New clubs hope to pick up steam in spring semester

News in brief: Immigration attorneys to answer questions Monday

Attorneys Mike Murray and Sara Fleming of FordMurray Law in Portland will visit the College on Monday to discuss policies and address student concerns in light of immigration policy decisions recently made by the Trump administration. Both Fleming and Murray work in immigration law and have experience with clients in higher education and student visas.
The event will be held at 4 p.m. in Main Lounge in Moulton Union and is open to the community.
Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster announced the event in an email to all students and employees on January 17. Individuals were able to submit anonymous questions for the attorneys via an online survey until January 27.

News in brief: Sustainable Bowdoin to encourage green living

On Tuesday, Sustainable Bowdoin will launch the Green Living Commitment, a program designed to help students create healthy habits and reduce their carbon footprints.
The program is a revamped version of a previous Sustainable Bowdoin initiative, Green Dorm Room Certification. Bethany Taylor, the sustainability outreach coordinator, said that the new program is designed to be more individualized.
“If you really want to recycle, but your roommate is not at all interested, you are no longer responsible for their inaction,” Taylor said.
Through a survey, students can pledge to different actions and habits for three different levels of certification: Bronze, Silver and Green. An online checklist outlines a point system, where students earn points based on their habits. Low commitment activities, such as buying a plant, earn fewer points, while higher commitment activities, like carpooling to campus, earn more points.
Additionally, participants will be entered in a raffle each month to win prizes for their dorm depending on their certification level. The higher the certification, the better the prize.
“The competition should reinforce people’s participation,” Taylor said. “It’s ongoing [and] you are encouraged to go back if you want to raise yourself up a level.”
The Green Living Commitment will run this semester in conjunction with another campus-wide energy-saving competition that will begin on February 27, International Polar Bear Day, and run through April 22, Earth Day.
Taylor hopes that the Green Living Commitment will become a permanent part of Sustainable Bowdoin’s programming.
“This semester will be focused on taking in student feedback and coming up with a better version of it to start in the fall,” she said.
To promote the Green Living Commitment, Sustainable Bowdoin will host a “Love Your Planet Valentine” event where students can write notes to each other in the spirit of the holiday.

News in brief

New clubs hope to pick up steam in spring semester

February 3, 2017

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This semester, three new clubs will join the ranks of over 100 organizations chartered by the College. They each have hopes of creating spaces and communities for issues and activities not represented by current groups. The groups are dedicated to analyzing feminism through film, discussing socioeconomic status at Bowdoin and producing student-driven TED talks.

Films About Feminism aims to eliminate the negative stigma surrounding feminism through analyzing gender roles in film. Audrey Leland ’18 was inspired to found the club after a successful screening and discussion of the film “Trainwreck” at Helmreich House last year. The club plans to host weekly screenings of selected movies followed by discussions on Friday afternoons at 24 College Street.

“We thought it’d be nice to open up to the wider Bowdoin community and welcome anybody who wants to watch movies with us and look at them through a lens,” Leland said.

Quest for Excellence is a another newly chartered organization. Originally a chapter of Questbridge, a national organization, it aims to provide a space dedicated to student discussion of socioeconomic disparities on campus. The group maintains its national affiliation with QuestBridge.

“Class isn’t something that is rude to talk about, and it deserves dialogue from all sides. And these conversations need to start ASAP, if not already,” said Gerlin Leu ’19, the group’s leader.

Kevin Trinh ’19 formed TEDx Bowdoin after watching TED talks. Unlike other clubs, TEDx Bowdoin had to follow an established TED procedure before it could be approved.

“TED has pages upon pages of rules that we have to follow, and a lot of suggestions that we should be following as well,” Trinh said.

Editor's Note, February 6, 10:55 a.m.: An earlier version of this article stated that Quest for Excellence decided to separate from its national affiliation with QuestBridge. It has been modified to reflect that the group is still affiilated with QuestBridge.

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