The Senior Admissions Fellows Blog

As sad as I am to end another school year (and can you believe, I’m finally out of here!),  I am excited for the final hurrah because it’s time for SENIOR CRUSH LISTS! It’s a tradition that has everyone swooning neck over neck to see the masterpieces that the seniors have created, listing every crush they’ve had during their time at Middlebury. They are posted on the walls of the dining halls so that everyone can see them. Seniors go all out for this tradition and fellow students casually peruse the lists to see if their names are posted. I’ve seen some really creative ideas over the years and I can’t believe it’s finally my time!

Professors’ names are known to have made appearances on these lists, FYI.

Yes, that is a Croc on the upper left corner.

This year’s crush lists have emulated themes of “Games of Thrones”, stolen Add Cards from the registrar’s office, a letter from the “Dean of Admissions”, etc. My crush list is going up tomorrow and I hope this campus is ready for the saucy captions that follow my crushes’ names!

Good thing that the Last Chance Dance is happening during Senior Week, right?

The end is near. This is my last week of classes for my undergraduate career. The last time I will sit in class with the professors I have gotten familiar with over the last 4 years. The last time I live, work, and socialize on the same 320 acres. The last time I will be able to wake up 5 minutes before a meeting and still arrive at a decent time. Yet, despite this week of first, last times all I can do is sneeze. If it is one thing you will not be lacking when you arrive in the state of Vermont it will be the allergens. We have every type here from pollen: aspen, elm, birch, to grass and tree. Here we have it all!

The irony about allergies is on days like today when the sun is shining  perfectly, reflecting on all the cherry blossoms in bloom, I find my face making more contact with a tissue than the beautiful breeze. It’s days like today where I feel conflicted. I love the aesthetic beauty of Middlebury’s landscape, yet my poor nose, ears, eyes and throat itch like I have swallowed poison ivy. Today I yearn for the relief only the concrete jungle of NYC can provide.

In 2 weeks’ time I will officially be a Middlebury College alumna. In 4 weeks’ time I will begin my post-bac class at Brooklyn College. In 3 months I will hopefully have a part-time position while finishing my classes.  In 9 months’ time the federal government will begin to ask my for payments on my loan. In 12 months’ time I will begin my graduate program at U Cincinnati and be asking to government for a little assistance. It will also be spring again and I will need a box of tissues to assist my nose in its bi-annual anti-environmental spasms. It’s funny how although things appear to change the actual remain the same.

Prospective students and parents always ask:

“What do you guys do for fun on the weekends?”

Well here is a line up of what’s happening this weekend at Middlebury!

Friday-

RELAY FOR LIFE
one of my class is cancelled! yippee!
DOLCI DINNER
Free Friday Film: Man On a Ledge

Saturday:

Spring Asian BBQ- sponsored by the Asian organizations. SOOOOOO DELICIOUS. I mean, who can say no to Korean BBQ?
Cook Carnival- four hour festival involving trampolines, circus performers, games, prizes
KDR- daytime rodeo at one of the social houses
DMC Block party and Basketball tournament  – fun, food, and basketball!

Sunday:

MCAB staff brunch at Waybury Inn (yummmm!)
Middlebury Maple Run- half marathon
Museum dinner catered by Tourterelle 
lots of homework

May first historically acts as a nostalgic day filled with memories of going out to breakfast with my dad and being granted his permission to arrive to school late due to our homemade holiday. However, tomorrow’s arrival of May first is already hitting me with preemptive nostalgia for the start of my last month at Middlebury College. Naturally, it is nearly impossible to fathom the thought of graduation and of fleeing the nest that has housed me for the past four years. However, I have been preparing for this moment all year and while that cannot remove the reality, it can at least cushion the sting.
Another plush cushion has been the influx of notifications about activities that surround this final month. In fact, it has been a feather bed. We are being showered with events and ceremonies simply for completing four years here. I am tempted to say that I cannot wait for senior week, even though it signifies the end of an era. I am also tempted to say that I cannot wait for the exclusive class of 2012 tank tops.
Aside from many ceremonies and gatherings that will occur throughout the month, the last week here promises to be nothing short of fantastic. We have a day dedicated to lounging at the beach (Dunmore, close enough) followed by an evening Caribbean Cruise (Lake Champlain, close enough). We will wake up to a mimosa brunch with our fellow graduates. We will do the unthinkable and attempt to hit every bar (3) in the local area during a ‘Pub Crawl’.  We will have the opportunity to spend an entire day crossing off To-Do’s from our ‘Bucket Lists’. We will stay up late, dancing into the night for a Senior Formal in the same space where we first Dos-ee-doed at the Ho-Down four years before.We will fall asleep after a Last Chance 80s Dance, with the promise of charming crushes and chanting Call Me Maybe. We will not fall asleep ever before graduating and dine like royalty at Steve’s Park Diner. We will graduate being quite tired but also being filled with pretty spectacular memories.
While tomorrow is certainly a marker of nostalgia and sadness for the inevitable end of our time here at Middlebury College, it is also an indicator of the incredible senior month that will follow.

