Vassar Admissions Blog

Rockefeller Hall on a gorgeous spring day. Enjoy!

Seriously though…what a week! You don’t really get a sense of how much there is to do until you get here, and then you want to do everything. I mean…just look at this bulletin board:

Here’s what I did these past several days…and you could find lots of events like this every week during the semester.

On Wednesday, a couple of my professors gave an awesome lecture on Alzheimer’s Disease. Since I’m an aspiring neuropharmacologist, I went over to the lecture and they talked about what AD is and the research currently going on in the field. Later that day, I went a featured lecture by a professor visiting from Penn State – Dr. David Hughes. Guess what his lecture was on. Go on. Do it. Guess!

ZOMBIE BIOLOGY. wut?

He talked about his research on parasites and zombie ants. What’s a Zombie Ant, you may ask? This is a Zombie Ant.

Thursday night was Jazz Night and ViCE Jazz brought this great Balkan band that played Bulgarian music. It was great because it was unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. And for you music buffs out there, they probably went through every time signature you can think of… 5/4, 12/8, 9/8, 11/8… Yeah. They did it all.Here’s the Jazz Night Poster for the Balkan Band.

Friday Night was Roaring 20s! It was a night full of Blackjack and swingin’ tunes. If you look behind me and my friend here, you can see the big band. They were great.

Saturday – I gave a tour, went to a Vassar Repertory Dance Troupe show, and I had a gig of my own for an All Families Weekend Reception. Got paid $50/hour. Yeah. That’s right.

Anway, today is Sunday (catch-up day) and I’m running an experiment in lab right now. Here’s a glimpse into Olmsted and my workstation.

Til next time,

-Matt

It is crazy how I came all the way from Swaziland to Vassar only to leave the campus for an amazing field trip my first semester freshman year!  Jeff Walker, geology rock star (and professor), led a group of students out west to Yellowstone National Park as an interactive part of my freshman writing seminar in volcanology. As you might imagine, it was a lot of fun. The trip started off in Idaho, at The Craters of the Moon National Park. The desolate landscape can be seen in the first image. We then spent a week in Yellowstone hiking around game-watching and studying the various geologic processes that drew us there in the first place. The second picture is a view west from one of the Park’s higher mountains, and image 3 is the whole group gathered in front of an exploding geyser! Enjoy.

You can read more about this trip on the Vassar Admissions website.

– Tim

It’s April! And it was 43 degrees today. 🙁 But what a better way to take advantage of this frigid winter than to go ice climbing! As part of the Vassar Outing Club, I recently organized five climbing trips for this spring with Alpine Endeavors, a local climbing company, and we’ve just had the first of our excursions.  Me and nine other students traveled to the Catskills and managed to have A LOT of fun on the ice, even though we caught the tail end of the ice climbing season.  We could hear the ice melting as we climbed!  Here are some cool pictures from our trip, including me belaying a fellow outing-clubber, my Co-pres doing some mixed climbing, and me ‘staring down’ the ice.  It was awesome!

-Katie

Admission officers hard at work! After months and months of reviewing thousands of applications, we are finally ready to mail decision letters. While snail mail will not arrive at your door for a few more days, Regular Decision applicants can go online at the close of business to check their decisions. Best of luck!

My name is Timothy Boycott and I reign from the beautiful Kingdom of Swaziland! This is no joke. Swaziland is a small but wonderfully diverse country located in southern Africa. I have lived there my whole life, up until last August when I decided to start a new journey here in the US. You’ll notice from the image that Swaziland is, by no exaggeration, quite lacking in land size and is about the size of the state of New Jersey.

So one might be wondering why the USA? Why Vassar? And why leave the beautiful, peaceful comfort of my home country? There are several reasons and I’ll just touch on a few. I love my home and leaving was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. However, I truly felt that it was something necessary to go through because, at the end of the day, this was going to be an amazing educational experience. Not just because I would be getting a great education but I also would be challenging myself to explore new parts of the world — new cultures and ways of life.

