the miscellany news | may 23

The Miscellany News Vassar CollegePoughkeepsie, NY

May 23, 2010Since 1866 | miscellanynews.com Volume CXLIV | Special Issue

4 Senior athletes honored at Athletics Banquet5 Seniors reflect,

reminisce on time at Vassar6

Inside this issue

A preview of the Powerhouse Theater season

Hill, seniors finish four years at Vassar

The Class of 2010 entered Main Gate for the first

time in August 2006 at a sig-nificant moment in Vassar his-tory. President of the College Catharine Bond Hill was about to officially take her place as the College’s 10th president, filling the position of former President Frances Daly Fer-gusson, who served the Col-lege as president from 1986 to 2006. Hill’s inauguration in

October that year was a turn-ing point for the College, but, as the class would see, Vassar would continue to transform over the next four years.

Much like the Class of 2010, Hill, more casually known as “Cappy,” might call this her senior year at Vassar. The ad-missions process was differ-ent for the two of them—the Class of 2010 was chosen out of an applicant pool of 6,075, and Hill was chosen out of 200 candidates in a nation-wide

search. Still, both came with diverse experiences prior to setting foot on Vassar’s cam-pus. The class was and is filled with champion athletes, star performers and budding scholars, and Hill brought her own expertise in the econom-ics of higher education and economic development in Af-rica, as well as degrees from Williams College and Oxford and Yale Universities.

“I do feel a special rela-tionship to the Class of 2010,”

wrote Hill in an e-mailed statement. “We were learning about living at Vassar at the same time!”

In this four-year period, the members of the Class of 2010 have seen improvements to campus facilities, such as the complete renovation of Davi-son House; attended notable speakers, such as writers Tony Kushner and Gail Collins; and participated in the Vassar Stu-dent Association’s (VSA) 128

See 2010 on page 3

Molly TurpinEditor in ChiEf

Seniors become alumnae/i

The Class of 2010 offi-cially became Vassar

alumnae/i after the College’s Spring Convocation, held in the Chapel on Wednesday, April 28.

A semiannual tradition at the College, Convocation was well-attended by mem-bers of the Vassar commu-nity and was an opportunity to hear remarks made by

the President of the College Catharine Bond Hill; cook-book author Lee Zalben ’95, who founded Peanut Butter & Co., a gourmet sandwich shop in New York; outgoing and incoming Presidents of the Vassar Student Associa-tion (VSA) Mathew Leonard ’11 and Caitlin Ly ’10 and Pro-fessor of Psychology Ken-neth Livingston.

The event began at 3:30 p.m. with a standing proces-

sional to “Prelude in F Major” by College Organist Gail Ar-cher, preceded by the “Song of the Open Road” sung by The Convocation Choir.

Hill commenced the speeches by commenting that she arrived at Vassar along with the graduating class. “Together, we’ve shared an exciting, if challenging, four years. They were a unique four years for you, and de

See REMARKS on page 2

Aashim UsgaonkarnEws Editor

13 members of 2010receive fellowships

As members of the Class of 2010 officially com-

plete their undergraduate education, the 13 fellowship recipients of the senior class have already made plans to continue their studies.

Nicole Weindling was awarded a fellowship by the Fulbright Program, an “interna-tional exchange program offer-ing opportunities for students, scholars and professionals to undertake international gradu-ate study, advanced research, university teaching and [non-university] teaching,” accord-ing to the official website.

The Compton Mentor Fel-lowship, which requires its fellows to “design a project of social merit that focuses on the environment, peace and conflict resolution, reproductive health, and/or equal opportunity,” was awarded to Dorien Ediger-Seto and Jackson Kroopf.

Seniors Ece Dogrucu, Eliza-beth Husson, Kwang Yeon Lee, Sarah Matherly and Maria Ribadeneira have received the Vassar Maguire Fellowship for study abroad, and Maria Men-

dez, David Mungo, Anh Ngo, Silvana Rueda and Jamie Ste-venson were awarded the Ann Cornelisen Fellowship for Lan-guage Study Abroad.

According to Director of the Office for Fellowships and Pre-Health Advising Lisa Kooper-man, the number of seniors applying for and getting fellow-ships is not so different in 2010 as it has been in recent years. “The applicant pool has been pretty consistent, and the re-sults are pretty similar, too. Vas-sar seniors tend to seek out op-portunities and are successful,” said Kooperman. As an indica-tor of this success, Kooperman noted that Vassar is ranked no. 4 this year among undergradu-ate institutions whose recent graduates have been awarded Fulbright fellowships, and has been ranked in the top 10 for the past four years.

Kooperman encourages ris-ing seniors to think about fel-lowships early given the level of involvement required by the application processes and the extremely competitive nature of the programs. Weindling agreed, writing in an e-mailed

See FELLOWS on page 4

Angela AiutosEnior Editor

President of the College Catharine Bond Hill addresses students and community members during the Spring Convocation in the Chapel

on Wednesday, April 28. Convocation marks the end of the academic year as well as seniors’ transition into the alumnae/i community.

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Several examples from the Vassar College Costume Collection are

on display in the Palmer Gallery exhibit from May 21 through June 6.

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A ‘Glimpse’ at little- known collection

Tucked away in the base-ment of the Vogelstein

Center for Drama and Film, in the Lower Costume Shop, is a little-known piece of history: the Vassar College Costume Collection (VCCC). The col-lection is composed of over 500 original historic costumes,

the oldest of which date back to the 1850s. From May 21 to June 6, several examples from the collection will be on dis-play in the aptly titled Palmer Gallery exhibit, “A Glimpse into Vassar’s (Secret) Closet.”

Costume Designer and Se-nior Drama Lecturer Holly Hummel rescued the VCCC

See COSTUME on page 4

Angela AiutosEnior Editor

Seniors listen to Convocation addresses in the Chapel on Wednesday, April 28. Speakers included

President of the College Catharine Bond Hill and Professor of Psychology Kenneth Livingston.

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Fund to be active in 2010-11Class aims for 75% participation

The senior class gift reached over $22,000 in total fund-

raising on Wednesday, April 19, according to its website. While the Senior Class Gift Committee already surpassed their goal of raising $15,000 for their gift, their fundraising efforts continued through Senior Week in hopes of meeting their class participa-tion goal of 75 percent. The gift, an endowed scholarship fund in the class’s name, will go into effect as early as next semester when it will begin contributing to Vassar’s financial aid budget.

To date, the 2010 Endowed Scholarship Fund has the largest rate of student givings among the College’s 21 peer institutions with comparable senior gifts, reported co-Chair of the Senior Gift Committee and

See CLASS GIFT on page 3

Lila TeetersContributing Editor

GRADUATION May 23, 2010

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Editor in ChiefMolly Turpin

Senior EditorsAngela Aiuto

Matthew Brock

Contributing EditorLila Teeters

News

FeaturesOpinions

ArtsSports

DesignCopy

PhotographyOnline

Caitlin ClevengerAashim UsgaonkarMitchell GilburneJoshua RosenJuan ThompsonErik LorenzsonnAndy MarmerEric EstesGretchen MaslinJuliana Halpert Carrie Hojnicki

The Editorial Board holds weekly meetings every Sunday at 9 p.m. in the Rose Parlor. All members of the Vassar community interested in joining the newspaper’s staff or in a critique of the current issue are welcome. The Miscellany News is not responsible for the views presented in the Opinions pages. The weekly staff edito-rial is the only article which reflects the opin-ion of the Editorial Board. The Miscellany News is published weekly by the students of Vassar College. The Miscellany News office is located in College Center Room 303, Vassar College.

LETTERS POLICYThe Miscellany News is Vassar College’s week-ly open forum for discussion of campus, lo-cal and national issues, and welcomes letters and opinions submissions from all readers. Letters to the Editor should not exceed 450 words, and they usually respond to a particu-lar item or debate from the previous week’s issue. Opinions articles are longer pieces, up to 800 words, and take the form of a longer column. No letter or opinions article may be printed anonymously. If you are interested in contributing, e-mail [email protected].

EDITOR’S NOTEThe Miscellany News would like to congratulate the Class of 2010 at the time of their graduation on their extracurricular and academic accom-plishments and contributions to the College.

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REMARKS continued from page 1

spite the fact that I know several classes before and after yours, these four years will always be uniquely the years of my introduction to Vas-sar,” said Hill. While speaking of the meaning of a liberal arts education, especially the one students at Vassar receive, Hill commented, “[The liberal arts curriculum] offers students freedom to and not freedom from” making challenging academic decisions.

Comparing the ignorance people harbor to-wards the types of peanuts in the United States to the ignorance they harbor by thinking that ev-ery college is alike, Zalben began his remarks by saying that, for him, Vassar was as distinguish-able and unique as an individual type of peanut, which includes such varieties as the Valencia Peanut and the Tennessee Red. Zalben went on to recall his own time at Vassar, claiming that his “education was not just in the subject mat-ter I was studying, it was in the studying itself.” Zalben concluded his speech by advising the graduating class to take advantage of the strong alumnae/i network set up by the Alumnae and

Alumni of Vassar College, recommending that students think of the organization’s members as “long-lost older cousins, connected by that steely thread of shared experience.”

Zalben wrote about his experience of revisit-ing the College in an e-mailed statement after the event: “I was excited to return to Vassar. It wasn’t until I was pulling into Main Gate that I realized it had been ten years since I had been back on campus, and Vassar looks even better than I remember it. I enjoyed the pomp and cer-emony of Convocation, and the peanut butter rush after the senior class photo was taken was certainly a sight to behold. I was impressed by the questions posed to me on a wide range of topics during my Q&A on food politics in the Rose Parlor the day after Convocation.”

Ly was next to address the gathering, and listed the many accomplishments of the Class of 2010 before and during its time at Vassar. Refer-ring to the collective future of the Class, Ly said, “Now is the time to use the skills that we have gained to take education.”

The gavel was then passed on Leonard, the

incoming 2010-2011 VSA President, who “[com-mended] the outgoing VSA Executive Board for all its work.” Addressing the upcoming academ-ic year, Leonard noted, “There has never been a more important time to work together.”

Confident that the newly-elected student leaders will ably fulfill their duties, outgoing VSA Vice President for Operations Brian Far-kas ’10 wished the incoming group of student leaders “good luck in all their efforts next year,” continuing that he is “sure that each one will do a great job guiding the College through its ses-quicentennial.”

Livingston, who compared college life to that in Neverland in his speech entitled “Notes from Neverland,” gave the ceremonial Convocation Address. “I used to be much better at giving ad-vice until I realized how bad I was at taking it, ” said Livingston.

After the recessional, as per tradition, rising seniors in the Class of 2011 lined up on the fifth floor of Main Building to ring the bell atop the building, signifying the official entry into the fi-nal year of their time at Vassar.

A Vassar convocation unique as a peanut

VSA ends year of achievement, challenge

“Vassar faces significant financial con-straints, but the VSA leadership sees

the unique opportunity to act as innovators for change,” wrote Vassar Student Association (VSA) President Caitlin Ly ’10 in an e-mailed statement at the start of the semester. Since then, the VSA Council has worked to increase transparency, boost community involvement and reform Vassar’s academics while tackling controversies along the way.

The year began on Sept. 6 with the Coun-cil adopting a strong stance in favor of getting students involved in the Poughkeepsie com-munity by awarding $5,000 to the Community Shuttle program, a move which it repeated at the start of the spring semester. Continuing this goal, the VSA went on to hold a record-setting Meet Me in Poughkeepsie on Oct. 10, with more events and participants than ever before.

The VSA also began its yearlong quest to reform academics at Vassar at its first meet-ing, endorsing a proposal to give students an extra half credit for participating in any varsity sport. This proposal underwent numerous ed-its and several drafts over the next six months, but was eventually passed by the Committee on Curricular Policies and put to a vote before the faculty on March 24.

Due to this policy’s success, there was a short-lived moment in which some students requested an additional half-credit for natu-ral science courses with a lab component, but nothing has come of it yet, in part because the various science departments have not yet agreed that the credit would benefit students.

The next week, the VSA passed a new room entry policy designed to clarify when and un-der what circumstances Security and adminis-trators can enter students’ rooms, a policy that was recently adopted by the College along with a Security FAQ , which answers common ques-tions about security protocol. For instance, Security cannot enter students’ rooms if they cannot see the alcohol from the hall.

Due to the current economic crisis, the VSA spent a large portion of first semester dealing with cuts to the faculty and staff and trying to mediate solutions between the students and the administration. The Dean of the Faculty even-tually adopted the proposal supported by the VSA to reduce course releases, meaning that faculty who chair departments or participate in committees will have to teach more classes in addition to their other responsibilities, thus ensuring that the total number of courses of-fered by the College stayed relatively stable. In the end, only ten courses had to be cut.

Of course, in the wake of faculty and staff layoffs, the Council often found itself work-ing with and speaking to students from the Campus Solidarity Working Group, a group of students who worked with the staff and faculty unions to oppose all layoffs, which requested that the Council endorse a letter composed by Adjunct Associate Professor of English Judith Nichols condemning the cuts on Nov. 22.

While the Council agreed with the letter’s sentiment, they were disturbed by the many inaccuracies in the letter, which alleged that Dean of the Faculty Jonathan Chenette was forcing faculty members to retire and that Vas-sar was the only school out of the top 25 lib-eral arts colleges that does have professor of

Islam.The Council’s main concern about the let-

ter was it’s operative clause, which read, “We are seeking your help in supporting our ad-ministrators in canceling lay-offs and cancel-ing teacher contract termination”—an option which the VSA considered to be too extreme given the present fiscal climate.

However, the Working Group gave the VSA a deadline, which later proved to be false, pre-venting them from considering it further at their next meeting, so after four hours of de-vate the Council decided to endorse the letter.

Despite their discomfort with some of the letter’s point, many Council members felt that their constituents would support the sentiment behind the letter and therefore supported it.

The next week, after many concerned e-mails from constituents, the VSA Council endorsed a memorandum drafted by the Aca-demics Committee clarifying its opinion on the issue and separating itself from the more extreme aspects of Nichols’ letter.

According to Class of 2013 President Ely Berns-Zeiv ’13, at the time, “I think the VSA’s greatest failing this semester was not consult-ing constituents before endorsing Judy Nich-ols’ letter.”

The VSA began the second semester with an attempt to ensure that it could never make such a mistake again, by passing a new amendment to the VSA constitution at their first meeting on Jan. 24, which mandates that the VSA wait one week before voting on letters brought to them by outside organizations.

The VSA also responded to the controversy caused when the administration decided to

See VSA on page 3

Matthew BrocksEnior Editor

Vassar Student Association (VSA) Council members meet every Sunday night to discuss the issues facing the Vassar College campus. This year, the

Council endorsed and saw the passage of the Athletics proposal, which would allow athletes to receive academic credit for participating in varsity sports.

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CLASS GIFT continued from page 1

outgoing Vassar Student Association Vice President for Operations Brian Farkas ’10. Usually Vasar ranks around no. 18 for giv-ing. The class gift has witnessed high levels of participation from the Vassar community since the Senior Class Gift Committee un-veiled it on Dec. 5, 2009. “We’ve gotten sup-port from outside community members, and faculty, and staff at Vassar, as well as parents and alumni, so it’s a school-wide effort, a community-wide effort, and that’s exciting,” said co-Chair of the Senior Class Gift Com-mittee Rachel Gilmer ’10.

Due to the sheer volume of this support, the gift outstripped its $15,000 goal Tuesday, April 20. Even before reaching this goal, the gift far outstripped the gifts at Vassar’s 21 peer insti-tutions as a result of the soliciting, tabling in the College Center, mailings and door-to-door requests made by the members of the Gift Committee. As part of this, the Senior Class Gift Committee held the College’s first-ever Faculty-Student Basketball game in February and hosted an informational session on finan-cial aid entitled “Why Do We Need Financial Aid? A Conversation about Education and Access.” The Senior Class Council has also played a role in drumming up support, help-ing by tabeling in the College Center, sending out mailings and going door-to-door request-ing donatin. The Council and Committee have worked hard to sustain the community and the senior class’s excitement about the gift.

“The vast majority [of the senior class] has given,” said Farkas. “Our class participation is about 70 percent, which is really good.” Yet, the Committee is still working to beat the par-

ticipation record of the Class of 2009, which saw 72 percent of their class give to a winter internship fund.

However, both Farkas and Gilmer remain optimistic about meeting the 75 percent goal. While “there are a bunch of people…who haven’t contributed,” Farkas said, “in many cases that’s because they’ve been busy this year and may not have had the time to go through the website…so we’ll continue to re-mind people over the course of this week.”

Gilmer echoed this sentiment: “It’s not that people don’t want to give; it’s just reminding people that it’s there…It’s a lot of footwork, but it’s gratifying work.”

Gilmer also stressed that at this point in the fundraising effort, “it’s not about the monetary goal.” Instead, Gilmer stated the Committee was eager to stress the importance of giving to a cause larger than any individual student or class. Said Gilmer, “It’s not about the mon-ey being spent; it’s about the act of giving, the act of contributing to the College’s future and future generations of students who want to come here…that’s really what the gift is about.”

Striving to achieve some larger purpose has driven the senior class gift since the be-ginning. According to Farkas and Gilmer, the Committee felt passionate about addressing the financial needs of students attending Vas-sar. To this end, they felt it was important to extend the College’s ongoing commitment to a need-blind admissions policy. The Commit-tee also recognizes that this is an issue that af-fects many Vassar students on a personal level.

Said Gilmer, “I know for me personally, I’m on a financial aid…It’s the reason I’m here. It’s the reason so many of my friends are here,

and I think Vassar would be a very different place if we weren’t giving everyone the equal opportunity to be here.” According to Gilmer, the Class of 2010 Scholarship Fund will help students of all different backgrounds find a place at Vassar. “Scholarships are the foun-dations of justice and equity because they put everyone at more of an equal playing field than they would otherwise be on,” said Gilmer. “In some ways, education should be this great equalizer that allows everyone the opportunity to start here and then go from there. Scholarships are the first chance in do-ing that.” Both Farkas and Gilmer cited the gift’s message of social justice as the key factor responsible for the community’s response.

Farkas saw this gift as part of a larger com-mitment on the College’s part to financial aid and higher education affordability. “President Hill arrived at the same time our class did in 2006, so literally since the first week on cam-pus, she has been incorporating educational access and affordability into her conversations about what the College should be doing, and our class has absorbed that over the last four years.” Affordability and accessibility, Farkas continued, are now core values for Vassar.

And while the Committee continued to so-licit donations, they are proud of what they have accomplished thus far. “It was just re-ally incredible, especially with everything that is going on with the economy right now, people are really being more exclusive with where they spend their money—they’re being careful—and it’s really exciting to see a cause that we can get the entire senior class behind, as well as the entire student body,” concluded Gilmer.

Class gift reaches beyond $22,000

2010 continued from page 1

organizations. The Vassar careers of both Hill and the Class

of 2010 began with campus-wide celebrations of Hill’s inauguration. The chocolate foun-tains at the “Cappy and the Chocolate Factory” themed party were much-noted in the pages of The Miscellany News.

The celebrations, however, gave way to seri-ous work. Upon her arrival at the College, Hill named affordability, the curriculum and the upkeep of Vassar’s physical plant—particularly dormitories and the College’s science facili-ties—as her top priorities. Along with Hill, sev-eral new administrators joined the College’s group of senior officers. Dean of the College Christopher Roellke took on his position in November 2008 after serving as a professor of education, associate dean of the College, dean of studies and finally as acting dean of the Col-lege. Under Hill’s leadership, the position dean of planning and academic affairs was created in the 2007-2008 academic year. Professor of Classics Rachel Kitzinger was named to the post.

