Author Archives: Stevie Durocher

Exploration, Discovery, and Inspiration

Every once in a while, you’ll find that professor who gives you free range on essays. I have always found that Middlebury professors want you to be inspired by your work, that they encourage you to be innovative and creative in your research and papers, but that often still comes with prompts and structure. Every so often, though, you will walk into a class that is all about exploration. I am currently enrolled in two classes in which the professor provides structure for essays but also makes it very clear that she does not want to tell us what to explore. Every essay comes with a “your choice” prompt. Pedagogically, she wants us to find something that means a great deal to us in the hopes that we will use this topic to really let us grow and develop as students and people. Giving us free range allows us to be the best possible versions of ourselves, because we want to learn as much as we can about a subject for reasons that are not purely rooted in obtaining a good grade.

While it may seem obvious that writing about something you are interested in is more rewarding than writing about something about which you care little, but it has really come into focus for me this semester. I am currently working on an essay about various works of the children’s author Kate DiCamillo, and I am not writing about her because she was assigned reading, but instead because I happened to pick up Because of Winn-Dixie on a plane and fell in love. I immediately wanted to read everything she had written, and more than that, I wanted to bring all of this reading together in an academic way that would then become part of my Middlebury learning experience. I actually wanted to write an essay on this author. Just reading her work wasn’t enough; I needed to pull apart her novels, see how they fit together and where they find their place in the literary canon. Because I was given free range over what to write my essay about, I was free to find my own inspiration, and this has led to writing a really fun essay that I can honestly say I am proud of.

As an English major, I have written many an essay in my time at Middlebury. I have been given a lot of freedom in my writing, and I have also been put under a lot of constraints. Each essay has led to new discoveries and a deeper understanding of not only the material, but also who I am as a student. Not essay assignment, though, has really exemplified the Middlebury ideals of exploration, discovery, and inspiration in the way this essay has. Every once in a while, you’ll find that professor who gives you free range on essays, and every once in a while your whole perspective will change.

Choosing Your Advisor

It might seem strange that a senior, well into her major by now, is writing about the advisor-choosing process.  And it should, because that process took place quite a long time ago for me.  However, I find myself frequently telling the story of how I chose my advisor freshman year, because it continues to amaze me how incredibly lucky I was.

On the first day of my second semester, I walked into a class for which I was not registered. I hesitantly walked up to the professor and simply said, “Hi, I’m Stevie. May I please add this class, and I know this probably seems strange, but will you be my advisor?” I had never met this professor, nor had I ever taken a class in the department in which I was declaring my major. I just had a feeling. In response, this professor—who didn’t know anything about me save my first name—said, “Sure!” I knew the second she walked into the room that this professor would be someone from whom I was going to learn a great deal, someone to whom I could go for advice, someone who would make a large impact on my Middlebury years. It turns out, I was right. Almost four years later, this professor continues to be my advisor, serves as my thesis advisor, and also teaches two of the classes in which I am currently enrolled.

When I was touring colleges, many students told me they had close relationships with their professors. Every time I heard this, I thought it sounded important and wonderful, but I couldn’t image that I would have the confidence to foster a strong relationship with a professor outside of the classroom. What I have found, however, is that becoming close to my advisor at Middlebury didn’t take effort or overwhelming confidence. Instead, it took a shared interest in her academic field and a desire to learn from each other.

In a good advisor, you find someone who is demanding of that which is difficult and is compassionate about that which is most difficult. Your advisor should be someone to whom you go for advice not only on academics, but really about anything. Being at Middlebury can sometimes come with its fair share of stresses, and your advisor is there to help you navigate the rougher waters. He or she knows you are capable of greatness, but also understands that you are human. An advisor’s ability to balance your perspectives can be a lifesaver.

When I look back on my Middlebury years, I know I will remember my teammates, my housemates, and my friends; I’ll remember that incredible class that changed my life and that class that seemed like it might destroy me. There will be books I cherish and lessons I’ll carry with me forever. And at the head of all of this will stand the incredible influence that has been my advisor.

