The Bates Student

As college tuitions are at an all time high, many students both at Bates and abroad are forced to ask themselves when applying to colleges what they intend on doing with a liberal arts degree or a humanities major. Many high school and college students worry that they won’t be able to make a return on their investment, or worse, that they’ll be stuck to work an unfulfilling career. While these issues seem more prevalent than ever, the worries are not new. On Friday, March 14, Carolyn Ryan ‘86, a former English major and current Assistant Editor at The New York Times came to share her experience with purposeful work and quell some of the worries familiar to liberal arts students especially those in humanities. Mediating the discussion was The Bates Student Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Rothmann ‘19, and Bates Magazine Editorial Director and Editor, Jay Burns.
Like many first years, Ryan came in to Bates certain about pursuing one path only to change her mind and pursue others in later years. “I do remember that initially, I came to campus and my extremely elaborate and very solid career plan was that I was going to win Wimbledon,” Ryan paused as the audience laughed, “and then I would appear on tour and maybe do Bates from a distance. And then I was going to be a cartoonist, and then I was going to be a lawyer…What happened to me, and I’m sure your college experience is similar, my first year I did tennis and it was pretty intense, didn’t win Wimbledon, but I think we beat Colby. But, the second year I stumbled into The Bates Student office, and what I really noticed—the tennis kids were great, but they were like, you know, a certain kind of kid—the kids at The Bates Student office were curious about the world, interested about talking about issues, compassionate, interested in talking about politics… and I admired them so much and I just thought ‘these are my people.’’
Ryan, who would eventually be nicknamed “Scoop” by her peers, began writing articles like “The Joy of Being a Dana Scholar” and “Steel Band on the Quad,” which eventually lead her to write more substantial pieces later in her Bates Student career, such as restaurant reviews and “The perils of roommates.” (For the record, according to Ryan, the best roommates should have a great stereo and love the Violent Femmes).
Through it all, Ryan was fueled by her love of writing which came to her at an early age: “…I mean I was very nervous about writing, but I had always, as a kid, liked to write. And when I was a little kid, really little, like fifth grade— I wrote a book. I grew up outside of Boston, and it was—it’s going to sound more sophisticated than it was—it was about the desegregation battles in Boston and the black and white racial class. And I had always liked the idea of being a writer.” In college, one of the biggest draws for Ryan to write for the newspaper was her excitement for “the possibility of describing things.”
Now, as one of the names on the masthead for The New York Times, Ryan works to hire new talent. “Just as a general rule, what I try to do is hire people for hunger and potential more than credentials, obviously we want people with experience, but what I’ve noticed at The New York Times, what distinguishes those journalists from the rest of their field…is something that you can’t really teach, which is drive.” One example of this drive would be the slew of message she would receive when she reemerged from going to the movies at night: “I would come out the movie and my phone would just be pulsating with all the messages from the reporters who were like working through the night, sending me a new draft, just got a new source, wanted me to know this, had another idea, and there’s like a drive that really defines almost an obsessiveness about what they want to do. And you can sort of sense that whether people are at a small paper or digital outlet. Where I’m seeing the good journalism training nowadays is at the non-profits.” A few of the non-profits that Ryan highlighted were New York’s The City, San Francisco’s Reveal, and Austin’s Texas Tribune.
One of the questions Burns asked during the talk was about what Ryan penned as “The Worry Trifecta” in an essay to the Bates Magazine—the three pillars being “Finding work”, “paying student loans”, and “wondering whether your English degree has any value whatsoever”. Burns then read a particularly poignant excerpt from her essay: “‘I found myself deeply troubled by how to shape a future for myself that will expand the limits of my learning. I fear that I will shrink from the task of self-enrichment. How does one remain a student, a seeker of knowledge, ideas, and meaning, in a modern, complex, bureaucratized world: how do we prevent our lives from being frittered away by detail as Thoreau wrote?’”
Burns then asked Ryan what she would tell her 21 year-old self knowing what she knew now. Without skipping a beat, Ryan responded “What a pompous kid!” She continued, stating, “Well, I think the thing that journalism is about is embracing your native curiosity and it’s an essential ingredient, and I think, for one thing, I did worry about—I don’t know why I worried about this as a kid—but I had seen, maybe in movies or in real life…people who have become bitter as they aged, or cynical, um, and I never wanted to be like that and it frightened me a little. And I used to read a lot of biographies, I still do… but I would read biographies both to understand how people became successful but also to understand how they dealt with disappointment. And what I didn’t want to do was to become negative, cynical, bitter, and for some reason I think that shaped what I was looking for and looking not for, and I think, to me, the essential ingredient really comes to curiosity.”
During the question and answer period, the majority of the questions the audience asked had to do with the recent shift in journalism from traditional print media to a more digital platform. For Ryan, one of the biggest changes has been the “biorhythm” of the newsroom:“It used to be, and not that long ago, maybe ten or maybe fifteen, that our biorhythms as a newsroom were really based on a daily paper. So, that meant people came in, kind of late in the morning, maybe 10:30, and maybe got an assignment, and then people took time for lunch, and you would kind of regroup at like 3:00 or 4:00, and you might follow your story by 6:00 or 7:00, and it gets edited at 8:00 or 9:00, and that was kind of the rhythm of a newsroom. And that has really changed. As soon as you really get news, and confirm news, that goes up. You publish it on the web and I think it has forced a kind of transparency around what we do.”
“What we want to be, and one of your fellow Batesies said this today,” said Ryan, “we want to be the one you turn to when you really want to get something solid, you really want to know what’s right and what’s wrong in terms of a big news story. So that’s our reputation, so even in a digital universe, we have to preserve that, and so part of that is being as forthright with readers about our reporting, about what we know, and we have to be really careful—even in a fast-paced environment. So we are not driven to get things first, we certainly want to, but what we really want to be is right.”

