or create opportunities for immersion. Language tables are a part of that plan. Every weekday at noon in Proctor dining hall, let me show you all the dining hall, behind me is Proctor. At Proctor dining hall we have 10 different language tables: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, etc. For example if you study French you only have to register beforehand, then on that day you come, eat food and use French to converse with your classmates. The teacher and waiters also use French. Let’s consider the benefits of this initiative. First for students studying languages they have the opportunity outside of the classroom to use the language. The casual learning environment of language tables is distinct from classroom instruction, right. Additionally as a professor I have opportunities outside of the classroom to understand my students. My teaching can have more relevance. There is still another benefit which is the wait staff being students! They are of course high level language students who then become role models for students that have just started to study the language. For instance you think, “If I study hard then in my 2, 3rd year I can get to that student’s proficiency!” This type of encouragement is useful and powerful.

I think Middlebury professors are extremely accessible to students. We come to a place like Middlebury because we want to have those interactions with students, whether it’s in the classroom or getting to know you better outside of academics, or providing mentorship for both your career at Middlebury and beyond. Those are the type of interactions that we love. And so we try to provide lots of opportunities for you to have those types of interactions with us. So obviously, in the classroom, that’s one way that we interact with you. But we also have office hours, which are just times every week where students can drop in and talk to us about anything that they want, whether it’s questions that they have about material from class or anything else that they wanna talk about. And most professors have way more office hours than the minimum required, because we just wanna give all of our students opportunities to come. You know, I schedule my office hours based on when students are available to make sure that they can all come and talk to me. And I give students extra credit for class if they come. ’Cause I just want an incentive for students as much as possible to come and have those interactions with me. Lots of professors also have interactions with students outside of class. So like, in the Computer Science Department, we have a barbecue every summer for students who are doing research with us on campus. And I’ve had lots of coffees and lunches with students to just talk about what’s going on in their lives and what they’re thinking about in terms of summer internships, or what classes to take next semester, or whatever they wanna talk about.

At Middlebury, you’ll find yourself in all kinds of different classroom scenarios. For example, in my introductory human geography course, Place in Society, we meet as a full class of 25 to 30 students, three times a week, but we also break the class up into two smaller lab sections. One of the fun things we do in those lab sections is students design a field trip that they take their classmates on at the end of the semester. What the goal is, is to take the classmates to places in the community that are manifestations of the things we’ve been studying about in class. This past fall, those stops included a visit to Monument Farms, a local dairy, the dairy that provides all the milk to the College’s dining halls, and to the Open Door Clinic, a healthcare clinic that provides free health care for those without health insurance. One of the largest groups that uses the Open Door Clinic are the Latinx farm workers that work on the local dairies. So, as diverse as our curriculum is, so too are the different kinds of classes you’ll find yourself in, here at Middlebury.

A first-year seminar is a course, every first-year takes it. It’s a course designed to get you involved in the liberal arts education and what the liberal arts actually looks like. A lot of these courses are unique and are something that professors are interested in but don’t often teach. For instance, I teach a course called the Language of Conspiracy Theories, which is a fun course where we study why do conspiracy theories exist, where do they exist in the 21st century, and why do they keep popping up. Those are the types of courses that you’ll be taking with your first-year seminar. They’re a great way for you to engage with peers in your new class. Your first-year seminar professor is also your advisor. So it’s a great way to get you involved with your first-year experience here at Middlebury and to get you set up for the rest of your academic career. Next I wanna talk to just quickly about choosing a major. This is my third year at the College, and I can say that I’ve been surprised how many students show up, they have a major in mind. They know what they want to do in life. And then after a semester, maybe a year, they’ve completely changed their mind. They’ll go from something that, oh, they were all about science, and now they wanna do something a little liberal arts. Or vice versa. So to find a major, we really suggest taking a broad array of classes. Really exploring the possibilities of what interests you. And you’ll be surprised by what you might want to major in. It’s okay if you have a major already in mind when you get here, and maybe that stays your major. Maybe the major changes. Or maybe you don’t have a major in mind, and that’s great as well. The great thing is you’ll focus on taking different sorts of courses and working with your professor to find the best major for you.