There is a part of me that thrives on that sense of adventure. I had gone to a world-renowned international school in Swaziland and much of the school’s philosophy concerned peace, cultural and social integration, and innovative, responsible thinking that would produce capable leaders of tomorrow’s world. Having spent seven years in such an environment, I wanted nothing more than to find a college that was just as dynamic and that challenged the individual as well as the world. Vassar has a history of being at the forefront of social change. Being the first institution to offer tertiary education to woman in the United States was a mighty starting point and representative of the revolutionary ideals that Vassar was founded on. I saw a lot of parallels between the person I had become, as well as the person I wanted to become, and all that Vassar had to offer.

On a more practical level, I wanted to go to an intimate, nurturing college. This led me directly to considering liberal arts colleges. The hands on learning and type of personal education that one receives at a liberal arts college like Vassar are invaluable. One can develop genuine relationships with faculty members and this allows a much more inspiring, meaningful learning process. I have found a lot of what I hoped to find in Vassar and I am reminded from time to time that there is much to explore and develop in my time here.

As I mentioned, I am a freshman. I have not yet declared a major, but I am heading in the direction of the natural sciences. I play guitar and enjoy having jam sessions with my fellows on my hall. I play intramural tennis and volleyball and spend a good amount of time hiking around New York State with the Vassar outing club. I am involved with two campus organizations: The Vassar Haiti Project and The Vassar Greens.

In my blogs I hope to give an interesting and insightful perspective of Vassar to prospective students. I hope to promote the idea of Vassar as a college that is not only part of the United States, but also the wider world.

… technically speaking could have been the title of a blog post at the start of my Freshman year. However, in the second semester of my Senior year, the sentiment seems far more present than ever before. As I run around campus attending to my ever-growing list of commitments, witnessing the eager conversations of underclassmen, I can’t help but feel nostalgic for that time in your undergraduate career where everything is ahead of you and so many new passions, thoughts, and goals are waiting to be discovered.

As a senior intern, I’ve been tasked with participating in the Facebook group for the admitted students of the class of 2017. There is something truly infectious and inspiring about witnessing their excitement, anticipation, and enthusiasm for everything they will encounter over the next four years. When I first arrived on Vassar’s campus in the fall of 2009, I had no idea (despite firmly believing I had done the due diligence to know it all) what my time here would hold. I quickly found that many of the events that led me to where I am now- as an exceptionally fulfilled soon-to-be Vassar graduate- shifted my perspective in a way that could only be accomplished through taking classes and engaging with the community in ways that pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone as they had never been pushed before.

So as I look back on the 3.5 years thus spent in Poughkeepsie, I find myself nothing short of eternally grateful for the myriad of experiences a Vassar education has afforded me. There is truly nothing like being part of a community that presents you with so much opportunity for engagement and connection. There’s a certain eeriness to becoming cognizant of the impending curtain call, as you finally participate in the events you’ve heard about throughout your years at Vassar (bell ringing, serenading, convocation, and 99 nights to name just a few).

That said, I also feel as though I am slowly beginning to become comfortable with my ever-closer steps towards the precipice that guards the dive into the great unknown of the so-called “real world”. My time at Vassar has prepared me for a (ever-so hopefully) amazing journey ahead, and it is with that perspective that I remark on my leaving college as- in as clichéd of a way as possible- bittersweet. And I guess the saying that every ending is a new beginning loans itself perfectly to the slight alleviation of this anxious feeling that seems to be creeping over my fellow 2013ers and I this semester.

Hi, I’m Meghan McDermott, a senior intern at the office of admissions here at Vassar. A lot has changed since I was applying to Vassar in the winter of 2008, so before I launch into the topics of future blog entries (like all of the awesome things I’ve been up to in the Hudson Valley since matriculating in 2009) I’m going to give you a little taste of my journey to senior year.

Though my obsession with food goes way back, I first remember thinking critically about it in 2004, around the time when Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me came out. I was in eighth grade at the time, and the film inspired a friend and I to conduct a study of how many fast-food ads were dominating commercial airwaves. Later, as an editor of my high school newspaper, I read a review for The Omnivore’s Dilemma and decided to pick up a copy. I was just getting really interested in the good food movement when I spoke with a Vassar admissions officer; the only question I remember asking her was about what Vassar was doing to bring more local foods to campus.

