Olivia DrakeStriking clocks gongs per day from Hartford to Middletown. Silver wedding anniversary years from Laos to Chad. Squares on a chess board from Warsaw to Kinshasa. Can you solve this puzzle? If so, you've started a treasure hunt, right on Wesleyan's campus. The Wesleyan Treasure Hunt, a permanent campus installation, begins at a plaque located in the southeast corner of Usdan University Center near the Huss Courtyard. It encourages students to explore the nooks and crannies of campus, and interact with the buildings as they look for new clues. "The hunt encapsulates everything I like about Wesleyan," says its creator Jack…
Ben Shiling '12 delivered a "Senior Voices" Address May 26. Hi, my name is Ben and I am an English major. To many, my parents included, this was a deliberate choice to either a) bank on grad school for a “good job,” or b) become an English teacher. Period. English major did not say to them “this is a man with a diversified future.” I was asked recently “what were you planning on doing with that” at a job interview. Ah! The life of a liberal arts graduate! We are a disreputable bunch, misfits, iconoclasts, destined, as Whitman proudly boasts,…
Max Bevilacqua '12 presented a "Senior Voices" speech in Memorial Chapel on May 26. There aren’t many places that I have felt comfortable wearing a dress in public. If you had told me, before I transferred from Georgetown, that in a few short months I would be sporting a cute little pink number with a deep v-neck in Beckham Hall, my Jesuit professors would have cried, and I would have laughed in disbelief. And if you had told me, that in a few short months at Wesleyan, I would be welcomed so warmly, challenged so fiercely, or inspired so deeply…I’m…
The Office of Parent Programs and the proud parents of the Class of 2012 hosted a gathering on May 26 for graduating seniors and their grandparents. Photos of the event are below: (more…)
The Wesleyan Chapter of Brighter Dawns, a non-profit organization founded by Tasmiha Khan ’12, was featured on News 8 WTNH on May 11. Brighter Dawns raises funds to build latrines and wells in Bangladesh. According to the report, Brighter Dawns started when Tasmiha Khan went to a slum in Bangladesh with her family and visited a young woman living in poverty. "Her name was Usma. She was about 15 years old. Had three children. Was forced into poverty at that time," she said. Khan started doing a few things to help that family, and when she came back to the U.S. she kept helping,…
David PesciKennedy Odede ’12 was featured in a May 5 Hartford Courant article discussing his mother’s impact on all he has done in the last four years. Odede came to Wesleyan from the Kibera slum of Nairobi and has since built a school, a clean water latrine, and a health center back home. "Work hard and read books. Look around you, but don't hate," Jane Achieng Odede told the young son she struggled to feed in Kibera, one of the world's largest slums next to Kenya's capital of Nairobi. Residents there are mostly jobless or live on less than a dollar a day,…
Join the Wesleyan community for class reunions, educational WESeminars, picnics, campus tours, a parade of classes and much more during the 2012 Reunion & Commencement festivities May 24-May 27 on campus. Highlights include an Eclectic party featuring The Rooks; an all-college picnic and festival on Foss Hill; a 50th Reunion and President's Reception for the Class of 1962; a champagne reception for graduating seniors and their families; an eco-friendly All-College Dinner; "Senior Voices" with the Class of 2012; the traditional All-College Sing; Andrus Field Tent party featuring Kinky Spigot and the Welders; and of course, the 180th Commencement Ceremony on…
As a 2012-12 Fulbright recipients, Miriam Berger ’12 will study journalism in Egypt; and Matthew Alexander ’12 and Lynn Heere '12 will teach English in Germany. Su Zheng, associate professor of music, associate professor of East Asian studies, will study, "China’s Emergent Soundscape: New Music Creativities, Body Politics and the Internet in Defining a Global Chineseness," in Shanghai, China. The Fulbright Program is the largest U.S. international exchange program offering opportunities for students, scholars, and professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools worldwide. Miriam Berger, a College of Social Studies major, will begin…
Lauren RubensteinQ&As with outstanding students is an occasional feature of The Wesleyan Connection. This issue we speak with Grace Ross from the Class of 2012. Q: Grace, you'll be graduating this May with a double major in English and American Studies. Why did you choose to major in those areas? A: It was the American Literature survey course I took with Joel Pfister my freshman fall that drew me to English and American Studies. We read Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative. Professor Pfister essentially summarized what I had been attempting to argue in A.P. U.S. History and offered analysis far beyond…
Lana Lana ’12 and Jessica Spates ’12 received a Baden-Württemberg–Connecticut Exchange Grant for a one-year study in Germany. The Baden-Württemberg Exchange Program offers students an opportunity to earn college credits in one of Germany’s top nine universities. Students spend the academic year at the university they choose. The Baden-Württemberg Exchange originated from a legislative partnership formed between the State of Connecticut and the German state of Baden-Württemberg in 1989. The agreement invites all students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities in Connecticut to study at any institution of higher learning in Baden-Württemberg. With nine universities from which to choose and…
Cara Tratner ’12 grew up in the dorms of Stanford University where her dad taught English. Immersed in academia from the start, she did not begin to question her educational privilege until her freshman year at Wesleyan. “As I became aware of the unequal patterns of access to education in the U.S.,” Tratner comments, “I looked back at my own schooling in a different light, starting to think critically about the level of segregation even in my own ‘good’ high school, and the way in which my success as a student was to a certain extent dependent on the failure…