Because Kitzinger and Roellke had already taught and worked at the College, Hill noted that they had a good grasp of Vassar’s needs. “These are people who really understand the institution and know many people on campus. That has been very helpful,” she remarked.

Dean of the Faculty Jonathan Chenette ar-rived in 2008 from Grinnell College. “It has also been very helpful to have someone with another perspective, although he arrived at a very difficult moment,” wrote Hill. “I think the new administration has handled the difficult decision making of the last few years very suc-cessfully, with significant help from the senior faculty leadership.”

Under Hill’s leadership, the Class of 2010 witnessed the re-adoption of Vassar’s need-blind policy in the fall of 2007 after a decade of need-sensitive admissions. The Class of 2012 was then the first class to be admitted with the policy in place.

Hill noted the role of students in the Col-lege’s decision-making processes. Prior to the adoption of the need-blind policy, the VSA Council passed a resolution advocating the decision. Last year, the VSA passed a resolu-tion in favor of the admission of undocument-ed students, which was then approved by the

Committee on College Life, and this year the Council’s support led to an optional half-credit for participation in varsity athletics.

A Miscellany News article written in Sep-tember 2007 noted that the decision to adopt the need-blind policy was a sign of the Col-lege’s financial health. However, Vassar’s en-dowment, like that of most private institutions of higher education, suffered after the financial crisis hit in 2008. However, according to Hill, the crisis made the need-blind policy more ap-propriate than ever. “To have responded to the financial crisis by constraining financial aid just when students and families needed it most clearly was inconsistent with our mission and goals,” wrote Hill.

While students’ voices have been significant in the adoption of many College policies, some members of the community expressed frustra-tion with the rapidity of decision-making in the wake of the financial crisis.

Together, Hill and the Class of 2010 have been challenged in the past two years by the effects of the recession on the College, and at times seemed to challenge each other. “I think the thing I found most difficult was finally re-alizing that I wasn’t going to be able to keep everyone happy… There was no way to reach complete consensus on how to respond to the financial challenges,” wrote Hill.

By June 2009, the endowment had decreased by nearly 30 percent, and it was clear to the Board of Trustees that significant and lasting changes needed to be made. “To be sustain-able, an endowment should not be drawing much more than five percent,” said Chair of the Board of Trustees’ Investments Committee Jef-frey Goldstein ’77 at an open meeting on May 21, 2009. “Next year the projected draw on the endowment is almost double that. It’s close to nine percent. That is not a sustainable path be-cause we are taking from the future.” Since the onset of the economic crisis in the fall of 2008, some students alongside faculty and staff have shown their concern for the way the College handled cutting back. Demonstrations in May of 2009 led to the creation of a Hardship Fund over the summer to help staff members who were not employed by the College over the summer. Over the course of the summer, the College allocated over $60,000 to employees.

Overall, Hill wrote, “We’ve reduced staffing by about 10 [percent] in almost all categories

of employment at the college. That was very difficult, but fortunately most of this was ac-complished through voluntary means. This is a major, long term adjustment at the College.”

In the fall, the Campus Solidarity Working Group emerged as a group for faculty, staff and students to voice their discontent at staffing cuts. The Working Group held several dem-onstrations protesting the College’s elimina-tion of 10 positions. The Working Group did not succeed in preventing these cuts, and a few students held a second hunger strike in December in an effort to save the jobs at the eleventh hour. The strike ended after Roellke disclosed the job status of the laid-off staff members, of whom two took on other posi-tions at the College, two accepted retirement incentives, one was able to remain after a vol-untary transfer of another staff member and at least one found a job outside of the College.

“In the end, I know there still isn’t complete consensus on the decisions that were made, but I believe we made the hard decisions that we needed to, and did so with lots of discussion and collaboration with the entire community,” she wrote. “We were as open and transparent as we could be, but in the end could not make everyone happy, because we had to adjust to the new realities of our financial situation.”

Though the cuts made by the College were less than unanimously approved by the student body, the Class of 2010 showed a commitment alongside Hill to the need-blind admissions policy in their choice of the Senior Class Gift—an Endowed Scholarship Fund (see “Fund to be active in 2010-11” on page 1).

While reacting to the financial crisis has in many ways defined the second half of the last four years, Hill has not been swayed from her original goals. “The financial situation has if anything clarified our priorities and goals, since we’ve had to think very carefully about how to respond to reductions in our resources,” wrote Hill. “I don’t think it has actually changed any of them, just perhaps changed the timing on some. It will take us longer to do some of the capital projects that we consider very impor-tant, including maintaining and restoring our beautiful facilities.”

Change, as well as progress, she noted, is an inevitable occurance: “I’m sure we’ll figure out that some of the changes we’ve made aren’t quite right, and we’ll adjust over time.”

Need-blind policy a defining accomplishment

VSA continued from page 2

cancel all summer abroad programs, due to the six figure losses that the programs incur. The Council passed a resolution on Feb. 7 request-ing that the administration examine alterna-tives for language students who need to go abroad but might not be able to do so during the academic year.

The rest of the semester was relatively quiet for the Council. They invited a series of guest speakers to discuss students’ involvement in the community, bringing Education Outreach Coordinator Leslie Williams, Director of Field Work Peter Leonard and Director of Spiritual Life Samuel Speers to speak on their various ar-eas of expertise over three weeks in late March.

However, the Council passed a number of resolutions towards the end of the year. It en-dorsed a resolution on April 11 requesting that the College hire a new Sexual Assault and Vio-lence Prevention Coordinator—a position that has long gone unfilled. Unfortunately, given the College’s current economic straits, the Council doubted that the administration will actually create a new full-time position.

At that same meeting, the VSA endorsed a proposal to the Environmental Research Insti-tute to hire a firm to perform a carbon analysis for Vassar for the year 1996, so that the College can set a goal for reducing its carbon footprint.

Then, on April 25, Vice President for Aca-demics Stephanie Damon-Moore ’11 and Vice President for Operations Brian Farkas ’10 an-nounced a referendum to see whether or not students would be in favor of changing the term “correlate” to “minor.” The vote came back with 94.3 percent of the 650 respondents voting in favor of “minor.”

At the VSA’s final meeting of the year, on May 3, the Council ran into a final controversy while passing the 2010-2011 budget. According to the VSA’s bylaws, “The recommendation of the Executive Boards shall be posted for a petition process of 48 hours,” but instead of publicly posting posting the entire budget, Vice President for Finance Scott Pascal ’10 and Vice President for Activities Aaron Grober ’11 e-mailed each group its individual budget.

According to Chair of the Judicial Board Daniel Salton ’10, this decision was technically not against the bylaws, which do not specify how much of the budget has to be posted and to whom it must be made available. However, various organization leaders at the meeting protested this decision.

After passing the budget, the 25th VSA Council took the reigns under 2010-2011 VSA President Mathew Leonard ’11, who was elected with unusually high voter turnout.

Looking back upon the year, Ly said that al-though the VSA has had large successes, such as passing the athletics proposal, she is dis-appointed that the Council failed to increase transparency at the College and did not col-laborate on projects with the faculty. To next year’s Council, Ly wrote in an e-mailed state-ment, “Set priorities/goals very early and get to work on them right away. The sooner the bet-ter! Many times, it takes months for progress to be made, so the VSA needs to voice their ideas as soon as the year is underway.”

Although Leonard was impressed by this year’s Council’s efforts to preserve need-blind admission, he agreed with Ly that the Council did not do enough to increase transparency. “They ultimately fell into the same old trap of being inaccessible. This is what I would have changed the most, had I been president. I think that it is vital for the VSA to talk to students…We need to use the referenda more often on contentious issues,” he wrote in an e-mailed statement.

“One of the first goals of the new Executive Board it to increase visibility, as well as trans-parency of the whole VSA process. We plan on restarting and maintaining the VSA blogs for each executive board member, as well as adver-tising committee times. In addition, we plan on creating task-forces involving non-elected stu-dents to help us tackle some of next year’s big-gest issues,” he concluded.

Council gave crucial support to athletic credit



Powerhouse Theater preparesto take over campus for summer

Summertime at Vassar means the arrival of a new variety of

creature. No, it is not the ground-hog, nor is it the squirrel, and no, it is not the deer that managed to escape culling. Rather, it is a spe-cies wholly devoted to the prac-tice and pedagogy of drama: the Powerhouse Theater Training Program and summer season.

Indeed, Vassar’s idyllic sum-mer landscape has been the backdrop for theatrical brilliance since the program’s start in 1985. The collaborative product of Vas-sar and New York Stage and Film, the program will enter its 26th season with a highly anticipated repertoire, including a full-staged production by Oscar-winner and Powerhouse habitué, John Patrick Shanley.

While the College’s physi-cal beauty doesn’t hurt, both the theater’s producing and artistic directors seemed to agree that its true beauty lies instead in its ability to provide a common ha-ven for all different types of the-ater and people. The eight-week program is a theatrical spectrum: one day a full-staged Shanley pro-duction, the next a reading by the program’s student apprentices.

Even beyond this enlighten-ing proximity, the program seeks ways to encourage comingling between the eager students and seasoned professionals. One result is this season’s concert reading of Walter Jones’s “1940s Radio Hour.” The musical, a fic-tional Poughkeepsie 1942 radio broadcast, will be a collaborative

project between apprentices and professionals.

“It is wonderful that these art-ists can come together at all dif-ferent times of their careers,” explained the theater’s artistic director Johanna Pfaezler.

The benefit of featuring all lev-els of production and profession-als is that individuals and their works tend to resurface. Such is the case with one of two of this season’s full-staged productions: John Patrick Shanley’s “Pirate.” First produced in the 2009 season in its raw form as a reading, the work is, as the company describes on their website, “a funny, pro-vocative and wildly theatrical tale of a guy who keeps showing up.”

“I like when this happens, then people can really see the evolu-tion,” explained Powerhouse’s Producing Director and Training Program alumnus Ed Cheetham.

The people to whom Cheetham refers are those that have been avid supporters of the program since its inception, many of whom live locally. As Cheetham and Pfaezler and see it, the Pow-erhouse provides a cultural ser-vice perhaps otherwise difficult to find in the area.

“The majority of audience is local, this is a great way for Vassar to open up its campus to have this consistent relationship with the community every summer,” said Cheetham. “A lot of what hap-pens that’s free, accessible to the public. There’s the amphitheatre lawn, perfect to see a play and bring the kids.”

One of this season’s works will pay homage to this steadfast au-

dience, inviting their interactive participation. Such is the premise of Zach Helm’s semi-staged work-shop piece, “Interviewing the Au-dience.”

“These individuals who have watched so many plays have a unique understanding of the pro-cess and to build a piece in front of them is truly fascinating,” said Pfaezler.

Another relationship that the Powerhouse has deservedly prid-ed itself on is that with Vassar’s drama students. While they come from across the nation, there are always a few of Vassar’s ever tal-ented drama students in the mix, whether before or after their ma-triculation at the College. This year, the apprentices will prepare two readings: Shakespere’s “Ro-meo and Juliet” and early 20th-century American playwright Sophie Treadwell’s expressionist classic, “Machinal.”

“I think the training program gets stronger ever year,” said Cheetham, once an apprentice himself. “My goal for when people leave is for them to see that there are many paths they can take, to set them on a path, to lead them, to make a choice. To think, ‘this is where I can see myself being, this is where I can find my voice.’ This will give them a deeper un-derstanding and appreciation for creating work, for creating art and how that can foster great commu-nication.”

Alas, in its 26th year, the Power-house program continues to be, as Pfaezler told The New York Times

in a 2009 interview, “a Fresh Air Fund for city artistis.”

Carrie HojnickionlinE Editor

COSTUME continued from page 1

from obscurity when she first came to Vassar in the fall of 1981. While organizing costumes used in the-atre productions in the basement of Avery Hall—now the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film—Hummel noticed old cardboard boxes lying at the bottom of the closets. “They looked like garbage. I still have the idea that they were intended to be thrown away…[but when] I decided to open them up, it was a treasure trove.” Hummel claims that she wanted to make pre-serving the costumes her personal mission.

However, this has not proven an easy task. One chal-lenge that Hummel has faced in her attempt to organize the VCCC is that, for many of the pieces, not much is known regarding their origins. “We believe they were donated by alumni or perhaps former faculty members; some of them don’t have a source. We have worked on resåearching and trying to find the connections.”

Hummel is aided in her “detective work” by Costume Design Assistant Arden Kirkland ’93. Many Vassar stu-dents have worked on the VCCC with Hummel over the years, but she claims that Kirkland, as a student, really “made it into her own” during her time as a student, eventually working the VCCC into her senior project.

Said Kirkland, “When I was a student, I had done an internship with the Costume Institute at the Metropoli-tan Museum of Art, and I really learned about how the museums take care of objects like this. So part of my se-nior project was trying to organize the collection better by giving everything a number and having files for each thing.” New additions to the VCCC are filed in a similar fashion—records reflect the names of the donors and the person who wore it, as well as photographs of the garment itself.

Organizing the VCCC and researching the history of each individual garment is only one hurdle; another is restoring the physical state of the actual garments, many of which are described by Hummel as “too small and too fragile to be used.”

This year, the VCCC received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), which was used to fund a series of conservation workshops on campus.

The workshops have focused on a variety of subjects, including condition reporting, cataloguing and the lat-est, a five-day intensive workshop in basic conservation techniques, or what Kirkland refers to as “stabilization.”

Kirkland explained that stabilization is limited to simple, non-invasive techniques to salvage a garment, and with good reason: “People who are really conserva-tors train for years… The garments are so fragile that if you try to do any advanced conservation on them without knowing what you’re doing, you could do more harm than good.”

These stabilization techniques appear to have paid off, as attendees of the exhibition will see. “Most of the things that are going to be in this exhibition, we would not have been able to put on a mannequin before that workshop,” said Kirkland.

Kirkland claims that interest in the VCCC has spanned across disciplines. “Miss Hummel and I are studying them from the point of view of costume designers, but we also have history students who are interested, [and] we have women’s studies students who are looking at what the clothing tells us about the women who wore it.” Even the Chemistry Department has gotten involved with the VCCC; Associate Professor of Chemistry Stew-art Belli and Senior Chemistry Lecturer Edith Stout have taught Kirkland and Hummel how to analyze the composition of various garments in order to determine what kind of materials were used in their construction.

The VCCC also attempts to engage outside groups each semester with its “Trying on History” activity, in which participants don period costumes for a short span of time. The most recent event was held on May 12 with a group of girls from the Mill Street Loft’s Program for Adolescent Student Women of Real Direction, which is designed to empower teenage girls from Poughkeepsie to overcome various adversities. Kirkland says that the purpose of the exercise is to teach the girls to relate the garments to their own experiences, and their discus-sions focus on related topics like body image.

“It’s not just about looking at the history of these pieces, but also looking at how we’re different and thinking about where we’re going.”

Workshop allows students to learn, practice preservation

Above, Vassar students use techniques learned in an NEH-funded workshop to stabilize origi-

nal historic costumes. Below, the mended garments are strong enough to be put on mannequins.

Photo courtesy of A

rden Kirkland

FELLOWS continued from page 1

statement: “To put it bluntly, the process [of applying] was quite challenging and required a lot of persistence.” She de-scribed the hours spent researching pro-grams, locating contacts and developing her proposal, confessing that she “truly could not have managed it” without the help of her professors, the Office for Fel-lowships and even her high school Chi-nese teacher.

Weindling knew she wanted to return to China after studying abroad in Qingdao during the summer of 2008, and chose to apply for the Fulbright because of its flexi-bility. “With Fulbright, I am able to combine studying with volunteer work, research and community interaction,” she wrote, adding that she wanted to incorporate her art historical studies in her program.

This September she will begin in-tensive language training in Hangzhou, made possible by the Critical Language Enhancement Award, a separate grant sponsored by Fulbright. Weindling will begin her 10-month Fulbright grant in De-cember; she plans to audit museum stud-ies courses at Shaanxi Normal University while volunteering and researching at mu-seums in different Chinese provinces with the aim of studying “how these provincial institutions articulate a distinct regional history and cultural identity.”

Edgier-Seto also sees her Compton Mentor Fellowship project as a continua-tion of her career at Vassar. A geography and Latin American and Latino/a studies major, Edgier-Seto has “been really inter-ested in immigration and border issues throughout college.” During her time at Vassar, she explored these interests dur-ing summer break through work with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, an Arizona-based non-profit or-ganization that provides legal services to men, women and children detained by im-

migration authorities.Edgier-Seto will be working with

the Florence Project again as a Comp-ton Mentor fellow. She will be dealing mainly with children who are caught up in the immigration process, help-ing them make difficult decisions and explaing their options. “My project is a much bigger version of what I’ve been doing during the summer,” she said.

For Mendez, however, the Ann Cornel-isan Fellowship was a means to explore a newfound interest. She explained in an e-mailed statement, “I started taking Por-tuguese lessons my senior year and re-ally regretted the fact that I hadn’t started earlier. I was enamored by the language and felt the urge to keep learning it.” Af-ter speaking with some friends who had completed the Ann Cornelisen Fellowship in the past, Mendez decided to apply.

Following graduation, Mendez will be headed to Rio de Janiero, Brazil in order to study Portuguese, anthropology and Latin-American history and relations at the Pontifical Catholic University. Men-dez would also like to pursue experiential learning during her time in Brazil: “I’m also hoping to explore issues concern-ing [the] theology of liberation in Brazil through volunteering opportunities at centers…that help many social movements organize in their struggles [for] justice.”

“I would say that the most difficult part of the application process was choosing the program [and] designing what I was going to do next year,” wrote Mendez.

Kooperman agrees that many students are hesitant about crafting a unique pro-posal. “It can be intimidating,” she admits, but adds, “All projects start with an idea—people don’t come in with full project pro-posals. As they move through the process, the pieces come together. I would encour-age people to not be afraid; there’s lots of support between me and the faculty.”

Vassar ranks fourth in undergraduate Fulbrights

Molly T

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Senior athletes garner awards, express gratitude

On May 5, four Vassar seniors were honored at the annual Department of Athletics and

Physical Education Banquet. Tennis star Nicole Pontee ’10 was honored with the Outstanding Female Athlete Award. On the male side, vol-leyball phenomenon Phil Tully ’10 won the Out-standing Male Athlete Award. Mike Mattelson ’10, a tennis standout, earned the Frances Fer-guson Coaches’ Award, while Brian Bianchetti ‘10, a prolific soccer scorer, was selected as the winner of the Athletics & Fitness Alumnae/i Award. Rounding out the award winners was squash player Libby Pei ’13, the winner of the Betty Richey Award.

In his freshman season, Tully helped the Brewers to an 8-15 record, the most wins for the program in four years. However, his star did not truly begin to shine until his sophomore year. In Tully’s second season, he earned first-team All-American honors, a distinction he would repeat the next year, while leading Vas-sar to its first ever Molten Division III Men’s Invitational Volleyball Championship (Nation-al Championship) appearance. Tully led the Brewers with 447 kill shots—spikes that earn his team a point—his sophomore year. In addi-tion to his All-American honors, Tully was also chosen as the North East Collegiate Volleyball Association (NECVA) player of the year.

In his junior year, Tully notched 471 kill shots, while repeating as a first-team All-American. Those 471 kill shots were the most of Tully’s career. In his senior year, Tully col-lected 424 kill shots, en route to a second-team All-American selection.