On Thursday Jan. 31, John Kosinski, the Government Relations Director for Maine’s Education Association (MEA) gave a talk about the current state of “malarkey” in Maine regarding charter schools. His talk in particular focused on the need to recognize that charter schools are in fact private rather than public and that for them to be considered public, they need to be held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as public schools.
Before discussing the controversies surrounding charter schools, Kosinski deemed it important to provide a definition: “I’m going to start out with a definition of what a charter school is, I just pulled this off of Google, but it’s a publicly funded independent school established by teachers, parents, or community groups under the terms of a charter with a local or national authority.” Although the state of Maine defines charter schools to be public, The MEA believes they are private schools, having to do with “transparency, the oversight, the governing boards of these organizations,” said Kosinski.
One of the primary concerns of charter schools is the rather high percentage of for-profit charter schools whose number continues to grow in the state and country. Kosinski estimates that the percentage of for-profit charters could be as low as 32% or as high as 45%. When it comes to virtual charter schools, the percentage of for-profits increases. The two in Maine, K-12 inc. and Connections Academy are listed on the New York stock exchange. As Kosinski says, “I think educators by and large would say…that education is something that we all benefit from, and that the resources that are dedicated to education in this state and in this country already are insufficient, let alone to introduce a market dynamic of someone who is trying to make a profit out of educating children.”
Another concern Kosinski raised in his talk is the lack of transparency common to charter schools and their relatively low standards of accountability. In public schools, school boards are elected by citizens to oversee the school and to make the school system as best they can using the resources. Charter schools, on the other hand, do not face this amount of scrutiny or community involvement. In Maine, there is a board of seven people: three are on the state board of education and are appointed by the governor, and the remaining four members are chosen by the appointed three. For Kosinski, “That doesn’t sound right. That’s a lack of accountability, some would say, and certainly a lack of transparency, because then that charter commission get to decide which charters they’re going to approve, how many students they can take on, how many grades, etc.”
Another monkey wrench that compounds the problems with charter schools is the amount of funding they receive. Given that they are not submitted to the same standards of accountability that public schools are held to, it is much easier for charter schools to misappropriate tax dollars for personal enrichment:“The Center for Popular Democracy has a pretty extensive analysis that you can look up where they account for $223 million dollars of waste fraud in charter schools in 15 states,” stated Kosinski. “Some of this is definitely segregated to the for-profit element of charter schools, where we’re seeing personal enrichment in-for-profit entity as they’re using these tax dollars, and again without transparency, accountability, and oversight, these problems are propping up.”
This misappropriation of funds is even more devastating given how much more money charter schools receive than their chronically underfunded counterparts. Charter schools in Maine receive $30 million dollars. According to Kosinski, this is not “chump change.” He further added, “And this money, important to note, comes right off the top. Not one public school in this state gets a penny, the way this it’s structured, before the charter schools get a 100% of their state aid, and only after that happens, does the money flow to every other public schools in the state. I describe it as charter schools sitting on top of public schools.”
The good news is that it’s a whole new day for Maine after the most recent election. With a new legislature, Kosinski hopes to pass a ballot initiative to tax the wealthy to get to the 2003 goal that voters agreed on to fund 55% of the cost of education. In addition, he hopes to tackle the charter school cap in the state, and evaluate the current nine’s overall performance. Another thing he hopes for Maine is a greater accountability of both brick-and-mortar charter schools and especially virtual charter schools. He also hopes to change the way charter commissions are formed, as the appointing system is “malarkey”. Overall, with these changes in place, Kosinski hopes to make sure that there are people holding the charter commissions accountable and pulling their charters if needed.