I can’t tell you exactly what she said (I honestly don’t remember) but it sounded good to me, and matriculating in the fall of 2009 I found myself blissfully happy with my college choice. Classes were engaging, the scenery was beautiful, people were helpful and the sense of community was absolutely everywhere. All of my classes were interesting, and I was already overwhelmed with the wealth of options for on-campus programming I found myself choosing from each weekend.  And yet, there seemed to be something missing.

I was working with a pre-major adviser in the sociology department when I decided to declare a psychology major. Soon after declaring psychology early, I enrolled (as a sophomore) in a course entitled “Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Food”. Due to popular demand, I had to fill out an application just to be in the class. I wrote about my interest in food and my as of yet untapped desire to approach the topic from an academic perspective, and I was in. In just a few months, that course changed the entire path of my career at Vassar.

Within a few weeks I knew that I was in for something special. The class required two regular meetings in addition to maintaining a small garden plot and completing field work on a local apple orchard. Having come from a divided home in urban Chicago and rural central Illinois, I was immediately drawn to the fertile, mountainous, diversified farming community of upstate New York. Through my field work adventures with two of my classmates I was able to begin to fill the gap I’d started to notice in my freshman year.

Working closely with our anthropology professor, the two students from my field work assignment and I decided to launch a chapter of Slow Food on campus. Slow Food is an international organization that strives to promote good, clean, and fair food around the world. The amazing work they do warrants a whole other blog post, so I’ll save that for a separate entry, but suffice it to say that we very quickly realized we had tapped into a deep well of (feel free to insert your best “hungry for knowledge” pun here) Vassar students.

In April of that academic year, Slow Food Vassar became the fastest certified organization (meaning our student body had voted, unanimously, to add our organization to the list of 120+ official student programming bodies) in recent history at the college. By that time I had elected to move into one of our cooperative living options on campus, and after being welcomed into that community I quickly began to recognize the importance of coming together over a home-cooked meal and the beauty of living with an exceptionally diverse group of people.

In my second directly food-oriented class at Vassar, “Food, Culture & Globalization” I watched the Austrian documentary Our Daily Bread, a narrative-free exposé of our modern food production system. Though I’d stopped eating conventionally-raised beef in 2009, the film caused me to question much larger aspects of my consumption habits. Thanks to living in a cooperative community, I was able to share my concerns with my housemates who were graciously willing to venture to a local butcher shop and try out local grass-fed and organic meats.

Upon setting foot in the shop, I was forever dissuaded from purchasing commodity meat in a grocery store. In fact, I later interned with that very butcher shop, and was able to receive academic credit when I was hired as a part-time employee in the spring of 2011. By that time I had realized that food had become more than an academic hobby to me. I wanted to go back to my roots in sociology and thoroughly explore the Vassar curriculum to make the most of my college experience.

In reflecting on what classes I’d enjoyed the most, what topics I’d chosen for the many papers I’d written, and realizing that in the fall of my junior year I was only a few credits away from completing my psychology major, I decided to attempt to create my own major program. Through working with the professors on the Independent majors committee and diligently searching for a comprehensive curriculum that wasn’t already offered at Vassar, I created a major entitled “Food and Sustainability Studies” and declared in the fall of my junior year.

I’ve had a lot of amazing opportunities with food, Vassar, and of course food at Vassar over the past four years. This post already covers more about any senior intern at our school than you’d probably like to know, though I feel obligated to disclose that it doesn’t even begin to cover the wealth of opportunities in food, farming, activism, and psychology work that I’ve found here. In addition to the many great things I’ve already discussed, I’ve also worked on the Vassar Farm and Ecological Preserve, received academic credit for studying “The History and Culture of Tuscan Cuisine” while studying abroad in Italy, interned for the national non-profit Slow Food USA, and currently serve as the academic intern for a multidisciplinary program in food and agriculture taking place on campus this year. I promise many delicious blog posts to come!