Midd students do research with faculty all the time. And I will draw on some of my own research projects to give you a sense of what that looks like. I’m an applied microeconomist. You can think data and statistics. My work seeks to identify and measure the causal effects of reproductive policies on people’s lives. And over the years, I’ve hired many RAs to work on research projects with me. My RAs have ranged from freshman to seniors. Some of them have been undeclared in major. Others have been majoring in computer science, math, geography, environmental studies, history, and not surprisingly, my own field, economics. My RAs work in visualizations, have appeared in scholarly journals. They’ve appeared in national media outlets like the New York Times. They’ve even appeared in federal courtrooms. This year, I’ve had three RAs working with me on a project that is in partnership with a national nonprofit organization. We’re all working together to rapidly update a database of reproductive healthcare providers so that we can see how changes in Title X funding that took effect this summer are affecting reproductive healthcare access. This summer, I have an RA lined up to work with me here in Middlebury on campus, fingers crossed. But definitely gonna work with me on a project to update another database of abortion facilities so that we can visualize the changing landscape of abortion access. Now, not surprisingly, my RAs have been incredibly helpful to me in my own research. It’s also, I hope and think, a valuable experience for them. They’re getting a chance to deeply learn and demonstrate their expertise with a methodological toolkit that’s really valuable in grad school and in demand among a lot of employers. But really perhaps even more importantly, there’s something magical about getting to deeply engage a research project and see what it takes to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. It can be really difficult and painstaking and messy and frustrating and exciting. And ultimately, in being part of that process, students transition from just being recipients of wisdom to actually creating new knowledge and being more rigorous and critical thinkers who ask questions about why it is that we know what we think we know. I think it makes them more skeptical without crossing that dangerous border into cynicism. So wherever your own passions lie, I would strongly encourage you, if you’re a Midd Kid, to look for opportunities to engage in research with faculty. Those opportunities are not difficult to find.

Our liberal arts curriculum will prepare you to become successful wherever your paths may lead you after graduation. You may continue your education in master’s and PhD programs or in professions such as law and medicine. You may also pursue careers in established and emerging fields, applying your knowledge of and skills in the arts, humanities, sciences, and languages. Last, but not least, when you graduate from the College, you become a part of a larger, supportive network of alumni.

These range across the academic disciplines and include spaces that support film and media production, dance and theater and music spaces, the special collections in our libraries, the art museum, as well as the Johnson Art and Architecture studios and the Makerspace. As a biologist I’m most familiar with our science facilities, which are mostly housed in McCardell Bicentennial Hall. These include the observatory and our greenhouse as well as several other teaching and research laboratories. So in my laboratory we have access to microscopy facilities as well as a wide range of molecular biological equipment and spaces. And then also, hip waders and other field equipment that we use to sample lakes around Vermont. All of these facilities really support our student efforts in diverse academic pursuits and will be available to you once you arrive on campus.

Middlebury is one of the few universities in the United States that is both need-blind and meets 100 percent of demonstrated financial need. This means that when you’re on campus for your four years, the financial aid office is both flexible and accessible. And once you’re at Middlebury for your four years, you have opportunities to take advantage of the financial resources that the College has. This can come in the form of free J-term skiing lessons that are offered at the Snowbowl, or free outing programs given by the Middlebury Mountain Club.

I am a firm believer that knowing what you don’t like is just as important as knowing what you do like. The CCI or the Center for Careers and Internships does a really great job of exposing you to a variety of fields through their structure and their support systems. For example, the CCI is divided into about six or seven sectors with career advisors in their respected fields. They also put out weekly newsletters, and we always have tons of career events happening throughout the week. Other resources that you can access, for example, are conversations with peer advisors who are trained, conduct resume reviews and mock interviews. Another really great thing that the CCI does is ensure that opportunities are equitable. So they funded over $850,000 of internship funding in underpaid internships last year. One of my favorite resources that I’ve leveraged at the CCI has been the Summer Consulting Program, and so I was paired with a partner at a firm, and he spent countless of hours helping me prep for really competitive internships. So I’m really excited to start off my senior year with a full-time job offer.

The Center for Community Engagement or the CCE is a great starting point on campus if you’re looking to get involved with the community, that can be domestic or globally. So if you’re learning things in the classroom that you wanna find a way to apply outside of the classroom, this is a great place to start. I personally am involved in Community Friends. I have a kiddo in town named James. He’s from the town of Middlebury, and we spend two hours a week together where I do some mentorship. And there are great opportunities like Community Friends to get involved with through the CCE. So if you’re interested in civic engagement, if you’re looking to make an impact on your community and get involved, CCE, or Center for Community Engagement is a great place. It also is a beautiful space on campus. It’s located behind one of our dining halls. It’s a house with a kitchen, a common room. It’s available to students at all time. They have their own newsletter, a blog, and it’s really, really easy way to get involved, meet friends in and outside of campus.