Tully leaves Vassar with his name strewn throughout the record book. He is the school’s all-time leader in kill shots (1,556), kill shots per game (4.45), attack attempts (3,333), points (1,777), and points per game (5.08). Tully is also sixth in digs, eighth in blocks and six in service aces. As part of the volleyball team, Tully was a part of teams that collected a total 71-37 record, and won two NECVA Metro Division Champi-onships and three Vassar Invitational titles.

The winner of the Outstanding Female Ath-lete Award, Nicole Pontee, came to Vassar from Chicago Illinois, where she spent four years on the varsity tennis team. At her high school, Homewood Flossmoor, she earned All-State honors in tennis multiple times.

Her freshman season at Vassar, Pontee earned the no. 25 ranking in the Northeast re-gion, completing the year with a 24-2 singles record—with one of those losses coming to a teammate—and a 19-2 doubles record. These successes were strong enough to earn her Lib-erty League Rookie of the Year honors, as well as a selection as All-Liberty League in singles. She also emerged victorious in the New York State Championships at both no. 3 singles and no. 3 doubles, as well as Seven Sisters no. 3 championship.

In her sophomore year, Pontee garnered the no. 25 national ranking (no. 9 regionally). This season also marked the first time Pon-tee qualified for the NCAA Division III Single Championship, where she advanced to the quarterfinals. Pontee also won the no. 1 single championship at the New York State Champi-onship, and at the Seven Sisters Championship. Over the course of the season Pontee amassed a 21-9 record competing at no. 1 singles, and a 17-7 record at no. 2 doubles. Her success for the year was recognized as she was honored as an ITA/NCAA All-American.

Pontee continued to impress her junior year, rising to the no. 12 nation ranking (no. 4 re-gionally), the highest for a Vassar player since 1991. Pontee was named team captain for the year, and was able to once again secure the no. 1 singles championship at the New York State Championships, while also winning the no. 1 doubles title. Pontee once again qualified for the NCAA Division III Singles Championship, this time losing in the round of 16 to the even-tual champion. That same year Pontee com-piled a 26-6 record at no. 1 singles, and a 14-9 record at no. 1 doubles.

In her senior season, Pontee is currently ranked no. 12 nationally (no. 6 regionally), hav-ing amassed a 25-3 record so far this season. She also successfully defended her two New York State Championship titles. Pontee’s National Championship fate is still yet to be determined.

Over the course of her career, Pontee has col-lected a 95-22 singles record, while also win-ning over 70 percent of her doubles matches. Pontee is 15-1 in Seven Sisters matches, and 31-1 in New York State Championships.

Mike Mattelson took home the Frances Fer-guson Coaches’ Award. Noted Mattelson in an e-mailed statement, “Receiving such a huge award is an incredible honor. To be recognized by the entire athletics community was such an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience that I will never forget. In regards to this award in particular, it’s humbling to have the coaches select me to be honored. The coaches are the driving force of the department so for them to choose me was unreal.”

His freshman year, Mattelson earned the Liberty League Rookie of the Year award. In addition he earned league awards in singles and doubles his junior season, accumulating a 47-29 record in singles over the three years and a similar 45-26 record in doubles.

While Mattelson had a successful three years, his senior year was truly a special one. This fall, he became the first Brewer to com-pete in the ITA National Small College Cham-pionship. Mattelson qualified by winning the ITA Northeast Regional championship. Mattel-son also persevered in the Wallach Invitational, capturing both the singles and doubles cham-pionship in that event. This season, Mattelson has accumulated a 21-6 record in singles, and 20-6 record in doubles.

Mattelson has persevered on his own this season, but his contributions to the Vassar team have set him apart. This season he led the Brewers to their first national tennis rank-ing, and their second Liberty League Cham-pionship. Mattelson also led the Brewers to the NCAA Team Championship tournament,

where they ultimately lost 5-2 to North Caro-lina Wesleyan.

While the team’s season may be over, Mat-telson’s is not, as he will compete in the NCAA Division III Single’s Championship. Mattelson was one of 32 competitors selected for the event which will occur from May 28-30 at Oberlin College. When asked about his proudest ac-complishment at Vassar, Mattelson responded, “being selected to participate in the 32 person individual national tournament is probably my proudest moment.”

Mattelson has accomplished a lot at Vassar, but he admits he could not have done it alone, “My success is owed to my teammates, my coach, and everyone around me who encour-aged me to be the best I could. While I put in a lot of time and I feel that a lot of my im-provement was a result of the hard work and effort that I put in, that would all mean nothing without the team succeeding.” He noted in an e-mailed statement.

Bianchetti received the final award. Bianch-etti started all 61 soccer games he played in at Vassar and led the team in goals his sopho-more, junior and senior seasons scoring 4, 10 and 11 goals respectively. Bianchetti completed his career with 26 goals, the fifth highest to-tal in program history, while notching nine game-winning goals, tying him for the program lead. Bianchetti was named to the All-Liberty League Second Team his sophomore and junior seasons.

In his senior year, Bianchetti became the first Vassar player to earn Liberty League Play-er of the Year honors. In addition to being rec-ognized by the Liberty League, Bianchetti also became the first Brewer to earn a spot on the East Coast Athletic Conference (ECAC) Divi-sion III Upstate First Team. His scoring prow-

ess led Vassar to a 9-6-1 overall record, with a 3-3-1 Liberty League record. Both were the best records for the Brewers since 2003.

It is of this team success that Bianchetti is most proud. He wrote in an e-mailed state-ment, “My proudest soccer accomplishment at Vassar is that I’ve been a part of making the program better. The individual awards mean a lot to me on a personal level, but I think the true measure of an individual’s success, is that they worked towards something bigger than themselves. In my fours years, the team has progressed every season, culminating in the success of this year with the best record since 2003. I’m very proud to say that I was part of this program, at this institution. Plus, 15 years from now when the Vassar Men’s Soccer Team is a perennial NCAA champion, I’ll be able to say I played for them back in the day.”

While each senior had their own individual athletic experience at Vassar, they all had one thing in common: the gratitude and adulation they felt towards their teammates. As Mattel-son noted in an e-mailed statement, “My favor-ite memory is simply seeing all the incredible relationships I’ve developed through tennis. Achieving success along side my friends is the most satisfying thing in the world and I would trade anything for it.”

Bianchetti echoed Mattelson’s sentiments, also writing in an e-mailed statement. “Some of my best memories have been off the field with my teammates. I’m really going to miss the times I was able to share with those guys on long bus rides, hotel stays, Spring Break in Barcelona, and of course, our time in the locker room.”

The four senior athletes are graduating Sun-day, May 23, and will all go on to exciting ca-reers in the world outside of Vassar.

Andy Marmersports Editor

Clockwise from the top left, graduating seniors Brian Bianchetti, Nicole Pontee, Phil Tully and Mike Mattelson participate in their respective varsity sports.

These athletes were honored with the most prestigious athletic awards at the annual Department of Athletics and Physical Education Banquet on May 5.

Photos courtesy of Sports Inform

ation

SENIOR RETROSPECTIVES May 23, 2010


How do you sum up four years in so many words? It is impossible.

After countless hours with friends and teammates, professors and ad-ministrators, what I have come to ap-preciate most about my Vassar edu-cation is how I have been challenged to rethink my core beliefs and basic assumptions about the world.

The Vassar of my imagination was loud and liberal. As a prospec-tive student, certain “Vassar traits” immediately stood out to me: Vassar students love to walk around campus barefoot, Vassar professors like to be called by their first names, not their last, and Vassar coaches love to show-case the accomplishments of their teams. I think I surprised my parents when I chose to apply early deci-sion to Vassar over some other top-ranked liberal arts colleges because I am pretty quiet, I like to wear shoes (or at least flip-flops), and I prefer to address professors by their last names. Perhaps not the most “con-ventional” Vassar student, I never-theless found my place at this school.

Driving through Main Gate in the fall of 2006, I knew I had a lot to learn here and an ocean of opportunities to choose from. The best and fast-

est way to get acclimated to a new environment is to get involved. So that is exactly what I did. Beginning my freshman year, I committed time and energy to Vassar athletics as a tri-sport athlete in volleyball, squash and rowing, and to the Vassar Student Association (VSA) as class vice pres-ident and VSA president. I stretched myself to my limits trying to find time to balance class work, athlet-ics and student government. I traded countless hours of sleep for late night meetings, early morning practices and weekend tournaments off-cam-pus. And I am still not ready to leave.

Thinking back on the last four years, a few moments definitively stand out in my memory: climbing a 75-foot ropes course in Virginia with the volleyball team and coming one step closer to overcoming my fear of heights, winning the VSA presi-dential election and looking forward to a year of progress, exploring the ice caves at Mohonk during senior week last year, attending candlelit After Hours concerts in the Aula and competing in my last varsity athletics tournament at the national squash championships at Yale University.

The time I’ve spent on the court,

in the office and in the dorms have come to define my Vassar experi-ence, almost, if not more than, my time in class. On a more personal level, my term as VSA president has been rewarding, despite the many difficulties that came with the posi-tion. I learned how to communicate calmly and effectively, how to listen to different perspectives with an open mind, and how to negotiate and compromise. I am proud that my initiative to grant athletic credit to varsity athletes passed and will be enacted next fall. This is evidence at-testing to the fact that incremental change can be accomplished at this institution to better the lives of stu-dents, faculty and staff.

In being challenged to rethink my core beliefs, I have learned practical life skills that I will carry with me to law school next year and through life afterwards. As I prepare to move on into a new chapter of my life, my dear alma mater will be close to my heart and always in my mind.

—Caitlin Ly is the outgoing VSA

President. She also served at the

VSA Vice President for Operations

in 2008-2009.

I had never been in love before. I had loved things and events and

maybe even people, but I’d never been in love before. Until this place came along. This “ridiculous pink-and-gray college,” as Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17 dubbed it in a 1915 letter to her mother. “If there had been a col-lege in Alice in Wonderland, it would surely be like this.” Why have I fallen so hopelessly, deeply in love with this ridiculous place?

Maybe I should back up. I’m a New Yorker, heart and soul. I was born and raised in the city. I never really understood how that defined me until I arrived in Cushing. God-forsaken Cushing. Unless you expe-rience it, the move from Manhattan to Main Street, it’s hard to explain. It feels something like a twisted-falling-backwards into another time. The people walk more slowly here. Their bodies and minds inch along with-out any sense of impending anything.

Vassar’s “culture”—as far as it can be pinned down—is lazy, artsy, ironic, uncompetitive, motionless and pur-posefully, self-consciously weird. Most wake up at 11 a.m.

On all counts, I didn’t fit in. I went to bed late and woke up early. I came to Vassar highly competitive. I’m a type-A. My high school taught me to strive to be the best, and to go to a school that’s the best.

How surprised I was to learn that people here don’t even believe that there can (or should?) be a “best.” They believe in this bizarre, “every-one’s a winner” postmodern shifti-ness that lacks purpose and direc-tion. They strive for their “personal best”—personal greatness instead of universal greatness. It was a quality of the students that made my freshman year excruciating and infuriating.

But then I found The Miscel-

lany News. Or maybe it found me. The incredible group of purposeful editors—who populated an obscure room on the third floor of the Col-lege Center—greeted me with open arms. They were unlike those on the first two floors of the building. They had deadlines. They were purposeful. They made their lives about improv-ing something—the newspaper. It was a small thing, but it was a thing that needed improving. Something I could wrap my arms around and throw my-self at heart and soul. And so I did.

Improving a newspaper taught me about the issues contained within that newspaper—the issues facing Vassar itself. And so I ran for student govern-ment. I served as Vice President for Operations of the Vassar Student As-sociation. My student colleagues here, too, were purposeful to a fault with an eye toward the future. They care about this place; they want it to be the best. Not like most Vassar students, who seem to want to be embarrassed by Vassar’s greatness. The experience was an education unto itself. To sit with the College’s top administrators and participate in long-term decision-making—particularly on the heels of the worst recession since the Depres-sion—was spectacularly enlightening. (Vassar’s top administrators, by the

way, are New Yorkers, or at least they might as well be. They clearly aren’t from here.)

Anyway, somewhere along the way, between seeing Vassar’s problems and brainstorming the solutions, I fell in love. I fell in love with this al-most mythical Vassar—a para-Vassar. A Vassar that worked toward better things. I fell in love with a Vassar that existed only within a very small seg-ment of the campus population. That Vassar is competitive. It has a deep sense of its own greatness. It’s ath-letic. It screams and it brags.

If I had gone to another place, one of those already-perfect stereotypes, I doubt I would have fallen in love. I would have liked it. I would have worn the Amherst t-shirt and gone to the big Middlebury basketball games with friends. My Yale Polo half-zip would have been a nice shade of sky blue, to match my Columbia binder.

I would have liked it. But I wouldn’t have felt deep burning passion—the kind that comes only with ownership. I’m not talking about pride. I’m talk-ing about an ownership of an idea of a place that buries itself inside of you. When Vassar receives a major gift or hosts a world-famous speaker, I feel a sense of inward movement, that I myself have made progress toward some greater ideal. When we can-not overcome our own small-minded and self-interested bastions of faculty members, I feel failure.

At Vassar, we can strive. Harvard can’t. It already is. There’s no upward mobility, no sense of recognizable progress. Only guilt for being the best, and fear for what downfall tomorrow will bring.

There’s something powerful about that perpetual sense of “almost there”—something powerful about being so close. There’s something so quintessentially American about the continual urge to build a place to be “more perfect.”

It took me four years to realize that Vassar gave me the very educa-tion that I resented it for not giving me. It taught me those practical skills of communication and negotiation, it taught me to strive, to reach for the top. It did all of that while taking me on a winding, meandering path through the student newspaper, stu-dent government, and student phi-lanthropy. My real Vassar education snuck up on me.

Love doesn’t always make sense. Now and again, the kind of striving love that makes the least sense—the moderate type-A and the hip-pie type-B, the pragmatic New Yorker and the weird liberal arts college—is the most unshakable.

So my Vassar education did teach me to strive after all. In a roundabout and ridiculous way that befits this roundabout and ridiculous place. And in a more purposeful, passionate way than anywhere else could have.

—Brian Farkas ’10 served as Vassar

Student Association Vice President for

Operations, Editor in Chief of The Mis-cellany News, and co-Chair of the Soph-

omore Class Gift and Senior Class Gift.

My senior year of high school, when I came out to the East

Coast from northern California to visit the colleges that had accepted me, I didn’t even visit Vassar. I had been accepted to what I thought was the school of my dreams, Barnard College; after visiting there and a few schools in Pennsylvania, I had a choice of wheth-er to spend a day in New York City, or drive up to visit Vassar. By that point, I had pretty much decided on Barnard, so I decided to skip the drive upstate and spend the day in the city.

It would very much surprise the 18-year-old me, then, to learn that I am now, at the age of 22, preparing to graduate from Vassar, after trans-ferring here from Barnard at the be-ginning of my sophomore year. As a place to spend three years, Vassar was certainly not without its problems—I don’t think anywhere is—but it ended up being a great place to go to college; I have loved spending my late nights below the stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings of the Library, walk-ing across the leaf-covered quad in the fall, and studying on weekday af-ternoons in the bizarre (but bizarrely comfortable) modern armchairs in Noyes House’s Jetson Lounge.

As a classics major, I’ve gotten a chance to take classes over and over with the same great professors in Vassar’s small Classics Department, which has been one of the best parts of my time here. When I arrived at Vassar, I knew I would major in classics; I had already discovered that I loved learning the grammar and literature of Latin and Ancient Greek. When anyone asked me the eternal liberal-arts-student question, though—“What are you going to

do with a classics major?”—my an-swer would be a shrug and an “ehh, maybe I’ll be a classics professor...” This was my answer, at the time, because it was it was one of the few ways I could answer that question without the asker—often a complete stranger—telling me that it might be more profitable to major in econom-ics. Now, though, I’m going on next year to a doctorate program in clas-sics, not because it’s the only option available, or even the most obvious option available, but because I have learned, through my classes at Vassar, that I want to keep studying ancient Greece and Rome for years to come.

Next year, when I’m in graduate school in Los Angeles, I will spend my time surrounded with people who are also passionate about study-ing the ancient world. What I have loved about Vassar, though, was be-ing surrounded by people who were just as passionate as me, but about completely different things. Wheth-er it’s feminism, or photography, or even—occasionally—sports, the people I have spent my time with at Vassar have been dedicated to a wide range of passions and pursuits. As a member of the Editorial Board of The

Miscellany News, I was surrounded by people who knew every official in Vassar’s administration and the inner workings of the student gov-ernment, and who spent their time investigating and writing in-depth articles making the changes our College was undergoing accessible and interesting to the Vassar com-munity. My own contributions to the Miscellany, as copy editor last year and senior and contributing editor this year, consisted mainly of mak-

ing sure that the paper never used an Oxford comma and cutting 900-word articles down to 700 words at 2 a.m. on Tuesday nights, so that everything would fit into our layout when we sent the paper to the publisher. I am proud, though, that I was part of the paper in the last three years, playing a role, however small, in recording a few important and tumultuous years in Vassar’s history, as the College re-sponded to the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s hard, really, to sum up my en-tire Vassar experience in a retrospec-tive of this length. Vassar, for me, has been far more than just my academics and the Miscellany. It has been, just as much, late nights sitting around and not doing homework with my house-mates in the living room of SoCo 6 or with my neighbors in the hallways of Noyes; it has been terrible meals in the All Campus Dining Center and delicious meals in my SoCo kitchen; it has been Sunday afternoons from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. knitting in Raymond Parlor with Knights of Commuknitty, the knitting group of which I was a member and sometimes-president. Beyond these moments and experi-ences, though, three years of college is hard to define in so many words. This, probably, is the way it should be—indefinable experiences are sim-ply more interesting. I can only hope, then, that as I move back to Califor-nia and enter graduate school and the “real world,” that there will be more equally good—and equally indefin-able—experiences to come.

—Caitlin Halasz is an outgoing

Contributing Editor of The Miscellany

News, and the former president of the

Knights of Commuknitty.

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Caitlin LyBrian Farkas

Caitlin Halasz



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I came to Vassar planning to double-major in drama and political science, take the

LSAT during my senior year, head to law school next fall and be a practicing attor-ney by the time I was 25. Along the way the poli-sci major fizzled to a passionless corre-late (culminating in its complete dissolution courtesy of the Registrar’s office last week), I took no LSATS, applied to no law schools, and am graduating with a bachelor’s degree in drama with no real life plan other than financial instability and artistic uncertainty. And I couldn’t be happier.

Such is the beauty of my Vassar education. I have been taught that what’s most important is for me to be able to look into the mirror each morning—at my bald head, grizzly beard, and (very, very cute) dimples—and be proud of the choices I have made. I have been taught to value passion over wealth and, as difficult as it might be to cope with the thought that I will never own a penthouse in lower-Manhattan, I’ve been sure to befriend a few econ majors along the way.

At Vassar I’ve had the opportunity to try many things: student government, carnival rides, star-gazing, math classes, dancing, writ-ing long papers, Jesus’s chili, to name several. I’ve realized that, though I like to do many things, there are only two things in the world that I love: food and theater. From winning the Big Sauce Challenge freshman year (and the odd combination of pride and embarrassment that came with seeing “Nate Silver Sauce” as a special in the Retreat), to chairing the Food Committee and helping the Aramark’s Chi-nese guest chefs make noodles my sophomore year, to writing a weekly food column for The Miscellany News and launching my very own catering company this fall, my College experi-

ence was fundamental in harnessing my pas-sion for cooking.