On Monday January 21, Chad Posick, a Criminal Justice and Criminology professor at Georgia Southern University held a lecture as part of the MLK Day events program called “At the Intersection of Race, Gender and Geography: Criminal Justice Sentencing in the United States.” Posick is situated in Statesboro, Georgia— a small, rural town outside of Savannah. Most of his research involves reaching out to rural communities to attempt to understand issues they face around poverty, unemployment, drug use, and sentencing.
“Today, I’ll be talking about prison incarceration,” began Posick, “Hopefully, what this will do is to get us a better understanding of sentencing overall in the United States, and maybe how we can go into these areas and try other types of strategies to one: reduce the prison population, and two: make sure those who receive any kind of punishment get the rehabilitation services that they need to move forward and not be plagued by a criminal record.”
Part of his research looking at jurisdictions around the United States is identifying disparities and biases in the Criminal Justice System. “What disparity on its own basically means is that there is a difference. There’s a disparity in the height of basketball players compared to college students, right? Does that mean that it’s a bad thing or a good thing? No, it’s just a disparity,” said Posick. “However if we think of bias, ‘is there a bias between groups of individuals?’ Well this is a difference that is due to some sort of preferential treatment or favoritism towards one group or one person over another. So disparity is sort of a neutral term where bias is a negative term.”
While a lot of research is being conducted on how race and gender influence sentencing, there is a lack of data collected on how geography works into the equation. Many of the issues that people living in rural areas face are different from those living in urban areas. According to Posick rural areas “tend to have a focus on natural goods and biodiversity, and mostly what you see that the norm context is is contact with nature and open spaces” while “Urban areas tend to be more focused on health, academics, engineering, working in factories, and the context is more contact with people. So there’s a little bit more individualism and isolation out in rural areas and a little bit more egalitarianism and working-with-each-other in urban areas.”
In the middle of the lecture, Posick showed a video of Natalie Collier, president and founder of the Lighthouse Black Girls Projects, deliver a speech called “Blurred Focus: The State of Black Women in the Rural South” – if you’d like to check it out, it’s on Youtube. During her speech, she highlighted how most of the numbers and statistics reporting disparities in the criminal justice system are conducted in urban areas, ignoring disparities in rural areas. Her speech gave voice to the experience of black women living in the rural south where there is little to no industry and limited access to homeless shelters and healthcare.
What Posick’s research attempts to do is provide a rural data set on the disparities in sentencing that should be added to the wider picture of the injustices of the criminal justice system. “What we’re starting to do is to look at state court processing data. So this comes from statistics that were gathered from 1990 to 1998…What’s good about this data is that it includes felony arrests as well as incarcerations of almost 130,000 individuals across 59 counties in the United States. So we can understand a little bit about characteristics of those counties as well as those individuals in those counties to examine incarceration and admissions into prison.”
His research has shown that regardless of race, ethnicity or gender, those in rural areas are more likely to be incarcerated for the same crimes as their urban counterparts. An interesting prospect in his research shows that the more diverse a county is the less disparity there is in the way that people are sentenced.
This leads into possible things that can be carried out to reduce discrimination in the justice system. In his talk, Posick focused on sentencing commissions—groups that try to understand issues and implement strategies to reduce bias in sentencing.
“We have to make sure we’re getting enough data from rural, suburban, and urban areas—all three of those to really understand this issue. And we need to analyze those data. So these commissions can be responsible for providing the funding and organizing the analysis of data so we have a well-rounded database on all the information that we can get on individuals and the communities they come from and then make sure to identify any disparities for any group—so it can be race, ethnicity, gender—but also narrowing it down by sexual identity, veteran status, all of those groups that we think may or may not be treated differently by the criminal justice system.”

