The Semester Starts

Tuesday morning the new incoming spring class showed up for a brief tour. They were great and I was very surprised at how many of them were transfer students. I'm always happy to see a transfer student because I know they, as a group, do very well at Hampshire. They have the advantage of already having left home and resolved those kind of emotional problems associated with departure. It is a drastic lifestyle change moving out of the only home you've ever know and in with a smorgasbord of strangers.

Just finding your way through the day can suddenly be quite daunting. Do you actually sit and watch your laundry or do  you walk away and hope it's still there when you come back. Who would want my wet laundry anyway? Isn't that creepy? So transfer students have done laundry already and maybe some have even paid an electric bill. That's always sobering – the cost of just living, not even doing anything. Having had that as a previous experience allows you to move on to more important problems and dilemmas. Today they all seemed happy and eager, ready for the semester to start.

It's hard to tell new students what Hampshire is really like. First, it's not what you think it is regardless of what you actually thought it was. It's subtler and more internal than you might imagine. No one here is in competition with anyone else, but you are always worried about the quality and quantity of your own work. That's the competition here, your work measured both in pounds and weightiness.

That same afternoon I shot a one hour long interview with a final semester Division III student who has been working in the labs. She spent last year in Afghanistan working on an unusual television program. In the process of the interview I discover she proposed the show herself to Afghani television, found funding, and while traveling around the country helped produce it. The show is like finding a new pop singer on American Idol, but with business entrepreneurs as the singers – they don't sing, they show their business plan. What's your business plan look like? Now she's documenting the results in a video documentary and describing the process in the form of a handbook (both on and off the web) for other countries to try out. I'm impressed.

Beginnings of semesters are always promising, but it's always nice to see at the same time real results of what Hampshire students do in the world and then start the semester.