Falling in love with theater was unexpected, or at least, the extent to which I have made it a part of my life is. I came to theater relatively late in life, not having been in a play until I was 16, and though finding a college with a great theater program was part of my college search, it was not the most important factor. Twelve plays later I must say that theater has defined my college experience. I was told I had limited space for this retrospective, so after contem-plating how I could say all the things I want to say to the Vassar Drama Department in this column (my idea to write this whole thing in size 7.5 font didn’t fly), let me just say this: I have never worked harder, failed more miser-ably, been more proud or strived to be a better person more than I have under your guidance. I am grateful for every second I have spent in the Center for Drama and Film, and though I will miss Sunset Lake, the Library lawn and the outdoor amphitheater, it is on the floor of the drama building that my feet will have the hardest time getting used to not being.

Sentimentality aside, what Vassar has truly prepared me for is to begin a life beyond its walls. I have been given the tools I need, an unbreakable support structure if I fail, and a beautiful community of intellectuals to return to when I’m ready. Though the future remains delightfully uncertain, my Vassar education is my empowerment and, at least for now, when I look into the mirror each morning, I am proud of the man this college has made me.

—Nate Silver is a weekly columnist for The Miscellany News, the outgoing president of

Shakespeare Troupe and the former VSA Vice

President of Student Life.

Chloe McConnell“What will you miss most about Vas-

sar?” a friend’s father recently asked. I took a moment. The campus, the academics, the activities? I went with my friends; “Living in such a high concentration of 20- to 22-year-olds,” I responded. “I’ll nev-er again be surrounded by so many incred-ible people my age. All my closest friends live with a 15 minute radius.” To me, Vassar is about making meaningful connections: rela-tionships between people, parallels between classes, and analogies between academics and life-experiences. From frustrating days in the library freshman year to quirky eve-nings in senior housing, the past four years were absolutely extraordinary.

I started classes freshman year by mak-ing a pact with myself: that academics would always come first. I spent most days in the Library, but luckily had incredible friends in Cushing House to return to each evening. While I’ve stood by my academic goals, I eventually realized that the relationships made here are just as significant.

I joined The Miscellany News sophomore year and immediately developed great rela-tionships with my colleagues whilst work-ing through the grueling weekly production schedule. Being on the paper spurred an active engagement with the College’s inner workings. Learning about Vassar’s history, understanding the administration and track-ing current arts events fostered a deep re-spect for the institution.

After a diverting junior semester abroad in London, I wasn’t ready to return to the rigid Vassar schedule and the tiny campus. Mov-ing in to the new Town Houses, however, refreshed the school for me. I lived with ten girls who transformed from mere acquain-

tances to close friends by the semesters’ end. I met professors that challenged me and took courses that reformulated my interests. This continued into senior year, which has out-done the rest in terms of meaningful friend-ships and social excitement. I wrote two theses and took on new opportunities with a WVKR radio show. I fully immersed myself in Vassar’s peculiar social traditions, and I explored the beautiful campus. Even after walking the same paths thousands of times, I still gaped at the huge trees and magnificent buildings. Leaving this idyllic environment will definitely come as a shock.

I haven’t yet come to terms with leaving the place that has been my home for the past four years, but maybe I don’t have to. While my time on this campus will conclude on May 23, and the concentration of smart minds and affectionate hearts will disperse, I know that Vassar will stay with me. This somehow makes graduation and the thought of starting another chapter of my life a little less terrifying. Absorbing Vassar’s culture and ethos is inevitable. It will remain inside of me through all that I have learnt; it will remain around me through my continued friendships.

For the rest of my life, these past four years will persistently shape my character and thoughts. I want to say thank you to all my professors, friends and classmates. Thank you for building this unforgettable experience.

—Chloe McConnell an outgoing Contribut-

ing Editor of The Miscellany News and has

been involved in WVKR, Contrast, Fix, Vas-

sar Equestrian Team, VISA and Habitat for

Humanity.

Nate Silver



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This past fall I had the opportunity to talk with a number of alumnae/i about my ex-

perience here at Vassar. I was asked why I chose the school, what activities I was involved in, my favorite place on campus, and a number of other questions that were meant to detail my personal experience over the past four years. Toward the end of the conversation, I was asked the inevi-table: “So what is the campus climate really like right now?” It was about halfway through the fall semester, and at that point the situation wasn’t so great. Spirits were low, and students, faculty members, administrators and staff were all frus-trated. Words like “transparency” and “econom-ic downturn” had become part of everyday con-versations. And so, I was honest with the alums: The campus attitude was fairly negative, but not at all uninspiring. I had come to the conclusion that students were taking action, demanding the best resolutions from their administrators for one reason: Vassar students love this place.

For me, drawing this conclusion was a rev-elation of sorts that I had yet to recognize for some reason. I knew that if anyone asked me about my Vassar experience my automatic response would be: “It has been incredible. I love this place!” And yet for the first time I was really able to approach these sentiments as an observer. I watched my fellow students spend time organizing protests, making signs, creating videos, signing petitions, participating in ergathons and writing letters to the Miscel-

lany, showing their love for their academics, their professors and their staff members, all the while pushing those in charge to make the choices that were the best for the College.

These choices were anything but black and white, and I watched as peer institutions struggled through the same process. However, I couldn’t help but think that the situation at Vassar would always be better—our students just cared more. Despite the challenges that came the way of the College, students were still continuing with their academics and extracur-riculars. There were three-, even four-hour Vassar Student Association meetings, with stu-dents using the opportunity to make their voic-es heard. No opinion was deemed unimportant

and all were expressed in an effort to make the College a better place for its students.

Any Vassar student here both first and sec-ond semester will admit that the campus cli-mate took a dramatic turn after Winter Break , and students seemed to be much more pre-occupied in showing their love in more tradi-tional ways. Plays were sold out, a capella con-certs overwhelmingly attended, and the stands at men’s volleyball games (and even men and women’s lacrosse games) were overflowing. Students supported the events, their peers, their professors and their community love—everything from thesis presentations to read-ings by English professors and composition classes, to a local elementary school threat-ened by budget cuts.

By the end of spring semester, there is always the anticipation of what the next academic year will hold. From many of my fellow outgoing seniors I’ve heard concerns (and excitement) about changes that will come to Vassar next fall, and it’s been sad to watch their realization that they will no longer be a part of that im-mediate Vassar community. Yes, as the Alum-nae and Alumni Association of Vassar College will remind you, the seniors are becoming part of that vast network of Vassar alumnae/i, an exclusive club of sorts that is still allowed to come back once a year to celebrate Founder’s Day. But the experience won’t be the same, and our love for Vassar will be taking another form. We’ll be celebrating it whenever we see our friends in New York City or Asheville, N.C. or maybe even Alaska, writing about it through e-mails and Facebook posts, and reading about it whenever we catch a classmate’s name in a newspaper article, or even a byline. And most important, our love will be forever extended to those current students at Vassar through our faith in knowing that those already here are showing the same love that has made the past four years nothing less than incredible.

—Liz Pacheco is the current Student Assistant

to the President of the College, co-Captain of the

women’s lacrosse team and outgoing Contributing

Editor of The Miscellany News.

All the living rooms in the Town Hous-es (THs) look about the same: one

window, linoleum flooring, and—for some reason I don’t think I’ll ever understand—no lighting.

In an attempt to set our TH apart, my housemates and I called our living room “Florida” this year. Our striped orange couch, purple carpet, faux-glass patio table purchased at an estate sale, and indoor plants gave it this sort of tropical living facility vibe that made us feel not like se-niors as much as senior citizens.

Which is, of course, pretty funny con-sidering we’re all 21 and 22 years old. But anyone who has ever taken a poli-sci class can tell you that the spaces we occupy al-ter the activities we do in them and thus our identities. So it’s not totally impos-sible to believe that we’ve spent the past year acting a little like old people—excuse, me—active adults.

I’ve spent a good deal of time at Vassar doing the kinds of things that your grandpa does when he hangs out in his plastic patio furniture shouting about what everyone else is doing wrong. I’ve had the pleasure of writing for the Humor & Satire section and editing the Features section of The

Miscellany News —tasks that have required that I poke fun at everyone and everything at Vassar and take on a sort of weird pub-lic critic persona. At times I’ve felt a little like grandpa sitting there in his orthope-dic shoes shouting insults from the corner when all I really wanted to do was make everyone laugh.

And sometimes I felt like grandma too. I wrote the Humor and Satire section’s “Weekly Calendar,” a long-standing tradi-tion that dates back to the much-missed-but-not-forgotten Miscellany News Back-page, and includes a daily themed nod to the historic—if poorly attended—tea in the Rose Parlor. In fact, I’ve never actu-ally been to tea in the Rose Parlor for all the hours I’ve spent making fun of campus culture through it. Regardless, thinking

so much about tea in the Rose has some-times made me wonder whether although I physically appear 21, I might actually be a 70-year-old dandy sippin’ on Earl Grey in the Rose à la Benjamin Button.

The trick, I think, is to remember that we never actually have lived like AARP members. Vassar is a place where we’ve all tried on different ages for size. We’ve talked as if we’re in our mid-40s in an afternoon seminar one moment, and be-haved with the maturity level of toddlers at TH parties only hours later. Then we’ve felt like arthritic seniors again the morn-ing after.

And now we’re leaving the retirement community, ditching the faux glass table aesthetic, and won’t return for another 50 years. We’re retiring from retirement. Or something.

Everyone’s been bellyaching about how hard it is to sum up four years at Vassar especially as we’re clinging to it the way Leo clung to that piece of wood in Titanic, but I have to admit that I can sum up my Vassar education: I’ve learned to be open here. Vassar and the friends and profes-sors I’ve had here have helped me to see why things are interesting and to see why they’re funny.

I’m so grateful to Vassar because I’m cu-rious and open, and I know it’s because I went here. The secret, I’ve learned, to be-ing a critic, is not only to be—hopefully—interesting, but interested. Which brings me to the point of this retrospective: The great thing about not actually being an old dog is that we can still learn new tricks.

So until the day I actually join the AARP, goodbye “Florida,” goodbye patio furniture, goodbye Vassar and goodbye tea in the Rose! I’m ready to come out of re-tirement, and I’m ready to try out my new tricks.

—Kelly Stout is the outgoing Features Ed-

itor of The Miscellany News and was Presi-

dent of the Vassar Democrats in 2008.

Dear Vassar,Over the past four years, I have learned,

experienced and felt so much that I don’t know where to start; I’m also not eloquent enough to put it all together in a beautifully written essay. So I thought I’d take your “goals for every stu-dent” from the catalogue—because I’m prob-ably one of the few people that actually read the front part—and use it as an exit checklist. Here goes!

1. “Achievement of depth and range of knowl-edge in a single discipline or in a subject ap-proached through several disciplines.”

Okay, I’ll agree with that. I came in with the intention of being a biology major, declared the first week of sophomore year and never looked back. Sure, I tried to see if there was anything else I felt as passionate about—astronomy, education, psychology, music, languages—but I just couldn’t find anything. Thank you for let-ting me pursue a well-rounded education; I can now go, “Ha!” at universities that have a dozen or so requirements for their students. My love for the Vassar curriculum is mainly due to the amazing faculty employed at the institution. Most, if not all, of my professors, have been so excited about their area of study and so eager to share not only their academic knowledge,

but also their life experiences, with their stu-dents. Being at a small school allows these re-lationships and truly does motivate you within the classroom.

2. “Recognition of the different kinds of knowledge and their scope and relevance to one another…[such as] between people and their social and physical environment.”

Oh, Vassar. When I first drove through Main Gate that rainy Sunday, little did I know that the terms “heteronormative,” “awkward,” “gender-neutral” and “Nilda” would become integral parts of my vocabulary. Or that skinny jeans and flannel would become integrals parts of my wardrobe. (Well, not mine, but other people’s. You know who you are.) As for the physical en-vironment, little did I know that finding people running/walking naked through the Library was acceptable, and even expected, twice a year. Or that where one lived on-campus carried an incredibly high degree of house pride (GO STRONG!) and house stigma, and that one con-tributed to it whether one was aware of it or not.

3. “Immediate experience of creative ideas, works of art and scientific discoveries.”

Definitely got my dose of all three, even if didn’t understand what was going on (which, as an extremely creatively challenged person, was

most of the time when it came experiencing the first two). I’ll freely admit that I’ve sat through plays and stood in front of works of art, not re-ally getting the artist’s “message,” but I came to appreciate the time, energy and love that went into it. Hey, I find beauty in a good recrystal-lization, so to each their own.

4. “Development of the powers of reason and imagination through the processes of analysis and synthesis.”

I’ve learned that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and that I don’t have to agree! You know how in high school, it was “cool” to go with the majority (even if that meant think-ing Edward Cullen was the hottest thing on the face of the planet)? Here, I could tell someone that I completely disagreed with something they said (and counter with something like, “I think Jacob Black is the hottest thing on the face of the planet”), back it up (“Edward sparkles like a girly-man; how is that hot?”), and continue in an intellectually stimulating debate (“What-ever, Bella doesn’t deserve either of them, she’s just an angsty whiner”) without fear of being labeled “uncool.” Being at a liberal school re-ally does force you, for better or worse, to open up your mind to all possibilities pertaining to life, and I’ve come to appreciate how my mind

has changed since freshman year. So, Vassar, you’ve done good. I knew you

wouldn’t let me down (just like my parents, who never cease to tell me how my four years better have been worth every penny, knew you wouldn’t). You’ve introduced me to some of the most amazing people I know and who I can’t imagine my life without, and opened up my mind in so many different ways that it would be hard to quantify. You’ve helped me grow into an independent and confident person, ready to take on the world. Well, not the real one—the medical school one. Real world, get ready. I shall take you on in about four years, up to my eyeballs in student loans and lost hours of sleep. Because if there’s anything Vassar has taught me, it is to never be afraid of taking on challenges, even if you have no idea how you’re going to do it.

Love,Alyssa

—Alyssa Alcasabas Pabalan is the outgoing

Student Assistant to the President of the College

and Senior Career Assistant in the Career De-

velopment Office. She will be graduating with a

degree in biology.

Kelly Stout Liz Pacheco

Alyssa Alcasabas Pabalan



I called home a lot during my first week of classes at Vassar. I could not believe

the workload. On the second day of my In-troduction to Sociology class, the profes-sor assigned a book and a five to seven page paper on that book, due the following Tuesday. It was Thursday. I couldn’t be-lieve it. On Monday night I called home and talked to my dad and, panicked, told him I wasn’t prepared for this college. I was go-ing to fail my first assignment. I was already overwhelmed, and I wanted to go home.

I wrote that paper, though. I think it was on C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. If I remember correctly, that book was dense. I sprawled on my bed on the fourth floor of Josselyn on Sunday night, making my first real attempt at “annotating”—which at that point mostly consisted of a lot of question marks and notes like “come back to this????” And then on Monday night I sat, at the last chair in the long table on the first floor right-hand side, typing at my computer until the bells chimed at 1, and then 1:25, in the morning. When I handed in my essay the next day, I felt so triumphant, so ready. Maybe I could figure this out after all.

I’m grateful to Vassar and to my professors for giving me the time I needed to figure it all out. I came to Poughkeepsie from a small town in southern Vermont, and at first Vassar just felt like too much to me. I could study things that interested me (like hip-hop—in college!), do things without asking anyone’s permission (like climbing the scaffolding on Main Build-ing to the roof at 3 a.m.! That was dumb.); yeah, I could generally fuck around and get away with it. Over the years that freedom has felt alternately delightful and terrifying. The delight, of course, is easily targeted: we’re in a beautiful place, surrounded by people we have grown to love, learning as much as we can, and after a while here it has come to feel a lot like home.

The terror is more difficult to place, but I think it has to do with an excess of comfort. When everything is going fairly smoothly, when your biggest concern is writing an essay or getting through a tragically boring sociol-ogy book, I think it all starts to feel too static. And at a certain age and maturity, stability—or perhaps more accurately, boredom—can be horrifying. I really miss that shock I felt in my

first few weeks at Vassar and into the spring of my freshman year, when every idea I en-countered was not just new, but also challeng-ing and confusing for me. Once I settled into the routine here, and realized I was capable of keeping up with the college workload, maybe I got too comfortable. I do know that I called home a lot less.

The thing is, though—discomfort isn’t al-ways assigned. It’s a lot more than struggling through a 300-page book and an essay. It’s hard to point out moments of growth or change over the course of four years, but I know that mine came when things got harder for me. I remem-ber a class midway through Assistant Profes-sor of English Kiese Laymon’s James Baldwin course in spring of my sophomore year, when half of the students were in tears by the end of the session because our conversations about Baldwin’s work and our own lives had become so emotional and difficult to talk through. I re-member the first time I really got away from campus, when I went to work at a community center in the spring of my freshman year, and realized that the theory I’d been consuming so rapidly didn’t always apply to real life. I

remember reporting for the Miscellany earlier this year, holding my voice recorder out in a crowded hallway in Rockefeller Hall as a for-mer staff member confronted President Hill about job cuts. In those moments, Vassar got hard again, and I felt pretty helpless.

In four years here I’ve learned to write pa-pers under stress and to read books in under two or three days and to meet deadlines (or at least master the art of extending them), but I’m still a pretty clueless, naïve young kid. I am still quite unprepared and overwhelmed by it all—especially the murky expanse of time that lies ahead after May 23—and I think that’s something to embrace. I hope Vassar students will do the same: wiggle your way out of that static consistency, if you ever feel it, and do something that makes you feel like you want to call home. It’s nice to feel grown up, but we are still kids, after all.

—Emma Carmichael is the outgoing presi-

dent of Hip-Hop 101, served as the Town Stu-

dents Representative to the VSA in Spring 2009

and served as the Features Editor of The Mis-cellany News in the fall 2009.

I came to Vassar on a whim. No, really. I applied here because Vassar would give

me the option to study the subjects I was interested in, because I thought it would be cool to live in New York (even though I’d never been farther north than Missouri,) and because I liked the name. My dad and I were touring colleges and universities in Philadel-phia when my mom called me to say, “You just got a big letter from Vassar College. Should I open it?” She read the acceptance letter to me and told me she was proud of me. My dad asked if I wanted to go see the place. So we took a four-hour side-trip up to Poughkeepsie. It was during Vassar’s Spring Break, and we’d come unannounced, so there weren’t any tour guides available to show us the campus. We wandered around in a warm downpour, com-paring Vassar to the schools I had visited in my search for the perfect school. Less urban than the schools I had seen in Philadelphia. Less uptight than the schools I’d visited in Ar-kansas. Less of a swamp than the schools I’d toured in Florida.

My dad and I drove back to Philadelphia, and he dropped me off at the airport so I could catch a plane back to Hot Springs, Ark. I spent a great deal of the next week or so sitting on the floor of my dorm room at boarding school with admissions brochures from the colleges and universities that had accepted me and a legal pad filled with lists of pros and cons and headed with acceptance deadlines. I was nearly to the point that I was going to have to just throw the brochures in the air and pick the school that landed on top. I closed my eyes and recalled my walking tours of several campuses, and in what may be one of the rash-est decisions I’ve ever made in my life, having never stayed overnight as a prospective stu-dent, nor sat in on a class, nor even spoken with a current student, that day I thought, “Yeah, I can see myself at Vassar.”