On Friday and Saturday, Jan. 11 and 12, Sandglass Theater from Putney, Vermont, came to Bates’ Gannet Theater to perform the company’s original play, “Babylon, Journeys of Refugees,” featuring recent Bates grad Keila K. Ching ’18 as an ensemble member.

The play started with a pop quiz, in which actors prompted questions and after a pause, would step forward if the answer applied to them. Some questions included: “Which of us have family in another country?” and “Which of us have been arrested?” to which one or a few actors stepped forward. For the final question “Who has been mistaken for another nationality?” all of the ensemble members stepped forward. It was later stated that this exercise was to differentiate who the actors were from the puppets they played.

From there, the stories of four refugees were told through multiple narrative forms, including song, music, sound effects, and crankies—or moving panoramas. Through the course of the play, the audience watched a mother escape from Afghanistan, a father and his daughter escape from Burundi, a boy from El Salvador escape from the gang violence around him, and a man with a master’s degree in computer science escape from Syria by boat. Present in each vignette, Gretel, the ghost from another war, slowly takes away prominent images from each story—from a sack of flour the woman from Afghanistan carried while escaping to a worn out pair of shoes the boy from El Salvador walked in on his way to the US border.

The story lines converge at the end of the play, when all the puppets are behind a chicken wire fence awaiting a decision on their appeals for refugee status in the US. While illustrating the experiences of refugees, the actors in the ensemble also asked questions about the US’s responsibility for accepting refugees, especially given the complication that the US is a major arms provider for war-torn countries like El Salvador. At the end of the play, the audience is left asking what happens to those refugees rejected from the US. Although Gretel the ghost is not given a story, we can assume she was rejected refugee status in the US after escaping Europe in World War II—signifying how history is known to repeat itself.

According the show’s playbill, Sandglass Theater decided to call the play “Babylon” after the ancient city of Babylon which is now in Iraq: “This fallen mythic civilization becomes, for us, a metaphor for the destruction and destabilization that is leading much of the world into a refugee crisis of mythic proportion.” It continues, stating that “In Babylon, the blending of actual testimony with unreal figures gives us a view into how we respond to the enormity of crisis.”

In response to a question during the Q&A session after the play about “Babylon’s” research and writing process, Shoshana Bass, one of the artistic co-directors and ensemble members of “Babylon,” shared the work that took place from the play’s conception to its final product. Through working closely with the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (now called USCRI Vermont), Sandglass Theater had the chance to interview staff members of the program—all of whom are resettled refugees—as well as their clients. According to Bass, “[W]e came in there with questions and what we needed to hear was what came out—and it was never necessarily [answers to] the questions we came in with.”

“With one exception, none of these stories we tell are somebody’s full rope for rope story,” explained Bass. “They are kind of amassed from different things. Through the interviews, we then kind of pulled up images that held to us the essence of this story and this situation, for example a pair of shoes that have been walked in for so long that they’ve fallen apart.”

A sentiment that all of the ensemble members wrestled with was representing a story that does not belong to them. As Eric Bass, the co-founder and director of Sandglass Theater, put it, “The fundamental issue in creating this piece is how you give voice, a voice that needs to be heard, when you cannot embody that voice, because it’s not you. It’s not just not you [as in] a different person, it’s not you [as in] a different culture. It’s not us. And so, what the songs are intended to do is to present that voice in a way in which none of us—not the puppets or the puppeteers—pretend to be anybody else but themselves. So the puppets are sculptural representations and they remain puppets, and as such, while they embody a person on a journey, they’re also metaphors—they remain metaphors in a way that the human being can be, but not as easily, not as naturally as the puppet.”

On Wednesday Nov. 7, a few days before Thanksgiving break, the Multifaith Chaplaincy held its yearly banquet in Old Commons, open to students, faculty, and community members alike. This year, the event’s theme was “The Art of Being,” featuring talented Bates student speakers whose crafts have shaped their lives in meaningful ways. The event featured live music, pipe cleaners, and origami activities, and a delicious meal provided by Commons.
Brittany Longsdorf, a Multifaith Chaplain at Bates, opened the event discussing Fritz Eichenberg, a German-American illustrator whose art explored religion, social justice, and nonviolence. While pursuing her Doctorate of Ministry at BU, she would often look up at a poster on her door featuring Eichenberg’s quote: “It takes devotion to create and reverence to enjoy beauty.”