“What did you do over your Febmester?”

It’s that most splendid time of year again…THE FEBS ARE HERE! What’s a Feb you may ask? Well, here’s a link for some of the logistics: http://www.middlebury.edu/admissions/apply/february but to really know the Feb program, you need to know the Febmester. Currently at the forefront of everyone’s minds—Feb and Reg (September admission) alike—is that age old question: “What did you do over your Febmester?”

Each Feb is given the incredible opportunity to take a Febmester, which is like a gap year but only eight months in length. The best part of the Febmester? What you decided to spend your eight months doing is entirely up to you. It’s a chance for you go somewhere or learn something you had always wanted to but couldn’t find the time for in high school. It’s a chance for you to learn a new language in a foreign country, hike a trail that challenges every part of your mental and physical endurance, or reconnect with family that fell to the side when SAT prep, band rehearsal, and soccer practice reigned supreme. It’s a chance to take something you’ve always found interesting and turn it into your greatest passion or discover something you never thought of trying before. For me, the Febmester was the perfect time to get my first job and learn how to play the guitar on the side. I had never had time for a job before, and I really wanted to enter Middlebury having had that particular kind of responsibility.

And what is ultimately most wonderful about the Febmester is the stories you bring with you to campus in February. By the time February comes, Febs are so excited to finally be at Middlebury, they want to learn everything about each other. Febmester stories are not only a great way to break the ice during orientation, but they’re also a way for you to tell people what you love to do, who you are when you’re not at school. It’s amazing how the Febmester stories simultaneously make every single one of us unique and bring us all together to unify the class. I have many friends who spent their Febmesters hiking long, involved trails, and those who hiked in Spain have a lot to share with those who hiked in the US. Those who went abroad to Italy have a lot to talk about with those who went abroad to South Africa, because even though the cultures are hugely different, the experience of being in a strange country with new food, new customs, and, often, a new language builds friendships that last not only your four Middlebury years, but also far beyond graduation.

There are countless perks of being a Feb, but the Febmester—both the experience and the way it aids in your transition to Middlebury—is by far one of the most special pieces of Feb life.

J-term, New-ways-to-spend-the-day-term

Smack dab in the middle of the winter, when wind is brisk but the views are breathtaking, you might think the best way to enjoy the winter is snuggled up with tea, looking out your dorm room windows. While this is more than lovely, J-term is really the best time to get out and have fun! And I don’t necessarily mean outside (so you don’t need to worry about frostbite).

Because we only take one class during J-term, we all have tons of free time to attend Middlebury-sponsored events or bring our friends together in a way we don’t usually have the time to. Just last night, my housemates and I attended an etiquette dinner hosted by our Center for Careers and Internships. We all dressed up in our most dapper business-casual attire and learned all of the proper steps of buttering your bread. While this may seem silly, it was a wonderful opportunity to spend times with my friends in a completely new environment that was a little challenging but ultimately came with a delicious catered meal.

And it just gets better from there! Not only do we all have extra time to go to sponsored events, we can put on our own little luncheons such as Thai Thursday. While my housemates and I usually have class on Thursdays, we took J-term time to spend the afternoon together off of campus in our greater Middlebury community. Lunch in the dining hall with friends is wonderful, but getting together to plan something different is truly special.

If you want to go even further, if a lunch trip into town just doesn’t seem like enough, J-term classes often aren’t five days a week, so day trips become far easier than they are during a typical semester. This week, my housemates and I are planning a trip to a small Vermont cheese-making factory. I can’t image anything better than eating cheese with my best friends. If you can, I’m in!

J-term is one of the most exciting parts of going to Middlebury. At first, you have so much time to read for pleasure, you spend all of your time in your room reading young adult novels (or at least that’s what I did), but then you see that you have been given an amazing opportunity to spend time with your friends in whole new ways. Whether you’re faking your way through an etiquette dinner or tasting cheese, J-term is nothing but fun and surprises!