A lot of the things I’ve done on whims or without much careful forethought since com-ing to Vassar have worked out surprisingly well. Freshman year, in a moment of little-sister vindictiveness, I signed up for the row-ing team. (Anything my big sister can do, I can do better, right?) I can’t count the number of

times I wondered what I’d gotten myself into, but my teammates kept me coming back, and four years later, that whim was justified when my boat got a gold medal at the nation’s larg-est collegiate regatta. (Sorry, I can’t help but mention it; I’m still coming down from that high, and my friends have told me I need to brag about it more.) My sophomore year whim came from a panic-stricken moment when I realized I was half a credit short of be-ing a full-time student one semester and hast-ily added Stagecraft. Not only did I absolutely love the course, I left it with two work-study job offers. I took a job in the scene shop, work-ing for Technical Director Paul O’Connor, who let us play kickball and play with power tools and cut out tiny giraffes with band saws, who told the best stories and who didn’t mind that I treated him more like a big brother than an employer. At the end of sophomore year, my next whim was to declare a double major in psychology and cognitive science, even though I was kind of advised against it due to a potentially frustrating amount of overlap. That ended up not working out so well, mostly due to my inability to be decisive when it came to crunch time for the cognitive science thesis, and I ended up dropping the cognitive science major so I could still retain at least a little bit of my sanity—but hey, I learned something about myself, so it wasn’t a total loss. My big whim at the end of my junior year was to run for president of the South Commons because it didn’t look like anyone else was going to do it. While I ended up maybe not being the most effective or inspiring leader, I did get to learn more about how best to work with people (figuring out quickly that I needed to include a “too long; didn’t read” option on important e-mails). My big whim for this year will come when I decide what to do with my life after graduation. As I’m writing this, I have no idea what I’m doing in the fall, and my decision strategy might be to play “employment rou-lette,” but I’m hoping my whims will continue to work for me.

—Nicole Clark is the outgoing South Com-

mons President and is a member of the Vassar

College Rowing Team.

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I’m sitting at the long center table on the right side of the Library in the middle

of finals week. Within the past two days here, I’ve witnessed stress and exhaustion-induced craziness ranging from Red Bull chugging contests to a capella concerts, with a little bit of studying squeezed in between. I could recite all of the selling points of this space that I’ve ingrained into my memory from years as a tour guide, such as the Goth-ic-style architecture, the Flemish tapestries or the stained glass portrait of Lady Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia. However, these facts definitely don’t convey to prospective students the atmosphere in the Library dur-ing finals, just like it’s impossible to truly know Vassar until you get here and experi-ence it for yourself.

As the first person from my high school to attend Vassar in several years, I had no idea what to expect. I’d already mentally pre-pared myself for the frigid winters and had decided early that I would use my Southern charm to make new friends, since I knew absolutely nobody. Although I had told ev-eryone in Nashville that I couldn’t wait for a “fresh start,” I worried, as move-in day crept closer, that I had gone a little too far with this decision.

Four years later, I couldn’t be happier. I honestly believe that my “why not?” at-titude from freshman year has shaped my Vassar experience in the best ways pos-sible. I remember impulsively deciding to run for freshman class secretary within the first weeks of school for the sole reason of meeting new people. When I won, I had un-knowingly discovered an activity that would follow me throughout most of my Vassar ca-reer. The Vassar Student Association (VSA) was the ideal outlet for someone like me who wanted to be involved in every part of campus life. Whether it’s the Committee on College Life, Drug and Alcohol Education Committee or the Judicial Board, if you have an opinion here, there are plenty of outlets to make yourself heard.

I remember at the end of freshman year (clearly still riding high from first-year-of-college enthusiasm) Selina, Lucy and I de-

cided to start a style magazine at Vassar in hopes of celebrating the cool, eclectic and creative students here. We clearly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, having no magazine experience whatsoever and even less authority on “style.” I just re-member standing in front of the VSA budget meeting, as a meek little freshmen, telling the Executive Board that we needed a bud-get of “approximately $30,000” in order to start our magazine. We could hear the group laughing at us before we even shut the door to the meeting room. Despite minor setbacks such as this one, my “why not?” attitude from freshman year is still going strong.

After eight semesters here, I’ve found that this mentality is inherent in every Vassar student and has seeped into almost every aspect of life here. Whether it’s taking 100 level art history classes your senior year, exchanging your Thursday Dutch routine for Late Night at the Loeb or taking a day to check out the Dia Beacon, exploration and experimentation are defining factors at Vas-sar. Sometimes it takes stepping outside of the College’s gates to really appreciate the value of the Vassar experience.

In my TH, we have a poster hanging in our kitchen that says, “Nobody wishes they got more sleep in college.” While this may sound crazy—who at Vassar consistently feels well-rested, anyway?—it really does ring true. Looking back on my college expe-rience, it’s the nighttime chats with friends, the hours-long procrastination sessions at the ACDC, and the random daily occurrenc-es that shape a college experience. Although the classroom lectures and discussions are great for intellectual development, four years at Vassar constitutes much more than that. So even though everyone sitting in the Library with me has tons of work to do, I’m glad we are all able to take a little break and appreciate the Redbull contests and musical entertainment that I know we’ll miss very soon.

-Liza Darwin is the co-founder of Contrast,

a 2010 representative of the Judicial Board and

a member of Senior Class Council.

Liza Darwin Nicole Clark

Emma Carmichael



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As of this writing, I have just turned in my second thesis.

Normally students are happy to turn in their senior project; I am ec-static. Now I can actually grasp the fact that my time at Vassar is end-ing. People always say that college graduation is a major point in your life. I think they are correct. I have learned so much during my time at Vassar and I will be sorry to leave.

I remember opening my accep-tance letter to Vassar and thinking, “That’s where Jackie Onassis went!” I was thrilled to go to a school with a big name, beautiful landscape and amazing traditions. For some rea-son, I thought Vassar would be the finishing school that it used to be. Was I wrong...

My first few weeks at Vassar sped by. A few key moments stand out: the first time I saw a squirrel take a muffin up a tree, my first Nilda’s, the first sip of chocolate milk at the All Campus Dining Center, the first time I got lost in the basement of the library...As I realized I was finally away from home for good, I remember think-ing “Why am I here? I don’t fit in. This is not what I signed up for.” Conservative me was terrified by the stark openness everyone exhib-ited. As I walked to class in makeup and heels, everywhere I turned I saw crazy outfits, Birkenstocks and sweatpants. Vassar was a long way from home. I was worried that I would lose myself in an effort to be politically correct and to fit in.

Looking back, I feel like I do fit in. Everyone seems to fit in. What I

know now that I didn’t then is that it doesn’t matter how different you are. Vassar didn’t change, but I feel at home. I changed, and I changed for the better. Yes, I will always con-sider myself conservative on Vas-sar’s campus, but my mind is open to new possibilities. Vassar has taught me to appreciate the differences in new things, people and places. I am still my old self with the same morals, manners and confidence, but I am an improved version. Had I chosen to attend another school, I really do not know if I would be the same person that I am today.

College is supposed to be the most fun time of your life. After the days of cramming for exams, do-ing projects and reading countless books, I can leave Vassar knowing that I have also gained amazing friendships. Four years away from home would have been horrible without my friends. I only wish that they could all come with me after graduation. I can honestly say that I have learned as much from them as I have from my academic work. Leaving them will be just as difficult as leaving Vassar itself.

So as I accept my diploma, I will be happy that I made it through these past four years and came out a better person. I will be forever grateful for all of the help I received from faculty members and friends. I will be a Vassar College grad. Fi-nally.

—Shannon Wilton is the outgoing

Editor in Chief of the Vassarion and is

the coordinator of the Daisy Chain.

Chocolate syrup. Somehow these two words have found

themselves wedged into almost ev-ery aspect of my time here at Vassar. Chocolate syrup reminds me of the first time I e-mailed my freshman year roommate, who loves choco-late syrup. I hate chocolate syrup, and this is just one example of the many ways in which we are total op-posites but soul mates all the same. My time at Vassar never would have been the same without her.

Chocolate syrup reminds me ever so lovingly of the hours I spent “fry-ing like bacon,” singing as loudly as I could, and getting syrup, amongst many other condiments thrown at me by seniors whom I revered as gods at the time. The bonds that come from dancing and singing with a group of 18-year-olds who have never lived on their own can-not easily be broken. Still today I pass my fellow Lathropians and give a nod or a smile, recognizing that only a select group of us could re-ally know what it’s like to hold your “L’s up” for about eight hours on a 90-degree day in September, scared to death but smiling and laughing all the same. Chocolate syrup is what we allegedly washed off in the Main House bathrooms after serenading freshman year, after getting a heart breaking second place when really, we deserved first.

Chocolate syrup reminds me of every dinner I ate at All Campus Dining Center during my freshmen and sophomore years with the same core group of people with whom I still eat almost every meal. It re-

minds me of the fact that I probably ate things that involved chocolate syrup, again, which I hate, out of pure desperation and the desire for that feeling of full you get when you eat something you actually enjoyed.

Chocolate syrup reminds me of going abroad for three and half months. Living in a foreign country made me miss things I knew I hated, but that still reminded me of home. Chocolate syrup, McDonald’s, cof-fee, refrigerated eggs and chicken fingers—all things you never cared about or noticed until you’re eat-ing pieces of ham, lukewarm hard boiled eggs and Nescafe for break-fast every morning at random hotels throughout the Mediterranean.

The stickiness of chocolate syrup reminds me of the various degrees of disgust I found myself feeling while surveying my living room second semester junior year on almost ev-ery Sunday morning, being respon-sible for keeping my house clean for the very first time, and questioning exactly how at the party the night before someone had managed to get that all the way up there.

Chocolate syrup was a key ingre-dient in my “water” gun first semes-ter senior year when I finally got to be the cool kid and cheered on the Lathrop freshmen while also soak-ing them with the “water” in my gun, jug and carafe that I grabbed after finally deciding that a “water only” serenading could in fact be fun and filled with more than water.

Chocolate syrup reminds me of the initial awkwardness and then the following understanding that

comes from five girls with very dif-ferent taste having to figure out how to divide the fridge, buy groceries together and separately and com-bine our efforts to create a clean, functional kitchen.

In all, chocolate syrup has been a surprisingly large part of my time at Vassar. But so have a lot of other things. I can’t imagine life without my freshmen year roommate, who never fails to drive me crazy. She will go on to do bigger things than she could ever realize, and watching that process takes my breath away. My friends from Lathrop, whom I’ve been lucky enough to keep since freshman year, have been my sup-port system through everything I’ve done and gone through at Vassar. They have touched my life in ways I will never remember, and in ways I’m scared to hope for again. The boys next door have made me laugh, cry and learn how to fight back. The unexpected connection I have with them is something I will keep close to my heart for a long time. All these people and events, along with chocolate syrup, have shaped my time here at Vassar and have made it into this intangible feeling that I am grasping onto for dear life. I’m ready to move on, but hopefully I’ll have a little chocolate syrup in my future to bring me back to a place where I can honestly say I became who I want to be, to a place I will never forget.

—Elizabeth Jordan is the outgo-

ing Online Editor of The Miscellany News.

Shannon Wilton Liz Jordan



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Graduation. It seems strange to talk about that word now as I sit here, one week before

I will be participating in what seems like a day I’ve prepared for my entire life. Through grade school and high school, we were instructed and encouraged to do well in our classes, be involved in community work and produce an all around persona that would eventually get us into a great college. As we approach graduation, I’m realiz-ing more and more that it seems like, until this moment, everything has been in preparation for the completion of our college education and now, as we near the end, I find myself asking: Now what?

In order to not completely diminish our di-rection and enthusiasm for the future, the truth is that the lot of us have certainly approached our college educations as a medium through which we can move on to great careers, further research or education opportunities or simply a life guided by the knowledge and experience of a liberal arts education. Having experienced Vassar and all it has to offer, I leave here with the fabulous sensation of knowing that, while a comfortable and familiar place, Vassar has made me ready to go because of its effectiveness as an institution of learning and a place that prepares its students to do great things.

As I look back at my four years here, my first thoughts are about how much I’ve changed, how my professors, friends and mentors have altered the way I think about things and mostly how I think about myself. I remember enter-ing the gates of Vassar in 2006 with expecta-tions that seemed inflated and idealistic and I am leaving here having met all of them and exceeded most.

It’s hard to condense what it has been like to be a Vassar student into so many words as the experiences are numerous and the lessons often unexplainable. I can say this, however: Vassar has taught me how to think. I learned some-where around the second semester of my soph-

omore year that I don’t have to believe every theory or article my professor presents to me or adhere to the opinion of the most aggressive stu-dent in class. Rather, I learned that these things were there as challenges to my own imagination and channels through which I had the luxury of deciding for myself what I was going to think about and take from each individual experience. I learned that not until you know what you’re confident about and have sufficient evidence or cause to believe in it should you begin to try and convince others of it. I learned that thinking, and thinking well, can get you anywhere.

As I approach my final days here, I think of the 34 credits I’ve earned across numerous disci-plines ranging from women’s studies to econom-ics and American Sign Language to Proto-Indo European linguistics and feel as if I’ve been filled by the knowledge of how to engage, how to ex-plore and how to grow.

What comes next? Well, specifically, jobs, graduate school, time off, exploration and fel-lowships, etc, but in the more general sense, who really knows? On May 23, we will be set-ting out from the gates of Vassar and be have our knowledge and skills put to the test in making this world what we want it to be and in using our education to change realities and develop new ideas. So when all along we were prepar-ing for college with an uncertainty as to what would come next, my feeling is that there was no way for anyone to inform us on or prepare us for that part. We’ve finally reached the point where we’re in control of the “what comes next,” and I truly believe we’ve all been sufficiently prepared to depart and find greatness.

My best wishes to the Class of 2010, and may we all contribute a little of what we’ve learned within these walls to the betterment of what awaits us outside of them.

—Brook Widman is the outgoing President of

Habitat for Humanity.

I can comfortably and definitively say that my time at Vassar has defined who I am as

a person. I have never before been in a place filled with so many engaged, brilliant and beautiful people. My experiences here have been entirely shaped by my peers, and as I look toward graduation, I know that what I am going to miss most about Vassar is not meal plans, senior housing or the amazing campus, but the presence and proximity of over 2,000 impassioned people.

Vassar students are incredibly involved. For the last three years I have served as an officer of Vassar College’s Emergency Medi-cal Services (VCEMS), and this past year I was given the privilege of being named cap-tain. Being an EMT on campus has given me the opportunity to interact with many Vas-sar students at some of their most vulner-able moments. Despite the circumstances, I have always been struck by how deeply caring and concerned Vassar students are for one another. Regardless of the severity of the situation, Vassar students are always extremely supportive of and concerned about their classmates. On many occasions, friends of sick students have debated over who is going to accompany their ailing companion to the hospital because they all wanted so badly to show their support in a time of need.

VCEMS’s volunteer EMTs give their valu-able time on nights and weekends to help serve their community—time they could spend relaxing, studying or partying with their friends. I can’t speak highly enough about this wonderful group, over 50 of them volunteering to literally spring into action at a moment’s notice in the service of their community. Despite their great service, Vas-sar’s EMTs are just one example of students going out of their way to better the commu-nity they live in.

Vassar students are diverse in their inter-ests and are experts at combining various fields of study to create new, exciting ways to approach problems. In addition to being an EMT, I am a drama major with a focus in lighting and set design. For me, this area of study has been the perfect liberal arts ex-perience. I’ve had the amazing opportunity to collaborate with my peers to create ex-citing and engaging works of art. Once we have completed the artistic and conceptual work, I spend countless hours on a com-puter drafting program, doing calculations and drafting in order to turn artistic ideas into an architectural and mechanical real-ity. For me, Vassar students’ ability to move between the artistic and the technical, the qualitative and the quantitative, has come to typify a liberal arts education.

I know that after I graduate what is re-ally going to stick with me are not classes, lectures or special events, but the fleeting moments of beauty and amazement that my classmates and I have encountered together. To me, it’s always been the little things that count. I will never forget my assignment to watch and observe the sunrise (twice!) with my lighting design class, epic spur of the moment hikes on the Farm, watching a hot air balloon land across Hooker Avenue, deciding to go bike jousting with friends during parents’ weekend, watching aster-oid showers from the Earth circle, being on call with EMS during Founder’s Day, biking around Poughkeepsie with my sculpture class, or venturing out into snow storms to sled down sunset hill. More than anything else, it is these moments of companionship, togetherness and beauty that will define my time at Vassar.

—Mike Faba is the outgoing Captain of the

Vassar College Emergency Medical Services.

Brooke Widman Mike Faba



I first heard about Vassar when a recent gradu-ate from my high school decided to attend.

This particular alum was quite impressive aca-demically, so I added Vassar College to my long list of reaches, maybes and safeties. I was a ris-ing senior and thought it was normal to apply to thirteen schools. I didn’t yet have a specific image in my head of what “college” meant to me, so I applied with a vengeance. Hell, I just wanted to get in somewhere. When it came down to it, I was choosing between Colby College and New York University. I was wait-listed at Vassar, and proud of it, but I didn’t expect anything to come of it. So I visited my two options and chose to spend the next four years of my life in “the City,” as I’ve since come to call it.

I was driving home from school one day in early May 2006 when my father called and told me to hurry for some unexplained reason. I as-sumed the worst and sped through the serpen-tine streets of my town. After I sprinted up the stairs to my house, my dad told me that I had gotten a call from Vassar, which I had since vis-ited and learned to love. I called the number that he had taken down, and the faceless voice that answered told me that there was an avail-able spot in the Class of 2010, and that it was mine if I wanted it. I asked her if I could call her back with my answer, and she gave me 48 hours. Within five minutes I was hitting myself for not having accepted the offer immediately. I twiddled my thumbs and feigned patience for as long as I could bear it, and finally redialed the admissions officer’s extension and told her that I would love to go to Vassar and thanked her profusely for the opportunity.

Here I sit, almost exactly four years after that phone call. I’ve spent the past few weeks (read: months) fighting off a case of acute senioritis. I wrote the longest paper that I’ve ever written this semester, and it’s in Spanish to boot. I just turned in the last academic essay of my college career—perhaps, even, the last one of my life.

In fact, this retrospective is all I have left to do in the nine days that separate me from my di-ploma. As I prepare for life outside the bubble, I’m beginning to realize just how fortunate I am to have lived inside it for so long. I’ve had the opportunity to play many roles in my years at Vassar, both literally and figuratively. In the same year, I joined the Cushing House Team and The Vastards—planning dorm events with one group of peers and singing ’80s and ’90s pop songs another—and I performed in two student-directed plays. I declared a concentration in His-panic studies and recently added a correlate in linguistic anthropology. So naturally, I’ve decid-ed to pursue acting after graduation. That’s the great thing about a Vassar education, though: We receive such all-encompassing preparation for the enigmatic “real world” that no career is outside of our collective potential.

I guess I have some people that I should thank for making my Vassar experience invaluable. To my fellow Cushing Two East fellowees, thank you for making me feel at home from the very start. To my parents, thank you for your endless support (both financial and the more important kind). To my professors, thank you for demand-ing that I pull many an all-nighter while scram-bling to complete your assignments: They were well worth it.

To all of the friends and acquaintances that I’ve made along the way, you’ve taught me as much as my professors have, and I am eternally grateful for that. To the faceless voice, wher-ever you are, I think I’m in love with you. You brought me to this wonderful place, a place I think I’ll have a pretty hard time leaving. I feel that I can only hope to repay you with the ways I use my Vassar education in the future. I promise to do my best to do some good. And for those of you about to graduate, I salute you. Display that diploma proudly.