She continued, explaining, “His spiritual exploration and practices transformed the way he approached his art. His wood carving art was his spiritual practice and his spiritual practice was his art. Our crafts, whether they are painting, teaching, meditation, pottery, comedy, dancing create in us a devotion that reminds us of what is bigger than us. What is transcendent in our midst, what deserves our reverence and awe. Tonight seven courageous Bates students will be vulnerable and creative and open as they share stories of their crafts, and the way this practice creates a sense of devotion and purpose in their lives.”
One of the speakers was Mamta Saraogi ‘21 who compared her craft of writing to a way of being. “I do a lot of things. I eat, sleep, breathe, and I also burn the popcorn sometimes. But in the midst of doing all those things, there is sometimes a need for something else that can make an identity. Writing is one of those things. It’s a form of achieving an inner balance in a manner not unlike meditation.” For Saraogi, writing has allowed her to make sense out of chaos, bringing a meaning to seemingly irrational thoughts.

Emma Proietti ’21 found her craft in the circus at a young age. She began her speech with the memorable one-liner: “I ran away with the circus a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday,” although, as she later clarified, her parents were there to take her to circus lessons. There, she found her adopted circus family, who in her words, “have been some of the most supportive people in my life, both literally and figuratively.” Her craft has also brought a new outlook on how to balance life and work. One of the phrases that she picked up along the way is “If you feel like you are going to fall, you probably will.” After pausing while the audience laughed, she stated, “I wouldn’t necessarily want this on a motivational poster, but it is something that I have taken to heart after too many times pushing myself a little too far —suffering the consequences and ignoring what my body was telling me. Reaching your physical limit is not unlike reaching your mental limit. You need to recognize the signs that you need a break. Discovering how to push yourself in a controlled way can make you stronger.”

For some, a craft can be as simple as a daily routine. During his speech, Jack Shea ’19 reflected on the importance of creating a routine in both his school work and in the real world. “I’m pretty confident that not all too many of us look at our day-to-day routine as being something that has been honed and put into regular practice for the betterment of our well-being. I’m not inclined to look at my own schedule and see it as art, because that implies that it’s something labored over, original, intentional, and creative,” said Shea.

“Routines can be craft too,” Shea continued. “This came up in abundance for me this summer when I was with the least self-conscious people around us, children. I was given a teaching fellowship at a public charter school summer program in Brownsville, Brooklyn.” Through his experience teaching, Shea found that success in the classroom relies on the environment a teacher builds. “In a classroom environment, consistency is the key. It takes those shocks from everyday life and absorbs them, giving back both positive reinforcement for good character and a stable environment for developing questions.”

Over his years at Bates, Shea found that to be successful, you have to be your own teacher. As Shea put it, “Have an environment which reacts to you in ways that feed your energy on good days and bounce you back on the bad. Make sure that what you do on autopilot, is put yourself in places that help you by consistently giving you what you need, and point you towards your own success.”

One of the final speakers at the event was Alexandria Onuoha ’21, a woman who struggled with her faith before exploring it through the medium of dance. “I got my start in dance at church and it brought so much joy in my life because not only was I using my body as a vessel of the Lord, but I was communicating a language through my body to other souls that needed just a glimpse of what freedom and happiness could be for them.” Through dance, Onuoha has provided a space for healing, holding dance workshops at a domestic violence shelter back in her hometown.
At college, dance also allows her to open a space for those seeking self-expression: “At Bates, through dance, I am creating a space where women of color are finally being highlighted and their stories are being heard, and black bodies are being celebrated.” Onuoha put it best, as she concluded, saying, “Simply, my art is finding my voice through other people’s voices.”

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, students and staff gathered to listen to Johanna Hayes ’19 and Shangwei Deng ’19 discuss their experiences working on projects funded by the Phillips Student Fellowship over the summer.

Each summer, Bates awards students around $6,000 dollars to explore something they are passionate about. The requirement is that the project the student undertakes must be outside their cultural comfort zone. Students in the past have conducted projects ranging from research or career exploration to arts or community-engagement.