Never Stop Exploring

The North Face company got it right: never stop exploring.  But it doesn’t always have to involve the wilderness, which in Vermont can get pretty aggressive around this wintery time of year.  No, the exploring I’m talking about happens in the Middlebury classroom.  We are constantly being encouraged to take classes that force us to work outside of our comfort zones.  Our advisors tell us to do this, our friends tell us to do this, our professors tell us to do this, even our graduation requirements tell us to do this (and we definitely want to listen to those), but what we really need is to actually do it.  In order to receive my diploma at the end of my four years, I know I need to fulfill seven of our eight distribution requirements and all four of our cultural requirements, and I have done so.  I took Germany in the 19th Century because I needed a history class, I took Funerary Arts of East Asia as my AAL (Asia, Africa, Latin America), and I took Epic Greek and Roman Poetry to fulfill my philosophy requirement, but did that all just kind of defeat the point?  Sure, I know I feel as though I am a more well-rounded student for having taken those classes, and I learned a lot about other cultures I never could have learned in my majors or minor, but was I truly pushing myself outside of my comfort zone if I was being told I had to fulfill these requirements?  Maybe.  But maybe not.

I am grateful Middlebury has asked me to fulfill a myriad of courses outside of my typical schedule, but what I was missing, what Middlebury could not provide for me, was a class I took entirely by my own coercion.  In my first three years, I never took a class about which I had to fight with myself.  This semester, that changed, however.  I took a class that did not fulfill any major or minor, distribution, or cultural requirements.  No one told me to take this class; I just took it.  The class is called Writing for Children, and, I will admit, it is taught by my advisor, who is one of my favorite professors on campus.  Doesn’t sound too scary, right?  What am I talking about going outside of my comfort zone?  This is a 100 level course in my department of study taught by someone with whom I have a close relationship.  Well, it’s not all quite so easy.  The catch: this is a creative writing course.  While I am passionate about the subject of this course–which is familiar to me–I am absolutely terrified of expressing creativity, especially creativity in the form of the written word.  The idea of crafting a piece with my mind and my heart only to have it put on display and torn apart by my peers is not something I find enjoyable.  The ideas of the class: totally up my alley.  The application of the material: heavens no!

What I have found is that, even though each time I write a piece for workshop my chest closes up a bit in sheer horror, I also get really excited.  This is new.  This is unfamiliar.  This is really fun.  I had always been too afraid of the criticism to take a creative writing class at Middlebury, but as a student in this class I have grown to appreciate others’ opinions not as judgement but as helpful suggestions and a mutual appreciation of the difficulty of this process.  The workshop environment is one in which I have never found myself, and it is one I always assumed I would loathe.  It turns out, there is a great deal I can learn when I force myself to do something terrifying.  This class has proven to be one of the most enjoyable and self-realizing classes I have had the pleasure to take at Middlebury.  Doing something that seems emotionally impossible is in every way beneficial.

You might think senior year is the year in which you finally get to just relax in your major, but I’ve found it’s exactly the right time to never stop exploring.

Moving Out

In the senior year there is constant talk of the next step–where we’ll all go from here and what we’ll do after we leave Middlebury.  But those are scary thoughts no one likes to think about.  Instead, I think we should all spend our last year (and maybe even all four years) moving out, not moving on.

As a Vermonter, I know many different Vermonts.  What does this mean?  It means the Middlebury way of life is not the only way of life you find if you drive around the state, especially to those areas that are far more rural.  There is so much to be enjoyed about Vermont, so many different people from different backgrounds.  You don’t always expect that from such a rural location, but I think getting to know the greater Vermont is an essential part of the Middlebury College experience.  It would be a shame to spend all four years in only one kind of Vermont when there are so many with which to fall in love.