The student center is the core of most college campuses, a building overemphasized on the tour as the heart of the campus, with students flowing in and out constantly, pumping out activities and information to the entire community.  Yesterday, I started wondering what role Middlebury’s own student center serves… How many times a day am I in McCullough?  Who else is usually around?  What happens there?

McCullough lies at the center of campus, directly between many of my classes and my dormitory.  Last Wednesday I stopped by the mail center to look for letters or care packages (and got a paycheck too!).  I then immediately spent a part of that paycheck buying tickets to our spring concert, Wale (one of my suitemates is the chair of the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) Concerts Committee and was in charge of booking him) and tickets to Stopkiss, a play that my other suitemates are directing and starring in as part of their senior work, at the Middlebury Ticket Office.

On the way out, I glanced up at the Honor Code signatures on the wall.  Upon matriculation, every Middlebury student signs an agreement pledging to submit only original work with proper citations and to maintain integrity in all aspects of academic life.  I flashed back to the day we signed the pledge, when hundreds of freshmen squeezed into McCullough to meet with the deans and to assume responsibility of our college lives.  The pledge brings a unique atmosphere to Middlebury: tests are unproctored, and closed-note take-home exams are common.  As a result, students work for personal achievement rather than in direct competition with their peers.

Later on in the night, I returned for Trivia Night at Crossroads Café.  The Café is a student run business that serves healthy food options including Asian noodles, frozen yogurt, fresh fruit, coffees, and smoothies.  The Café’s stage hosts student musical performances, poetry readings, trivia nights, lectures, and community discussions on a regular basis.  I grabbed a table downstairs while my friends ran upstairs to the Grille to order food.  They returned a few minutes later with a Dr. Feelgood (a grilled cheese with chicken tenders inside) and a Heart Attack (fries smothered in cheese, bacon, chicken tenders, bbq sauce etc.) for the group to split.  The room quickly filled with about a hundred students hunched over in groups trying to identify a man (Nicolae Ceauşescu) from his photo.  A few hours later, as Trivia Night came to a close, I swung by MiddExpress (the on-campus convenience store in McCullough) to restock on tape and notebook paper before heading home with my suitemates.

As I reflect on the number of things I did in McCullough over the course of a single day, I’ve realized that I’ve been underestimating the Student Center all these years.  McCullough may not be the only center of student life on campus, but it is definitely an essential part of daily life for MiddKids.

One of the buzzwords most heard around campus this past week has been avocado, in light of a recent gift by the parent of a freshman Feb of 10,000 pounds of Ettinger avocados to Middlebury College dining services. As the avocados made their first appearances in the dining halls last week, students were shocked and awed at the unexpected presence of such an exotic food alongside our normal bananas, oranges and apples. Word spread like wildfire, and the dining halls became new sites of expectation and anticipation.  And as the myth of the avocados spread, so did rumors of their origin. Many speculated as the to the exact quantity of avocados that Middlebury was now in possession of—5 tons, 20,000 avocados, an entire truckload full?—yet their exact numbers and source remained something of legend.

Yesterday, Middlebury Magazine published an article online detailing the exact quantity and source of the gift of the avocados, including quotes from the chefs of our three dining halls on campus who were tasked with coming up with creative menus to make use of this windfall.  Indeed, over the past week, the dining halls have been replete with creative dishes featuring avocado, and every trip to the dining hall offers another opportunity to discover the new, and perhaps unexpected, ways that the avocado has been implemented into our daily meals. Over the past week, I have tried avocado coconut ice cream, avocado lime cheesecake, avocado salad, grilled avocado with pineapple relish, and of course, guacamole. Moreover, these dinosaur egg shaped vegetables have been showing up in surprising locations all across campus. I’ve discovered several in my suite this week, and students can be seen stashing one in their backpack to be eaten later as a snack.

All in all, the avocado has overtaken Middlebury, and from the sound of it, we’ll be eating them for a long time to come. So, if you’re going to be visiting Middlebury in the next couple of weeks, or if you’re coming to campus next week as part of Preview Days, be sure to look out for these creative additions in Ross, Proctor and Atwater! Guacamole forever!