This summer, Deng participated in a full-immersion program in Latin while living in Falconieri Villa, about a half-an-hour away from Rome, Italy. Deng is currently a Classical and Medieval Studies and Politics double major at Bates. His talk “Making Latin Modern?” dealt with how the Latin language heavily informed one of his favorite modern works, “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot, which is ripe with references to antiquity.

When Deng first arrived in Italy, he could not speak a word of Latin. “On the first day, I was not able to speak the language with any other people. People were from France, some were from Egypt, there were people from Spain, Germany and also many Americans.” As he humored, “All I could reply was ‘Ita, ita, ita.’” Ita is a word for ‘yes’ in Latin.

However, he began to pick up the language by listening to others, “I was able to make sounds, I’d pick up here and there over a conversation between fluent people. I could sort of tell if a word meant ‘to speak’ or ‘to hear’ and I’d be able to compile a sentence using these words, telling them “sententia mea” or my opinion.”

Those in the program started by asking everyday questions such as “How are you?” “Did you know” and “Can you pass me the cheese?”

“And gradually,” recounted Deng, “during the second and third week, I unburdened myself with the inquiry of ‘what is the distance?’ and ‘what is the experience of time?’ and gradually and gradually, I played along and became more and more a part of the community: singing, going out for excursions that are still in Latin, and it’s a fascinating experience.” In a sense, he experienced what it would be like if Latin were still a modern language.

However, the question for him still stood what the ramifications of resurrecting a dead language are: “When I was writing the proposal, I knew what challenge I may have. Latin itself is not really easily connected to our present culture…and there will always be a realistic struggle between me plunging into an ideal world and airlifting Latin into a contemporary one. And I was also very aware of a slippage of a dead language into a contemporary one…there were so many things that I could not name.”

After Deng’s presentation, Hayes, a Dance major and Anthropology minor discussed her project titled “Studying Self-Identity and Culture in Dance Environments.” In her two-and-a-half months spent in Europe, Hayes travelled to Germany, Spain and Austria and took four different dance and moving programs.

One question she found herself asking was “How do different dance practices’s values shape an individual and their relationship with others?”

Per Hayes, “This was the biggest question of this project, just because I grew up in a ballet background and I was taught to stand up straight and suck my stomach in and a boy would lift me up and that’s how I built a relationship with my own body and understanding how I could touch people, not touch people—that built my world, and the moment I got out of that ballet context to a modern context, I was like ‘Oh wait! There are other ways of moving! I don’t have to pull my stomach in any more. Wow, does that feels great!’”

Hayes spent the first month in the small town of Stolzenhagen, Germany, living in an artist commune surrounded by an idyllic landscape where the Freedom to Move Caucus was held. In the program, dancers dealt with issues like consent, identity, and how embodied experiences differ between people. For Hayes, “It was so tangible, even in movement, to feel those differences and to feel our own stories come out and social things come into play and it kind of blew my world apart and it left me with a lot of questions about dance and the dance space, and the way that it’s structured and the way it definitely excludes people.”

Hayes then headed to Spain to participate in two dance programs, one in Zaragoza and one in de Pedra. “After coming out of the Freedom to Move Caucus, I still had all of these questions of privilege in my mind and was kind of wondering why am I here lying on the floor listening to my collarbone while there are some real things going on. And that was a huge barrier for me, something that I’m still trying to address,” Hayes said.

While she loved the movement and dance styles in Spain, she did not enjoy how it was taught. When speaking about her time in de Pedra, Hayes said, “You would just be so exhausted and so torn apart and you would just get up and go to the next class. And you’d get torn apart, and you’d be told to go more and faster and harder and you’d die, and you’d go to the next one.”

One dance element Hayes seeks to bring to the U.S. is how emotion can inform postmodern dance. “And so going forward as a dance artist, hopefully, I hope that I can take what I experienced in Spain and apply the other teaching ways of consent or social issues and self-guided practice into some of those movement styles that I learned in Spain. Out of this project I just feel like I have so many tools, like I can pull from so many different situations, and that’s a gift. It just made me really believe in dance and think there’s so many ways to do it, and that makes me super excited about it.”

For those interested in applying, the deadline for the Phillips Student Fellowship is February 1, 2019. Students interested are strongly encouraged to begin working now with an advisor, as the trip requires a lot of planning and forethought.