The Middlebury College community recently came back from Fall Break.  Because Fall Break isn’t a full week, only Saturday through Tuesday, many students don’t go home and decide to stay at school and enjoy Vermont without quite as much homework.  Some students take this time to explore Vermont more fully.  Whether it’s spending three days in the Green Mountains surrounded by Vermont’s four-legged residences, going to a small B&B in the southern part of the state for a night, or finding a Vermont friend with whom to go home for the weekend, there are endless ways one can get to know the greater state.  A day trip to Montpelier can show you what it means to be the only U.S. state capital without a McDonald’s, or a trek up to the Northeast Kingdom (a personal favorite of mine) can show you firsthand what almost 1.5 million acres of farmland looks like when covered in autumn leaves.

Middlebury is a beautiful place filled with people who have lived and worked in Vermont their entire lives, people who are only here for four years, people who thought this was temporary but absolutely had to make it home, and everything in between.  It’s a diverse place filled with thousands of unique stories, and that only gets more exciting and more varied as you move around the state.  If you meet a Middlebury student from Vermont, you’ll likely find he or she has a lot of other Vermont Middkid friends, because we like to revel in our shared experiences, but you’ll also find that our upbringings are very different depending on the region of Vermont in which we grew up.  Where I’m from, we have farms on farms on farms, but I have a friend from Burlington–the largest city in the state–who thinks of Lake Champlain as home.  We grew up in two very different versions of Vermont, but we love it all the same.

So in this time of thinking about what’s next, I like to remind myself, and those around me, to think about what’s right now and how we can spend this time enjoying and exploring the beautiful state Middlebury students call home.

Lights…Camera…Action?

Hair. Make up. Costume. Poses? Different costume? Fix hair. More makeup. Different costume, again?

Every year, the Middlebury Dance Department puts on a photo shoot for all majors and minors in the department.  It’s an exciting time to work with a photographer who really knows dancers.  It’s also a time filled with indecision.  As I walked into the costume closet–hair a mess, makeup only half plastered on my face–I had absolutely no idea where to begin.  I’m almost certain some of those costumes have been in that closet since before I was born.  There was everything from silver unitards to oversized red blazers to dresses only a barbie could fit into, and I wasn’t interested in any of it.  Did I want to look pedestrian or full on diva?  Use the clothes I brought or be completely transformed?  And for heaven’s sake, what was I going to do with my hair?  It’s amazing how quickly such trivial questions became so vitally important when there’s a camera involved.

I was at the shoot with the three other senior dance majors, who were also trying on and throwing off costumes at an alarming rate.  Each of us was to decide what our solo shoot would look like, but also how we wanted to look for our shoot as a group.  Here we were, four very different dancers with four very different bodies, all trying to look like we fit together.  There were some serious, and thankfully some not-so-serious, decisions to be made.  Ultimately, we decided we would all don jumpsuits of varying colors.  My first thought: you want me to dance in this thing?

Once we were all together and under the lights, I had a second thought: this might be kind of neat.  I had done the shoot the year before but only as a soloist.  For the most part, solo shoots are all basically the same, because I know how I dance and what it feels like to be in front of the camera.  Shooting, and more specifically moving, as a group would prove to be an entirely new and surprisingly rewarding experience.  None of us knew where to begin, but we knew we had to start dancing eventually.

What happens when you put four dancers with different backgrounds in jumpsuits and tell them to move?  They move!  Although our collaboration typically starts and ends with us all being in the same room for technique class, there was a mutual understanding of each other’s strengths as both people and dancers that allowed us to create some truly beautiful images.  It was surprising how well we knew each other and were able to respond to each other’s movement.  All having to overcome the awkwardness of the clunky jumpsuits gave us a common enemy, and this created a level of comfort with each other we had never been able to achieve before.  At first, we were afraid to even get close to each other, but as the shoot progressed, we learned how to lean on each other for both moral and “oh my gosh, stay still, please don’t let me fall over” support.

Having completed both sessions, I can now say the group shoot actually taught me more about who I am as a dancer than did my solo shoot.  Being me is pretty familiar, but being me in a jumpsuit with three other dance majors, that’s a whole other story.