—Sam Fleming is a member of Vastards.

The sun setting at 4:30 in the afternoon is really a bummer. That was one of the first

things I learned my freshmen year. I didn’t like this place very much at first. It was very cold and very dark, and I couldn’t find anything to eat in ACDC besides chicken wraps and cheese-burgers. I was overwhelmed by new “friends,” people you were suddenly intimately close to—sharing a living space, sharing a bathroom—but who you did not know any real thing about. I felt surrounded and isolated all at once, and it was a feeling I didn’t quite know how to deal with. I wanted friends, and I wanted privacy. I wanted to be left alone, but I wanted someone to knock on my door. This tension I encountered in my new world was one I would learn to balance throughout my Vassar experience, socially, per-sonally, intellectually, etc.; I was in a place where there was seemingly infinite possibilities—what to learn, where to go, who to know, what to play—which is at once thrilling and terrifying. Despite its dark beginnings, however, my Vassar experience has proved to be undoubtedly a thrill.

Those friends I fumbled so awkwardly with at the beginning are now my best teachers and my closest allies. The cockiness of experience that came with sophomore year united us—we knew this place now, and we knew each other. I learned what it meant to have and to be a “good friend.” At Vassar, your friends can be everything; you can grapple with an intellectual question while playing beer pong—a seamless integration of sport, smarts and fun. Vassar stu-dents, our friends, taught me the depth of what “being a friend” can, and ideally should, mean. The responsibility, patience, trust and love that are so integral to any relationship came to the fore as we were placed in the hectic social scene that is college and struggled with the subse-quent suffocation and ironic isolation. The bal-ance emerged in friendships deeper and stron-ger than I could have ever imagined on our rainy move-in day freshman year, and will undoubt-edly be what stays with me as we all leave this place together.

These friends were also companions—part-ners on the excellent adventure that is life at

Vassar. Time at Vassar offers endless opportuni-ties for exploration. On campus, in Poughkeep-sie and across the world, Vassar enabled me to explore, play and learn. What was never in ques-tion for me at Vassar is the beauty and wisdom of this physical place. Stomping around this campus for four years lead me into open spaces of play, secret nooks for prayer, sun-filled attic rooms, rooms of intense learning and on and on. Vassar’s campus is one that teaches by its presence, where you realize that the buildings themselves can instruct you as much on space, structure and beauty as any lecture. There are trees here that you can disappear into for a day, discovering a veritable home in their branches. Climbing these trees, finding these attics, filling these spaces with fellow adventurers are some of the strongest and happiest memories I have, and remind me to keep exploring, wherever I go.

Where will I go? That is the next question, the next step. Again I am (we are) faced with something simultaneously terrifying and thrill-ing. What’s exciting is that we know what to do now. Vassar is a place where we learned how to be in the world, where we learned how to keep on learning. Now, with new confidence, we can recall the awkwardness of freshman year and get through the awkwardness of our next “first day.” We can remember the inflated ego, the wise and foolish sophomore attitude, and carry confidence without forgetting a sense of humility into our endeavors. And, as junior year taught us, we can endeavor whatever we please, make places that seem foreign, whether across the world or across the street, seem like home, knowing that the friendships and place that has supported us so far remains supportive, no mat-ter how removed we may feel. Finally, hopefully, we have learned too to take those moments of pause, to appreciate the trees we walk by every-day, so that at the end, we feel sense of comple-tion, dare I say a bit of wisdom, as we, as seniors, as graduates, pack up our Vassar lives, and look, rain or shine, to the next move-in day.

—Riley Greene is the outgoing Town Houses

President.

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Sitting down trying to write this reflection was possibly the hardest assignment that I

have been given during my four years at Vassar because it forced me to grapple with all of my accomplishments, heartaches and disappoint-ments throughout my time here, all while try-ing to do them all justice in a mere 800 words or fewer. After seeing 27 schools and being part of an extremely insular high school graduating class of 35 women, I pretty much did everything in my power to make August 18, 2006 come as quickly as possible because in my mind, that day marked my freedom. I thought that Vassar was the greatest place on earth because I only had to go to about two classes a day and make it to rugby practice by 3:30 p.m. I quickly realized, though, that Vassar provides its students with “free time” so that they will take full advantage of the clubs, orgs, intramurals, teams and posi-tions that not only make the school successful, but its students post-graduation as well.

After bouncing around between three dorms, quitting the rugby team and not really knowing what the purpose of a student fellow was, by the end of freshman year I was a bit dazed and con-fused to say the least. Knowing that I came to Vassar to define my creative and analytic skills as well as immerse myself in the eye-opening experiences that my sheltered upbringing could not provide me with, I applied for the position of house fellow intern. I owe most of my happi-ness and success at Vassar to House Advisor and Assistant Director of Campus Activities Jocelyn Tejeda who went to bat for me and provided me with the opportunity to be a part of the Jewett House Team the following year.

Aside from becoming an expert slice and bake cookie maker, I got to work closely with Assistant Professors of English Eve Dunbar and Kiese Laymon to put together activities such as the “Gnome Game,” a personal favorite, and the Seven Deadly Sins study break where we analyzed Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” which is always a pleasure. However, what I re-ally learned that year was that all of the profes-sors at this school have extraordinary stories and histories that not only contribute to the suc-cessful standing of the school but to the creation of a well-informed, intellectually curious, and profoundly creative student body that is more

than prepared to take on the challenges of the “real world.”

My junior year I served as the Jewett House student sdvisor. Between the 3 a.m. phone calls from panicked student fellows and 6 a.m. study sessions that were always interrupted by the birds’ chirping, I could not have gotten through serving as student advisor without Batia Epel-baum, who has become a great mentor and friend. Through all of these activities, as well as my position this year as the Class of 2010 representative to the Committee on College Life, I have become very closely acquainted with the inner workings of our school, and al-though there are things that I would still like to change, I can’t imagine a place where I could have learned more about myself than I did at Vassar. I finally figured out what a media stud-ies major is and does (sort of) and grew to real-ize that I could learn something from each and every one of my peers. Every day I found myself in awe and inspired by my friends who were All-Americans, started their own companies or had their films shown at festivals around the world, and I wouldn’t have wanted to spend the past four years amongst any other group of people. Although there has been an inevitable ebb and flow of good and bad times, I have found a group of friends that I will be in touch with forever, and I have been given the tools to succeed in the unfamiliar post-graduation life.

Thank you Vassar for always pushing me. Sometimes the pushes made me cry, which was especially embarrassing during office hours, but they were always for the better.

To my friends along the way: Thank you for eating Bacios’s mushroom and olive pizza cov-ered in ranch with me, for the dance parties to trashy songs that never seem to end, being there for me during all-nighters in New Hackensack, picking me up after sliding through the grass (or pavement) covered in ketchup and chocolate sauce, spending hours with me in ACDC even though it was challenging at times, and most im-portantly for grounding me and always bringing me back. Thank you all for teaching me about second chances and new beginnings.

—Ana Popkowski will graduate with a degree

in media studies.

Riley Greene Ana Popkowski

Sam Fleming



When I came to Vassar, I wasn’t sure what a college educa-

tion was supposed to do, and now upon leaving, I am only sure of the magnitude of what I’ve received. The coursework I took over the past four years has destroyed my con-ceptions and presuppositions about the world, challenging me in ways I hadn’t thought possible or necessary. The community I found in the Vassar Christian Fellowship, in my profes-sors and friends, helped me construct a vision of what I thought the world could be and how hard I was willing to work for it. While I intellectually confronted problems of modernity, post-colonial race relations, and the-orist after theorist telling me I was inescapably trapped in myself, in my culture and biases, I was surrounded by a community of friends that loved me and pointed me to God with un-wavering faith. In the face of issues that look insurmountable, partly be-cause I am implicated in all of them, I have a concrete hope for my personal transformation and a unyielding faith-fulness that I hope can lead to global transformation.

I acknowledge that my time at Vas-sar has been unique to me in many ways, but I only know how to be as nakedly honest as I can: My streaking is best done in writing. In my time at Vassar, I saw a community of people in the Vassar Christian Fellowship expe-rience God individually, together and grow as a result. We became less self-ishly ourselves and less inhibited by our biases and failures. If we, who are so immovably stubborn could change, albeit slowly, perhaps the world (world is not an abstract concept, but made up of individual people) could change. Perhaps God was big enough for that. I’ve also learned that God de-lights to use us screwed up people, so God’s glory becomes all the more evi-dent in a slow and irresistibly beau-

tiful revolution. Dare I say it, but we have just become too selfish, lazy and too instant-result oriented to see a revolution through. I shudder to think what the world would be like if people like Iranian human rights activist Shi-rin Ebadi, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Burmese Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi decided that committing a lifetime for the sake of change would be too taxing. Perhaps it would be easier to just hunker down, earn some money and pass a lifetime without risk. How-ever, in all the late nights I’ve spent with friends wandering around a dark campus dreaming for our fellowship, in all the papers I’ve procrastinated on because I needed to lovingly talk to someone more than I needed a good grade, I’ve seen that change is too feasible, palpable and addicting to be abandoned for an easier life.

Revolution (if you’re into that kind of thing, and dammit I’ve fallen in love) happens slowly. A prayer attrib-uted to El Salvadorian Bishop Oscar Romero concludes saying, “We are workers, not master builders, min-isters, not messiahs. We are proph-ets of a future not our own.” I guess what I’ve learned most at my time at Vassar is that I’m a worker and a prophet. We prophesize a future that has not come and that we may not live to see. Then, we work, cry and bleed for it. Simply said, I want to be part of a generation that does not sell out. I want to see a generation, who radically practices the things we’ve been taught to their full implications, better than our teachers have. I can only wonder what could happen if we all communally committed to a lifetime of faithful, constant service of others.

—Ming-Hui Tseng is the outgoing

President of the Vassar Christian Fel-

lowship.

It’s easy enough to become complacent here. I know I’ve spent too much of my short time

here just enjoying the ride, and who can blame us? Vassar’s probably one of the most beautiful places we’ll ever live, we get to read cool books and party away the days. Many of us here have been told since day one that we’re special, des-tined for great things; Vassar is supposedly our just reward.

But great things never came from being com-placent, and there’s nothing special about people who just absorb this privilege without at least questioning where it comes from. The truth is we’re not just here to go into debt in order to have a great time for four years—at least that’s not what it says in the mission statement. We’re here to do more it says, including to develop “the individual imagination to see into the lives of others” and form “independent thought and an attendant resistance to irresponsible authority.” So let’s use the great minds that got us here, think about the people around us and more important-ly the people not around us. Can we, if even just for a moment, see into their lives? Have we been resistant to “irresponsible authority” lately?

Our institution is a complex one with an in-

teresting history. We taught women science when it was still popularly believed within the medical community that lady-knowledge made your womb start wandering, but we are also a place which only had six black students in the entire class of 1971.

These sorts of paradoxes exist today on this campus, as well as within the greater society. To those who have yet to graduate, I urge you to use the power and privilege of this institution to speak out when you do stumble upon these paradoxes. Vassar provides a fairly safe place to try out new ideas, to practice using your voice and has endless resources to learn more about how and why these paradoxes exist. Don’t even for a moment think that you are powerless or that no one would listen to you. For better or for worse, just being in a place like this connects us to more power and money than we probably deserve. Think about it this way, how much money do students spend just on alcohol here every weekend? Probably somewhere in the tens of thousands, maybe more. Cash is lying around this campus by the bucketful, just wait-ing for the right project. What if we could have that money right now? What could we do with

it? How could it be better channeled? How many problems could we solve? And remember many problems don’t need money at all; they just need brains, some knowledge and a better attitude.

Obviously questioning “irresponsible author-ity” isn’t always super easy, even at Vassar. It’s hard to know sometimes who’s right and who’s wrong—things are often shades of gray. Some-times you might speak up only to say the wrong thing, and probably more frequently you’ll re-main silent when you know you should have said something. The times when you know you’ve got it right will feel threatening to those who know they’ve gotten it wrong. Some people will think you’re “ridiculous” or “snobby” for even caring. But so what? Mistakes come with an education, and there’s nothing wrong with being just a tad disillusioned—it certainly doesn’t mean you love this place or this world any less. In fact it means the opposite. It means that you take your commitments seriously, that you will support the contract you signed as freshman with the mission statement on it. It means that you want to give back to an institution which has provided you with so much—great memories and friends, new ways of thinking about the world and a de-

gree that says that you’ll forever be connected to Vassar, to that power and prestige, to all of its successes and to the most depressing of its failures. It means you accept the fact that you are responsible not just for yourself, but for the actions of your fellow students and for the ad-ministration your tuition pays for.

So be sure to enjoy the ride, to lie on the well-manicured grasses, to meet new friends from all over the world, to learn about something which has no real significance besides the fact that it’s super cool. But don’t forget that com-placency didn’t get us to where we are today and that we owe it all the folks that got us to Vassar and to all the kids who have yet to come here to make the very most of our experience here. Congratulations to the Class of 2010, I can’t wait to hear about the big changes and projects you’ll go on to work on. And best of luck to the Class of 2011, may next year be the year that you form an “increased knowledge of oneself, a humane concern for society and a commit-ment to an examined and evolving set of values.”

—Sarah Muenzinger is the outgoing President

of the Student Activists’ Union.

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Rain pelted my umbrella as I watched my parent’s rented

minivan drive out of the muddy lot behind Josselyn House. Turning back to face the quad, Vassar’s cam-pus suddenly seemed huge and void, blurred in the downpour like an im-pressionist watercolor of a dreary, unpeopled landscape. It seems that ever since that first smeary uncer-tain day, my time here has been a gradual process of peopling and clarifying that first image I had of Vassar College. Now I see a campus rife with familiar faces, buildings sharpened and defined by experi-ences. It’s a landscape that I have run across and tripped over and lounged in until the canvas of Vas-sar now appears so vivid and heavy

with painted memory that I know that finally, it’s done. There is the freedom and giddiness of freshman year, the settling in of sophomore year, that crazy semester I thought it would be a good idea to take five and a half credits; there are the three hour meals at ACDC, the awkward-ness, the well-worn friendships, the loneliness; there’s my summer with the Yale-Vassar program in St. Pe-tersburg, the subsequent whirlwind semester in Paris, the new TH, and that second semester of my junior year in which I believe I grew three years in as many months; there’s senior year, with all its many hard-ships, the many times when I told myself “it’s not so bad”; there’s my a cappella group that I have loved

throughout; there’s my thesis that nearly killed me; there’s all the professors that changed my life, intellectually, spiritually, and some-times accidentally by adding to that store of wisdom that grows as one matures. It’s hard to say if there is anything that I would change about my time here. Everything seems so cumulative, who knows who I might be if I were to go back and change any of it? Now, facing a real world that seems just as blurry and uncertain, I remember my first day at Vassar and realize that college, like many things in life, is what you make of it.

—Shelby Wardlaw is a member of

Matthew’s Minstrels.

Let’s go on a field trip. Have you ever been to Bonticou Crag?

Nope? That’s rough. Everyone should visit Bonticou Crag before they graduate, which is why this is an opportune moment for a field trip. You don’t have much time left!

I think Bonticou Crag is the per-fect hike. Let me fly you through it. We start with a little-mile-or-so-uphill warm up, which is followed by a tantalizing boulder scramble up the cliff face. It’s just strenu-ous enough to feel legit, but short enough to do it twice if you’re at the top and a member of your group is throwing up at the bottom, and he really wants to get to the top.

The best part is the view from the top. No, that’s a lie. The best part is the view from the top at sunrise. Which is why the Bonti-cou Crag Sunrise Hike remains the most popular Outing Club adven-ture, despite its 4 a.m. departure

on Thursday mornings. The advan-tage of the 4 a.m. departure is that we’re back in time for 9 a.m. classes and ready to take on the day (per-haps with a nap around 3 p.m.?).

Despite the more than four times I’ve done this exact hike, each time is wonderful, a little dif-ferent and totally worth it. I know what I’m getting into when I go to Bonticou Crag, just like I know what I’m getting into when I start a new year at Vassar. Each year is exciting, a little different, totally worth it and yet strangely the same.

Freshman year was a like that up-hill warm up; we were just getting into our zones. It was hard enough, it is college after all, but it was noth-ing compared to sophomore year (trip one up that boulder scramble), junior year (that’d be trip two), or senior year (that wonderful sunrise coupled with the viewless, and at times steep, decent).

By the end of senior year, we’ve had that time to warm up and feel out our friends groups and ourselves, then we pushed the limit, partied a lot, worked even more, got out and came back. Now, instead of being that weird outdoorsy freshman with a bad post-Locks-of-Love haircut and an apologizing personality, I’m that weird outdoorsy senior with long unruly hair and a personality to match. We haven’t fundamentally changed, but now we own our eccen-tricities, our styles and our opinions. We’ve freaked over theses, then fin-ished them. We’ve fought and made up. We’ve studied for tests, passed and failed them. We’ve had the ad-ventures, put in the work, seen the sunrise, and now we’re back in time for graduation and ready to take on the world.

—Nadine Reitman is the outgoing

President of the Outing Club.

Sarah Muenzinger

Nadine Reitman Ming Hui Tseng

Shelby Wardlaw



Thinking back to when I arrived in August of 2006, I don’t think I ended

up following the path that I had original-ly planned. Which is great: I am not the pre-med, cognitive science major that I imagined I would be at this point. Instead, I would say that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote, “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,” has been very applicable to my Vassar experience. I thoroughly en-joyed my time as a member of the rugby team, but I am also quite satisfied that this year instead I served as the president of the Black Students Union and secretary of the Council of Black Seniors.

On another note, I would like to encour-age every student to visit the ALANA cen-ter for a Black Students Union meeting or any student of color organization’s weekly discussion meeting. (No, you do not have to be the ethnicity of the org in order to discuss or observe.) I think the major-ity of students on campus do not realize how alienated an individual can feel when they are the only or one of very few mi-norities in a classroom, at a party, or in the library. Our College claims to be diverse. Therefore, students on campus ought to acknowledge those differences if we are truly to call ourselves a tolerant institu-tion. The many incidents on campus that occurred over the past four years related to cultural ignorance and/or intolerance

should serve as a reminder that although the Vassar bubble is full of intelligent scholars, it is not immune to ineptitude in some sense.

Community forums can only go so far toward correcting cultural ignorance; I encourage all students, faculty and ad-ministrators to increase their awareness of their own subconscious racial and cultural biases. (Yes, we all have them.)

Taking humanities and social science courses outside of my major division was one of the most academically rewarding decisions I made. In addition to taking Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds and Protein Chemistry, I also took Introductory Sociology and Black In-tellectual History. Looking back, I would encourage every scientist to venture out-side of Mudd and Olmsted every once in a while to learn about the world outside of science. (What happens outside of science does indeed affect you regardless of your awareness of the fact.)

I think the breadth of courses and ac-tivities that I have engaged in is what was most satisfying about my Vassar experi-ence. I am very appreciative that I have never felt locked into a specific path—not course-, major- nor extracurricular activ-ity-wise.

—Marquise Hopson is the outgoing Pres-

ident of the Black Students’ Union.

It is quite fitting that I’m writing my senior retrospective from a spot by the window

on a Metro North Train headed south for the City. Escape defined much of my time here. My constant journeys away from Vassar’s campus were not only an attempt to evade my physical surroundings or my relationships with peers, but an attempt to abandon myself, a concerted effort to avoid facing the confusions surround-ing the liminalities of my own identity.