Unlike most seniors, who are busy getting ready to present their written theses at the symposium, this week I’ve been working feverishly with the other dance majors to prepare for our thesis concert, which goes up next weekend. At the beginning of the year, I was daunted by the prompt: “make whatever work you want to make. You have the support and the resources–now be an artist!” Now, though, I’m really excited to be showing a body of work for which I’ve been at the helm every step of the way.

This week, though, I’m even more at the helm than I was expecting to be! Our lighting designer and technical director for the concert just unexpectedly went on maternity leave–we’re really excited for her! It means, though, that the four of us are all of a sudden in charge of self-producing our show. While this caused a minor freak-out for a day or two, what we realized was that… actually, we can totally do it! It’s going to require some hard work and a lot of list-making, but four years of learning how this happens has left us well-prepared. The tech crew has been scheduled; the posters designed, printed, and hung; the program laid out and proofed–it’s going to the printer on Monday. All the things other than the actual dancing and choreographing are things that we–almost to our surprise–actually know how to do.

Though it was daunting at first, now I’m kindof excited. It’s a fun challenge–and best of all, it will result in a show that we can really be proud of!

Julieta Paredes Carvajal is an Aymara woman, communitarian lesbian feminist, co-founder of Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) and the Community of women creating community as well as the Communitarian Feminist Assembly. She lives in La Paz, Bolivia, land where a political change process is underway. She is anti-patriarchal feminist activist, writer, singer, author and poet, and has been involved in feminist training with indigenous and working class women throughout Bolivia and in other parts of Latin America.

I went to her lecture last night. I felt like my grandmothers and my aunts and my very own mami was speaking to me about their struggle as indigenous women under Western patriarchy for many generations. Throughout the lecture, I felt moved by Julieta’s thorough theoretical talk about Communitarian feminism and how it differs from other feminisms. In a nutshell, she summarized how feminism in Bolivia has changed before and after 1492. Before Christopher Columbus’ arrival, most indigenous women used to have full autonomy and power in traditional societies. Women used to control the land, hold political roles, and determined the well-being of the community. But that does not exclude the fact that indigenous patriarchal societies also existed in Latin America. However, in 1492, European colonists brought an oppressive institution that determined the tragic fate of indigenous women in Latin America: machismo. Indigenous women were negatively impacted by two forms of patriarchy: Western and Indigenous.

Her talk consisted on how women AND men should work together to fight all forms of oppressive institution. She used a metaphor: the human body. She said that the left side of the body is male and the right side is female. And if they don’t work together, one side of the body will suffer. The other side of the body will carry the weight of the burden. That is to say, as a community, we should care for each other even if we do not know the person. If a person is sick, we should help them. If a person is in trouble, we should give a hand. We are a community of people who should love each other. That was the best part of the talk.

I have begun to make a list of things I will miss about Middlebury…  Some will say it is too soon I say, NAH!

1. Waking up 20 minutes before you are supposed to be somewhere and still getting there on time.
2. Not having to wash dishes daily.
3. Having extended vacations such as Winter Break, Feb Break, Spring Break and Summer Break. In the real world you get circa 1.5 sick days a month and maybe a week long paid vacation, other than that Sallie Mae, Freddie Mac and “The Man” own you…at least until the student loans are paid.
4. Taking long showers and not directly feeling the burden of a water bill.
5. Leaving the lights in your room/apartment on and not being shocked when the heating bill comes.
6. Being able to have heart to hearts with your friends face to face until 3 / 4 in the morning.
7. Having impromptu 2 hours Skype dates.
8. Being able to see your friends face to face, daily.
9. Procrastinating till 2 in the morning and still getting a project done…Well maybe this will still work in the real world in some situations, but not both. A doctor can’t speed up a 12 hour surgery because he over slept.
10. Having constant access to your professors, your mentors, and your bosses through e-mail, phone or drop in visit.
11. The joy of care packages…once you leave college you will have to buy your own cookies and snack basket.
12. Naps. One can schedule these in but it is very difficult at a 9-5 without getting pink-slipped.
13. Rolling over and deciding… Nah not today.
14. Walking around a town enclosed by mountains.
15. The quiet tranquility of the campus, most nights from 11pm to 7 am.
16. State of the art facilities.
17. Not paying for ink cartridges.
18. Having a buffet and open salad bar for every meal.
19. Eating at all times of the night and day.
20. Falling asleep in a Library/Public place and not being judged!