I arrived at Vassar, wide-eyed and opened mouth, floored by the opportunities at my fingertips. I was one of the most driven kids in my high school and had worked hard to get here. Intent on getting far away from my small town in Oregon, I was completely ready to immerse myself in the College. It wasn’t long after arriving, however, that I began to feel overwhelmed by how different this space was from home. Although our common start-ing point as some of the smartest and most unique high school graduates in the country, living in a gated space, separate from outside forces, appeared to be our great equalizer, I was overwhelmed at how out of place I felt. In class, I was shocked by the breadth of my peers’ knowledge and keen ability to articu-late themselves. Socially, I was surrounded by

more wealth and privilege than I had ever seen before. Within the first few weeks of school, I began faking my way towards acceptance, as-similating to some preconceived notion of what I thought was a successful Vassar student.

As a black and European Jewish woman, physically separated from my family and my roots, I was not quite sure how to occupy my intersections, and instead I allowed my peers to determine my fate for me. Within my first week of freshman year, my light skinned complexion made me privy to a con-versation that would forever change my fate at Vassar. A girl whom I’d only interacted with on a couple of occasions, tried to initi-ate conversation by arguing that someone in our class was obviously only at Vassar due to the College’s affirmative action policies.

Within moments of being here, it became clear to me that this was not necessarily an inclusive campus for people of color and be-cause she assumed I was white, due to my light skinned complexion, I figured it was easier to laugh along, while really laughing at myself, rather than stand up for who I am. I began to believe that success within this institution would require my assimilation to the student body and the College’s ideals. I spent my en-

tire first year of college attempting to pass as a rich white girl, when this couldn’t be farther from my upbringing. I became other people’s assumption of who I am, rather than a truthful self-conscious representation of my actual self.

However, this decision to succumb to my surrounding’s conception of who I am didn’t make me feel more accepted, and as I attempt-ed to pass, suppressing my identity and roots, the real me literally became invisible, a shad-ow taking my place. I was stuck in a space of liminality afraid to embrace my whole identity. Would black students see me as attempting to be someone I’m not? What would happen if I continued to fake whiteness, denying the blood running deep within my personal life and fa-milial history? I slowly began to realize that my desire for acceptance was bullshit.

I knew that Vassar would change me but I could have never anticipated just how transfor-mative this experience would actually be. It was through my injurious experiences here, cou-pled with classes and conversations with pro-fessors, that I began applying everything I was learning in the classroom to not only my out-ward vision of the world, but in accepting and understanding myself. I had dug myself into a deep inescapable hole of self-denial and shame,

and I began to realize that I had to love myself in entirety. Escape was no longer an option.

In many ways, I think we all spend time pass-ing while at Vassar. Separated from the first 18 years of our lives, college is an opportunity to experiment with the person we want to be. No longer confined by our past, we are able to determine our fate autonomously. For me, this blessing was a curse, and it isn’t until now that I realize the ways in which my anxiousness to move on from who I was held me back far more than it propelled me forward. As James Baldwin once said, “Know whence you came. If you know whence your came, there is really no limit to where you can go.” My most valu-able moments here have been spent embracing my wholeness—I am defined by past experi-ences, coupled with my vision of the present. To know our foundation allows us to break a chain and stand even taller, releasing our limi-tations regarding our potential. My foundation is my family, my siblings, my mom, my dad, my black identity, my mother’s Jewish roots, Oregon, Poughkeepsie, friends, professors and undoubtedly, my Vassar education.

—Rachel Gilmer is the co-Chair of the Senior

Class Gift Committee.

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I came to Vassar with the singular expectation that there would be a space for me to fill. It was

to be a social space, an intellectual space, an ar-tistic space. I was going to fall into it when I was ready. I imagined this process of suffusion involv-ing minor adversity here, conversations about top-ics that defied the bounds of my knowledge there and the occasional irreparably awkward moment. At the end of each day, though, everything would be fine because I was somehow in a place that someone had deemed the right one for me. It took time for me to let go of this vaguely conceived idea of what my Vassar experience was to be. I cannot say when my instinct to passively receive knowledge transformed into an instinct to actively seek it, but that my experience at Vassar catalyzed this shift I have no doubt.

There is a generosity about this campus that lends itself to students who are attempting to forge an artistic identity. In its verdant landscape, open spaces and hidden corners of Gothic antiq-uity, this is a campus that invites creation through inhabitation. I learned how to recognize negative and positive spaces in Basic Drawing and Design on this campus. Novice that I was and still am, I am ever thankful that my eye sees artistic possi-bility everywhere. This way of seeing is a choice that I learned to make alongside the fellow theater makers of my class and the classes before me. The experience of observing and working with people who are bold in their love for art has changed my life. Never have I been part of a wide network of individuals so consistently curious and tenacious in their craft. Out of the personal and communal

experiences of watching each other perform on-stage and performing ourselves, an assertive and keenly sensitive group of artists has emerged. I now know what an artistic voice sounds and feels like. The work of my friends and peers has cracked me open, filled me with joy and pride, left me raw and made me yearn for more. I no longer float through life with the hope that artistic inspiration will fall in my lap—that my day’s travels will carry me to the same safe place each night. I have cho-sen to look for art everywhere, and I see it.

I think of poet Sylvia Plath’s lines, “You are the one / solid the spaces lean on, envious,” from her poem “Nick and the Candlestick,” and I cannot help but feel that I have become a space that sur-rounds the ever-present devotion to theater on this campus. I am glad that I will leave Vassar a more porous being than I was when I entered. The plays that I have watched and been in at Vassar, as well as the work that I did on my senior thesis have bored holes in the carefully constructed identity that I brought with me to Vassar. In my four years with Woodshed Theater Ensemble and my one semester thesis project spent with Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus, I have learned to say yes. Vassar has been a place of both extreme pain and immense bliss. I attribute my ability to af-firm the duality of my experience through my art to the students and professors that I have come to know at this school. My gratitude will find expres-sion in the art that I create.

—Hannah Gold is a member of Woodshed The-

ater Ensemble.

Hannah Gold Marquise Hopson

Rachel Gilmer



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There is something called the “wall of talent,” and, thinking back on my last

four years, I realize that Vassar’s principal lesson for me has been to avoid it.

Some music students second-guess their decision to come to Vassar instead of enrolling in a conservatory, fearing that they will graduate without the necessary tools to make a career in music. I no lon-ger have that fear. A music conservatory is a perfect example of the “wall of talent,” with hundreds of highly skilled musicians all trying to do, essentially, the same thing. To succeed in that environment is to be the best at what everyone else is doing. It’s like attempting to climb a brick wall when there might very well be a way around it.

To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that Vassar is lacking for talent. In fact, I don’t think I have ever encountered a place more densely packed with raw ability than Vassar. But this place is unique in that it encourages us to seek out those cracks and niches and the easier ways around, and I think we’re bet-ter for it. I’ve learned that not only are there many solutions to a problem, but that there are problems that no one has recognized yet. And if you can discover a problem that calls for your specific experiences and skills, then you’ve found something wonderful.

For instance, this semester I was involved with an educational project that brought together Poughkeepsie Middle School stu-

dents and Vassar students to play music. At one point we had a roomful of seventh graders, each with their own drum, cowbell or tambourine, and things were in complete chaos. I would struggle to regain focus, then someone would make the slightest tapping noise and the uproar would start all over again. That night my friend Emily suggested making it into a competition, so the next week we divided the class into three groups and had them play separately. And it worked beautifully. Instead of attacking the problem head-on, we changed the rules and created a new problem that we could handle more easily. We never succeeded in fully gain-ing the students’ attention, but we did suc-ceed in focusing them on the task at hand.

In this case, the “wall of talent” is all the possible ways that we might have attempt-ed to capture the student’s attention. My friend Emily’s suggestion was a solution to a different problem—the problem of how to get them excited about the activity. What she understood is that if you want a middle schooler to care about something, ask them to do in front of their friends.

This is what I have learned at Vassar: Let others solve the obvious problem. Then try to figure out what you have to offer that is entirely yours, and offer it.

—Mark Van Hare is the outgoing Orches-

tral Director of the Mahagonny Ensemble.

A couple of weeks ago, a prospective student of the Class of 2014 sent me an e-mail as the

contact for the Vassar Catholic Community (VCC). Some of his questions included: “What is it like be-ing a religious student and the leader of a religious group at Vassar? Do you see Vassar as a place of atheism and soulless hedonism, to be blunt? Or are people irreligious but still effectively moral? Is there a spirit of service on campus, or are Vassar kids generally disinclined to interact with or help the Poughkeepsie community?”

In my e-mail response and the weeks following, I began to reflect on the last four years and what it has meant to be a “person of faith” at a renowned secular institution of higher education. For me, being a religious student has been a major part of my college experience although I didn’t expect it to be. I had come to Vassar as a practicing Catho-lic, more because my culture and family required it. I had some conscious investment in my faith, but it was largely shaped by the fact that it was what I grew up with. College gave me the free-dom to decide whether my faith was a priority.

Becoming an active student of faith—through the VCC, the Inter-Religious Council and the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life—has probably been one of the most rewarding decisions I have made. It is in these communities where I found the most joy and the most frustration, where I questioned but sometimes couldn’t find the answers, and where re-lationships were built on the shared understandings of something greater than ourselves that move us to be compassionate, to love and to respect every life.

Not to say that my undergraduate journey of spir-itual and self-discovery has not been without a fair share of anger and frustration. It has been difficult being a student of faith, let alone a leader in the VCC for the past three years. There is a wide range of cul-tures and traditions among Catholic students, and not all share the same perspectives on the Church. Given the history and recent events in the Catholic Church, combined with the lack of a common lan-guage with which to talk about religion in general, students of faith here face enormous challenges in the attempt to integrate their faith with their col-lege experience. Adding to this are the instances of negativity, disrespect and insensitivity that I have unfortunately observed on many occasions by the College community towards religious groups.

Despite this however, Vassar is a school that at-tracts intellectuals, thinkers and activists who think outside, above and beyond the box. Where there are students who are adamantly agnostic or athe-ist, there are students who truly want to live out the cornerstones of their tradition. The religious and spiritual communities are important, thriving and passionate parts of student life, and together, they contribute to a spirit that exists in the greater col-lege community—one that yearns to celebrate, serve and protect the human experience. It is perhaps this spirit, this joy, this struggle, that I will miss, yet also take with me as I leave this place and go beyond the stone walls of Vassar College.

—Katrina Mateo is the outgoing President of the

Vassar Catholic Community.

Katrina F. Mateo Mark Van Hare



When I first arrived at Vassar in August of 2006, I felt certain that my primary

focus in college should be on academics. Af-ter all, why did we come here other than to get the best education possible? I had no interest in running for student government, becoming a leader in any extracurricular group or even getting a campus job. I knew my parents were spending $200,000 to put me through college, and they rightfully expected me to concen-trate on school.

What I’ve learned during my time here, however, is that academics represent but one component—albeit an important one—of a Vassar education. Other important pieces of the puzzle include things I’m quite proud of, like growing as a person and getting involved with worthwhile causes, and things I’m a little less proud of, like dancing at Matthew’s Mug until 2 a.m. and going home to eat an entire Napoli’s pizza by myself. (Note to underclass-men: Eating a whole pizza in the middle of the night by yourself is a bad idea.)

Yet perhaps most importantly, my Vassar education has taught me that my ability to make a difference in the world and in people’s lives is limitless.

For me, this realization came after I dis-covered a group called ACT OUT during my freshman year. The organization, still in its infancy, was composed of several young polit-ical activists seeking to end LGBTQ discrimi-nation. That year I participated in two sit-ins at the New York City military recruitment center to protest “don’t ask don’t tell.” At the second sit-in, six Vassar students told the re-cruiters that they wouldn’t leave until Curt Peterson, an openly gay man, could enlist in the military. They were arrested for engaging in this courageous act of civil disobedience. I was immediately hooked.

I had never intended to seek an official lead-ership position in the group. But in the spring

of my junior year I went to Washington, D.C. to intern with the Human Rights Campaign, and for the first time I felt like I could do anything. After returning to Vassar, I chan-neled all of my energy into being president of ACT OUT. As it turns out, we really could do anything. With the help of my amazing co-president and our dedicated Executive Board members, ACT OUT chartered two buses and brought over 100 students to the National Equality March last fall. We raised $600 for a LGBTQ homeless youth shelter in New York City. We attended a marriage equality rally in New Paltz. We single-handedly planned and organized a Congressional Lobby Day to sup-port three pieces of federal legislation. And, most impressively to me, we convinced two members of Congress to co-sponsor a bill that would help prevent anti-LGBTQ bullying in public schools. We had indeed made a dif-ference in the world, regardless of how small that difference might be.

Without diminishing the importance of schoolwork, I would say that the best advice I have for students is to take an active role in Vassar’s non-academic student life. Dur-ing these four years, we are given almost entirely free reign in our extracurricular activities. We have the opportunity to work with low-income children in local schools, to support social and political issues we care deeply about, to help get-out-the-vote in Poughkeepsie during election years, to food-drive for local homeless shelters and to do any number of other things that suit our interests. To all students, I urge you to join an organization. Get involved with its leadership. Brainstorm new ideas. You’ll be surprised with what you’re able to accom-plish during your time here.

—Casey Katims is the outgoing President of

Act Out.

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I remember two things from the Fall Convo-cation of our freshman year, in September

2006. I remember the Vassar Student Asso-ciation president telling our class to relish every moment of our four years at Vassar because before we knew it, one of us would be up there addressing the Class of 2013. That blew my mind—2013. It seemed light years away. The second thing I remember is Presi-dent Hill, in one of her first speeches as the new president of Vassar College, advising us to try new things—to take a course in a subject we found intimidating, to take up a new activity, to learn a new language. When I started college, I had no idea what I wanted to major in. I only knew that I had wanted to study the Italian language since I was about eight years old, and I was finally going to be able to do that.

Other than my desire to take Italian, I had no academic plan. I dabbled in English and drama my first semester, then decided I wanted to branch out and try subjects I knew nothing about—cognitive science, media studies, religion, linguistics, astronomy and art history. To be quite honest, at the end of freshman year, I felt confused and aimless. I was enjoying my random melange of classes, but I was still clueless about what to major in, and I envied my friends who seemed to have everything figured out. I decided to keep taking Italian, which I adored as much as I thought I would, but worried about what I could possibly do with my life if I majored in Italian.

Although I felt like I was floundering at times, in the past four years I’ve taken classes in 14 academic departments. I eventually did decide to major in Italian, with a minor in art history. But some of my favorite classes have been those I added on a whim during the first week of the semester in departments I never considered when I sat in the Vassar Chapel

in the fall of freshman year. I’ve written a re-search paper about women’s baseball during World War II and observed three-year-olds’ speech patterns at the on-campus nursery school. I mastered the Martha Graham-style dance contraction and spent an entire semes-ter analyzing costumes, hairstyles, and sets of Hollywood movies from the ’20s and ’30s. I couldn’t possibly have seen it then, way back in freshman year, but the greatest gift Vassar has given me has been the freedom to create my own education—to force myself to push past confusion and explore new fields.

No, I still can’t tell you what I’ll do with my degree in Italian, but thanks for asking. I can, however, have a conversation in what is quite possibly the world’s most beautiful language. I can explain why Italians never drink cap-puccino after 10 a.m. and why they never use Parmesan cheese on a seafood pasta dish. I can serenade you with 136 memorized lines from Dante’s “Inferno” or transport you to Manhattan’s Lower East Side with an excerpt from my historical fiction thesis inspired by my Sicilian family’s immigrant past. Some-how, out of semesters of confusion and a hodgepodge of classes, I gained some clarity. I accepted the fact that my undergraduate major doesn’t need to determine the course of my entire life, and I delved into a whole ar-ray of disciplines. Somewhere along the line, I let go of the idea that I had to have a plan, and just enjoyed the ride.

Sometimes things do fall into place. In the words of Dante Alighieri, “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle”—and thence we came forth to look again at the stars.

—Gabrielle Kotkov ’10 was co-founder of

the Italian Club, and co-founder and president

of Vassar On Tap. She will graduate with a

major in Italian and a correlate sequence in

art history.

Gabrielle Kotkov Casey Katims



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I’ve learned a great deal of important and weighty things in my time at Vassar, but

that’s to be expected. What I find far more interesting is the astounding number of abso-lutely trivial facts I’ve learned about life, my-self, living in a community and Vassar. Here are some of my favorites:

Birds will always start singing at 4 a.m. in the morning, no matter how much work you have left to do.

I can probably walk from the TAs to Main with my eyes closed, but I don’t want to test it. The TA bridge is indestructible...maybe.

Somebody should wash the dishes in the sink, but not me because I didn’t use any of them.

Cell phones are not allowed near Raymond Av-enue when construction crews are dynamiting it.

Bacio’s is the most successful thing to ever occupy that corner.

“Staying open until whenever” is a good business policy.

New England Building makes incredible noises between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.

The golfers will insist on sharing their golf games with you at 9 a.m. on a Saturday by talking with each other very loudly outside your window.

Meteor showers are incredible. Meteor showers are more incredible when you can hear dozens of your classmates sitting on the same golf course as you—but you can’t see them.

Somebody will always find a way to break the sound system at Matthew’s Mug. The Mug used to have mirrored ceilings, nice decora-tions and a sunken floor.

If you have an afternoon to kill, going on a tour of Vassar is a baffling, enjoyable experience.

The storm drain in the Aula parking lot will collapse and form a sinkhole every year.

The TA stair platforms will collapse and form asphalt moats/ankle traps every year.

Preparing to throw a party is the quickest way to get your house clean.

Throwing a party is the quickest way for

your toilet to end up in multiple pieces.Bathroom graffiti in the Library can range

from inspiring song lyrics to helpful conversa-tions, but usually it’s just drawings of penises.

Totes, belig and cray were big in ’08.When someone asks you for your ID number

and says “999” for you, you won’t be able to remember your ID number.

Hypermediation, globalized, neoliberal, het-eronormative and most other words that will be featured in a thesis or essay title above the 100 level are not recognized by Microsoft Word.

It is possible to cite yourself in a paper: You wrote enough about the topic last semester.

Pulling an all-nighter with the rest of your class every other week is both an excellent and terrible bonding experience.

Disco fries are never the right choice (except when they are).

Moodle is an acronym for “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.”

Always send duplicate jobs to VPrint.There are secret walking trails in the forest

behind Sunset Lake.The Farm Oversight Committee is a shad-

owy organization that only appears when you want to throw a rave on the Farm.

The phrase “Cisco Systems Web Authentica-tion Redirect” will be burned into your mind after one semester.

Chili Wednesday isn’t always on a Wednesday.The Retreat used to serve alcohol. There are

seven hidden staircases in the Library. For my fellow outgoing seniors, I hope this

trivia brings back fond memories of some of the wonderful quirks of Vassar. For those still attending, learn these well and add your own.Use your spare time to find places on campus you never knew existed. Enjoy every square inch.

—Paul Noonan is the outgoing President of

Vassar Teknowledgy.

Paul Noonan Tom StevensonVassar is not the place I imagined way back

when I accepted my early decision offer (there’s an original beginning for you.) I envi-sioned the school as a haven for brilliant bohe-mians—an Ivy League with more character. I was attracted by the shady campus, venerable buildings and cool name. Vassar. Yep, still cool.

I got my first wake-up call early on, when I learned that Vassar was not the first choice school of many of my classmates. Rather than joining a class of eccentric intellectuals who selected Vassar from a glittering menagerie of suitor institutions, I would have to assimilate as Just Another Brown Reject.

The obscenely wealthy student body was another surprise. My own upbringing was far from deprived: I spent most of high school in the private system, and my parents squirreled away money when I was born to prepare for the staggering cost of higher education in America. Even so, by the end of my sopho-more year, I was forced to finance the rest of my Vassar education with loans and work-study. The fact that many of my peers can ac-tually afford the whopping tuition payments, eat out whenever, and purchase a whole So-viet satellite’s-worth of hard liquor is nothing short of astounding. And it can be galling, too. Good thing Vassar social science majors leave infused with a near-fatal dose of liberal guilt.

The students at Vassar have probably been the biggest disappointment. People would act as individuals, I imagined, unconcerned with striving to embody whatever “cool” means at a given moment. I know these people exist at Vassar, but they seem to be a permanent mi-nority. “Free spirits” at Vassar would dress in steel wool if it meant fitting in.

I worked too hard at Vassar. I failed to take a lesson from two friends who dropped out for mental health reasons, and a few months ago I suffered a dissociative “stress-reaction” (read: nervous breakdown) of my own, which pretty

well derailed my senior year. And for what? During my senior fall, the term that did me in, I reasoned that all my hard work would go unrecognized unless I clinched general and/or academic honors, and I resolved to get As in four high-level, full-unit courses. With no room for error, I drafted and edited papers more thoroughly than ever before; I dropped out of extracurriculars; I virtually took up residence in the Library, which strained my relationship with housemates. In the end, I accomplished my (stupid) goal. But frankly, who cares? Not the excellent graduate school I’ll attend next year. Not my future employers. In fact, in all likelihood, no one will ever focus on my under-graduate GPA again. I would warn you against making the same mistake.

Part of my unhappiness at Vassar stems from unrealistic expectations. As I hugged my moth-er before starting college four years ago, she told me, “These will be the best years of your life.” I know she meant it to sound exciting, but frankly, that’s a lot of pressure. Whenever I was feeling down, I felt worse for thinking, “This is as good as it gets.” But I have anecdotal evidence that my mom greatly overstated the undergraduate experience. I’m in touch with alumni who revel in the autonomy that comes after college, and lavish sympathy on me, the indentured academic. I’ve heard the same from professors. I look forward to better days ahead.

I would be remiss if I didn’t end by saying how grateful I am for the education I’ve been given. Though certain aspects of my Vassar ex-perience have been disappointing, the educa-tion was not one of them. Although much of what I’ve learned scares the hell out of me, I guess we have to know what’s wrong with the world in order to fix it. Maybe, in the long run, Vassar will be worth the big bucks.

—Tom Stevenson is the outgoing President of

No Offense.



To meet us now, you’d never guess that we have only known each other for two years.

We are the two graduating seniors from Iced Brew, Vassar’s synchronized skating team, and being on the team has brought us really close together. The team has been a large part of our college experience.

Hannah: Recently I realized that I made good on a promise. On the supplement to my Vassar application, I responded to the question “what will you contribute to the Vassar community?” with a lengthy explanation about my ambition to start a synchronized skating team at Vassar. I skated on a team for nine years prior to coming to Vassar and hoped to continue to skate in col-lege. Even though there are many other schools around the country with established teams, I was drawn to Vassar for its academics and atypical student body over my desire to skate. Therefore, I decided to try and have the best of both worlds and start a team at Vassar. When I arrived on campus freshman year and met my fellow classmates, it seemed like this would be a quirky enough thing that students would be in-terested in it. Thus, in my sophomore year, Iced Brew was born. It’s been a challenging, yet in-credibly rewarding three years. I may have had to build everything up from scratch, including many of the members who had never skated be-fore, but I’ve loved every minute of it. To me, be-ing the founder and president of Iced Brew is the greatest accomplishment of my college career.

Allison: The last thing that I expected to do in college was join a synchronized skating team. I was a singles skater for many years, but quit long before coming to Vassar. Instead, I did a lit-tle tutoring at Poughkeepsie Middle School and joined the student committee at the Frances Le-

hman Loeb Art Center. In fact, when I first saw the posters recruiting members for Iced Brew, I didn’t even consider joining. My hallmates spent an entire year encouraging me to sign up, and during the fall of junior year I finally joined the team. Not only did joining Iced Brew bring me back into a rink, it has also led me to experi-ence more aspects of life at Vassar than I knew possible. The members of the team have majors in every subject, and participate in a variety of other activities on campus. This year Hannah and I live together in the South Commons, and we spend tons of time figuring out how to keep the team fun and focused. This season I became captain of the team, and have enjoyed my posi-tion as co-troubleshooter and team cheerleader. This experience has brought me close to stu-dents of all years, backgrounds and interests, as well as rekindled my passion for skating.

Hannah & Allison: Together we have won gold medals at two local competitions, per-formed exhibitions for our peers, and baked tons and tons of cookies for fundraising bake sales. The team has grown tremendously (from six to 24 skaters in three years), and we’re both really proud of our role in Iced Brew’s develop-ment. We’re completely student-run, and as a result, we’ve had a lot of freedom, but also a lot of responsibility. Iced Brew will be our legacy at Vassar and will provide students in future classes an opportunity to be a part of this unique community. Iced Brew has enriched our college experiences greatly and we hope it will do the same for others for years to come.

—Hannah Erdheim is the Founder and Presi-

dent of Iced Brewed. Allison Smith is the team

captain.

ADVERTISEMENTS

Sitting on the Hudson River one morn-ing, watching the sun ignite the changing

leaves that covered the hills flanking the river, hearing the bubbles underneath my boat, the soft splash of oars entering the water togeth-er is one of my favorite memories at Vassar. When I came to Vassar in the rainy fall of 2006, I never imagined that I would be on the rowing team, let alone be a co-captain. I was not an athlete. I had failed miserably at team sports in physical education classes. The sto-ry of how I came to row at Vassar follows the same narrative line as many other experienc-es, such as how I decided to be a history and Chinese double major, how I became involved in the ALANA Center, how I began to work at the Office of Admissions. These unforgettable experiences were not planned, were not really by chance, but really they were unexpected.

I think back on all the things I was supposed to be and all the expectations I came to college carrying in the back of my mind, and I have shed every last one, except for maybe being a pretty diligent student. I am not pre-med. I will not be an hepatic surgeon, and when my parents’ friends ask what I’m doing with my life, they will be able to laugh nervously just like me. But thinking back on all the opportu-nities and experiences I have been afforded at Vassar, even if by accident, I have loved each and every one.

Getting my ankle sprained at rugby practice early freshman year gave my friends and I the opportunity to eat “just add water and micro-wave” Indian food that a friend had brought in a suitcase from home. I ran naked into the Li-brary with those same friends, past the desks where we slaved for hours at a time on history theses, anxiously waiting for the day to turn them in. Being dragged to the Kenyon Hall erg room one wintry morning brought the weird-est and most fun people I know into my life.

We sweat together, grunt together, struggle together and laugh together.

The ALANA Center has been a place of community and safety. There, when I needed a piece of home, when I needed a shoulder to cry on, when I needed somebody to vent to or when I was just frustrated at dealing with ev-erything that is race, ignorance, privilege and identity, I was sure to find a brother or a sister to contemplate with. I never really questioned any of these things until I came to Vassar, and the realization that I had to deal with them was sprung on me, once again, unexpectedly. Lost and reeling for something to make sense of all these questions that had suddenly as-saulted me, I found shelter in the friends I had made through my ALANA connections. The journeys we have taken and the questions we have asked are all experiences that render you to me, and I will never forget them.

For me, Vassar is a place where the un-planned and the accidental can blow you off your original course to a place more wonderful than you could ever have imagined, or dared to imagine. I will miss this big safety net where dreams can be dreamed and risks can be taken, cognizant that failure is a huge possibility, but they are encouraged to be taken anyway. For my classmates, let us continue to dare to dream like we’re still here, for no matter where we go, our Vassar family will always be somewhere nearby. For the underclassmen, dare to be crazy. Use the quiet of the library to hatch a plan for something totally ludicrous, and follow through, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. I am sad to leave this place where I have learned to think until I dream and laugh until I cry, but I am excited to see what I may stumble upon next.

—Kyle Chea is the founder of the Multiracial/

Biracial Students’ Association and a member of

the Vassar College Rowing Team.

Kyle Chea Hannah ErdheimAllison Smith



As I write this, I am probably more ner-vous than I’ve ever been. Not the heart-

pounding, sweaty-palmed anxiety you get before a performance or a presentation, but something more subtle and difficult to define. Well, not too difficult: I’m scared to graduate. The past seventeen years of education should have prepared me for this (graduating is the point, right?) but I’ve never dared look past the midterms and final papers to the inevi-table conclusion. On Sunday, years of learning will be transformed into a degree, and I’ll walk off Graduation Hill both elated and terrified at the prospect of never again discussing Ul-

ysses, or singing in Skinner, or walking around Sunset Lake with a cigarette and my thoughts. A good chunk of what I’ve learned will only be pertinent if I’m playing Jeopardy from home.

Maybe I’m more worried than most—I’ve been in boarding schools for over half my life, and the prospect of living on my own with-out a dorm full of like-minded bright young things will take a lot of getting used to. Vassar, in particular, has given me more than I could ever expect. On my revisit day, I could im-mediately tell (I think most of you could, too) that the students here are exceptional. Not exceptional in that tri-varsity-athlete-straight-A-student-aspiring-biochemist kind of way (though there’s that, too) but exceptional for their character. I received some small confir-mation of this when my friend’s father said, “The kids at Vassar know what’s up. I like their head space.”

I don’t know how to define “head space” exactly. Does it mean we’re liberal? Probably, but “liberal” is a tricky word to pin down, and it often ends up sounding like one-half of a bipartisan conflict. Thankfully, there is also the liberal arts, the sort of education thanks to which I’m able to use the Oxford English Dictionary to pick out convenient definitions. The first: “Liberal—the distinctive epithet of

those arts or sciences considered worthy of a free man,” and then there’s “free of restraint, free in speech or action,” and my personal favorite: “free in bestowing, bountiful, gener-ous, open-hearted.” Some of you have maybe learned this already, but if you ever can’t find the words for something, let the Oxford Eng-lish Dictionary do it for you.

I’ve had the good fortune at Vassar to work with incredible writers, both teachers and stu-dents. From my freshman writing seminar to Senior Composition, my experience at Vassar has been one of always reaching to find the right words. Working in the Writing Center, I’ve read and revised countless papers by my friends and peers, and every time I read some-thing new I’m astounded by the variety and depth of knowledge on display. All I have to do is show up to work, and inadvertently I learn about shifts in magnetic poles, Utilitarianism, Coca-Cola marketing strategies in China and the detective stories of Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve concluded, after almost four years of writing and editing, that one thing will make a fantas-tic paper: passion. If you don’t care about your argument, neither will anyone else.

The trick is to find that argument, to find that passion, the one thing that gets you so ex-cited you’ll just die if you can’t tell someone else about it. That’s the point of writing, the point of any communication at all. I’m ner-vous now, but I do know what I care about, and I’m going to write it like crazy now that I’ve got a diploma and no excuse not to.

Thanks for four great years. I think every graduating senior has found something at Vas-sar that has changed them and made them bet-ter. I encourage you all to be free in bestow-ing, bountiful, generous and open-hearted with what you’ve learned.

—Jon Roth is an accomplished bassist with

the Music Department.

Being done with your final set of finals is a wonderful thing. With my work finished I

have been able to take my last few days at Vas-sar at my own pace, sleeping in until ten thirty, playing video games, going to the gym and then having a late afternoon tennis match. I had just been commenting to one of my housemates about how wonderful this was, that being at Vassar without any work to do was freeing and relaxing, but I should have known that telling someone would jinx it. Within five minutes of these remarks to my housemate, I was ap-proached by the The Miscellany News, which asked me to write a senior retrospective, and it only had to be 800 words. My first thought was, “800 words!! Hell no, honey! I am not writing ever again!” My second thought, “You clearly have never spoken to any of my professors or you would know that I am NOT the right per-son to ask to write anything!” My third thought, “Could be fun…question mark?”

Needless to say, I accepted the offer. However, I hadn’t walked ten feet from Contributing Edi-tor Miss Teeters before I started stressing. It’s not that I don’t have plenty to say about Vassar and everything it has given to me personally but that’s just boring! Nobody cares about reading that! I could write about the many high school-esque dramas which I have experienced, and while that may be more enticing to a reader I was not sure I wanted to expose so many tawdry details of my life. I struggled with trying to pin-point the discussion I wanted to raise through this retrospective. What was my thesis going to be? Do I have an argument? Is it cohesive? It was about the point when I started outlining what I wanted to say that I realized that Vassar may have influenced me too much. So I chose instead to “screw it!” No argument, no point, no organi-zation and no mind for who is reading. This is my retrospective, and it might as well have my rambling, unfocused and manic voice! Having just done a word count I see that I am already succeeding at establishing myself as a rambler! I have written over three hundred words and said nothing! Point for me!

Although the gifts and changes Vassar have given me go far deeper a simple superficial look at my first and last days at college paint a vivid enough picture. Snapshot: I arrived at Vassar a starry eyed 18-year-old boy who could not break out of the boarding school fashion. I was obsessed with theater, had too much ambition, too competitive and was determined to make a

name for myself. I spent my year wearing polo shirts with popped collars trying to convince myself and the rest of Vassar that I was straight. I was a first class know it all who had so much hope. Snapshot: I am graduating in a week. I am 22 and still starry eyed. I am obsessed with dance and theater and truly understand how lacking my knowledge of both is. I want to learn every-thing I can and am always hungry for more. I am celebrating my one year anniversary with my boyfriend in two weeks. I would not argue if someone told me I was a pompous arrogant hu-man being, but I would say that I know my own shortcomings now. I can see my lack of experi-ence, and although I still have hope, I am filled much more with fear and anxiety.

In case the changes between these two pic-tures were not clear enough here is a run down. One, I came out of the closet. Hurray for me! I now own more glitter, heels and Disney princess paraphernalia than is probably healthy. Two, I was introduced to my deep passion for dance, an art form I had never taken part in before col-lege other than basic choreography for musicals in high school. Three, I have realized how col-lege is a secure bubble. I have been taught that I am not an adult yet, and even after graduation, I will still be studying how to become one. Break-ing down the changes in this way they don’t seem like much, and yet I found myself break-ing down into tears with every professor I said goodbye to, with every last class I took, even when I handed in my last official assignment. My boyfriend tried to comfort me through the worst of these episodes, after I had said good-bye to one of my ballet professors, and he told me that I can always come back to visit and that although it will be different, Vassar will still al-ways be my school. I explained to him that it’s so much more than just my school. I found myself at Vassar. It has shaped me and molded me into who I am. Inherently Vassar is a part of me and although college was not without its hardships I personally owe a debt to this school. One I am not sure I am ever going to be able to repay.

Okay, so maybe rambling along was not my best idea because not only have I babbled past my world limit I wrote the sappy college admissions essay I was trying to avoid. So I am going to attempt to make my summary brief to make up for this. Vas-sar, I will miss you and, by the way, I owe you.

—Joey Army is a member of Vassar Repertory

Dance Theatre.

To Vassar, the apple of my eye:I think of my past four years at Vassar like

I think of an apple. One of those light green and burnished red ones whose colors mirror the leaves’ transition from summer to fall. A honey crisp, maybe, that tastes sweet, is not too grainy and has a good bite—just the right amount of lin-gering tartness. Like eating a honey crisp, I have devoured the sweetness and tartness of Vassar over the past four years: pierced the skin of the apple of knowledge, bitten into the smooth flesh that lies beneath and pondered the remaining core and the perfect wholeness of the seeds.

I came to Vassar right before apple season. Arriving from Colorado, I was struck by the fields and fields of apple trees near campus. The abundance of apples that came in the fall was a kind of miracle to me: so many kinds, so many tastes. My classes were equally diverse and deli-cious, each like a new variety of apple. I studied anthropology, sociology, art history and English. I learned how to think and ask questions about the origins of ideas; their many tastes; how to cut into them, parse and divide them; and how to relate these slices to each other. I discovered the joy of slicing into an apple to savor its sweet, juicy, tart essence in every bite. After a period of tasting—searching for the juiciest bite into the wisdom I sought—I eventually fell in love with culinary anthropology and French. I delighted in thinking about the intersection of culture and food and became addicted to the taste of the word “pomme” (the French word for apple) rolling from my tongue. Professors would pluck apples from the highest branches of trees that I could not yet climb on my own and pass these pieces of wisdom down to me. They pushed me to strive, taste, seek, discover and cultivate my own orchard of apples.

The apples grew. I fertilized them with joy-ous, sun-dappled afternoons spent listening to my friends play fiddle in the Vassar orchard; cat naps between bouts of intense studying, reading and writing in the chairs of the Vassar library; and classes that left me hungry for more. I wa-tered my trees with occasional tears from the pains of growing and learning and sweat from the heat of getting boxes up and down four flights of stairs on move-in day. I discovered new varieties of apples during my junior year abroad in Paris, France, where I fell in love for the first time, strove to make a perfect tarte aux pommes and learned about living in another culture. When the lower branches of my trees leafed out and started to bear fruit, I shared what I had learned with other students who were hungry to discuss knowledge: how to write a better paper in the Vassar College Writing Center or another way to get at the core of culture as an Anthropology Department academic intern. The spring days were long, lingering and sweet, and my trees blossomed.

And, now, too soon, I have come to my last season at Vassar. I will not be here in the fall when the apple trees again bear heavy, ripe fruit. I will be in Arizona, where there are fewer apple trees, making pastry at a restaurant in Flagstaff and satiating my taste for life in the Southwest. My little crop of Vassar apple trees goes with me. I have tasted the sweetness of the knowl-edge of the Vassar community, and I will never stop hungering for the crisp, sweet-tart taste of learning something new.

I think of Vassar and the taste of apples fills my mouth.

—Becca Roseman is the outgoing Chair of

the Anthropology Majors’ Committee.

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Becca Roseman Jon Roth

Joey Army



Members of the community gather outside the College Center to attend a union rally in October. Throughout the fall, com-

munity members came together to voice concern over College staffing cuts and showed solidarity for campus staff members.

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Underclassmen participate in Serenading, an annual College tradition, on

Saturday, Sept. 5. This year, the event underwent serious rule revisions.

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Professor of Art Harry Roseman’s “Hole in the Wall” is exhibited in the Frances Lehman Loeb

Art Center (FLLAC) above. The aFLLAC will be closed next semester for repairs to a leaky roof.

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President of the College Catharine Bond Hill and senior officers meet with community members dur-

ing an open forum on Oct. 6 in Rockefeller Hall. They discussed the College’s recent budget cuts.

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Lead singer for The Flaming Lips Wayne Coyne uses a megaphone during the group’s concert at the Mid-

Hudson Civic Center on Saturday, April 17. The Flaming Lips were brought to Poughkeepsie by ViCE.

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Community members visit the 10th annual Arlington Street Fair held on Sept. 26, 2009. The

Fair, which included food vendors and entertainment, donated its proceeds to local charities.

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The Year in Photography

Vassar Student Association (VSA) Presidential candidates debate campus issues at the VSA Ex-

ecutive debate on April 20. Mathew Leonard ’11 won the position of VSA president in a close race.

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the miscellany news | may 23

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