The Bowdoin Orient

During its Wednesday night meeting, Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) welcomed Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion Leana Amaez to discuss how BSG can facilitate conversations and promote a positive climate with respect to difference on campus. 

“Your obligation is to the process, not to anyone … not to neutrality … it’s holding a process that allows for everyone’s voices to be heard,” said Amaez. “And that’s going to be more important in this context than ever before.” 

Vice President for Student Government Affairs Reed Fernandez ’17 asked Amaez for her advice on BSG’s role in promoting a diverse and inclusive environment on campus, especially in lieu of the presidential election and recent hate-related incidents across the country. 

Multiple BSG members brought up the recently announced merger between the Women’s Resource Center and the Resource Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity. Although Amaez is not scheduled to begin supervising the reconceptualized Center for Gender and Sexuality until July of this year, members raised questions regarding why the merger happened, what Amaez’s new role will look like and other impacts of combining the centers.

“We’re not looking to replace [specific offices] and only do something that’s intersectional … That’s not by any means the way we’re planning on approaching it,” said Amaez. “The idea was that those spaces need to be collaborative and at the table together, because sometimes they’re stepping on each other’s toes in ways that are counterproductive.”

Amaez added that hearing stories from students who identified with more than one student center was another reason for the merger. 

“People have been saying we program and talk about issues in way that pulls people’s’ identities apart … in a way that does not feel authentic,” said Amaez. 

BSG members responded positively to Amaez’s visit, saying that they had a better understanding of their role in promoting inclusivity on campus and were more encouraged to collaborate with Amaez. 

“I think BSG is very important for these kinds of issues on campus … I’m glad she came,” Fernandez said in an interview with the Orient. “I think it was a productive discussion.” 

In addition to inclusivity on campus and the merger, BSG members also discussed planning for Ivies, an upcoming student government event with other NESCAC schools, a “Human Library” event and new developments concerning tampon dispensers and picnic tables. 

In response to growing student interest in public health, Associate Professor of History David Hecht is teaching an interdisciplinary course entitled “Public Health and the Liberal Arts” this semester. The course exposes students to lessons in public health through a variety of academic fields from mathematics to romance languages. 

“This class is part of a larger initiative of the College on public health and liberal arts,” Hecht said. “I’ve been working with a group of faculty for a little over a year now to brainstorm ways that we could capitalize on the large student interest in the subject.” 

Although Bowdoin rarely offers interdisciplinary classes, Hecht knew that the course had to be an interdisciplinary one from its inception. 

“Interdisciplinary was the logical place for the class,” said Hecht. “We do not have one person on campus who specializes in public health. It made sense to then bring in expertise from around the College.” 

The class’ lecturers reflect its interdisciplinary nature. Bowdoin professors from departments as varied as romance Languages, environmental studies, and mathematics are all scheduled to speak over the course of the class. Hecht also invited six guest speakers from outside of the College, whose lectures will be open to the general public.

“I wanted to make sure that we had representation from across the College,” Hecht said. “I had no particular designs on a specific department.” 

Students interested in taking the class had to fill out an application, which included a short essay detailing what they hoped to get out of the class, why they were interested in public health and their previous experience with public health. They were also required to discuss an unusual assignment that had prepared them for taking the course. 

A total of 18 students were selected from the 36 who applied. About half of the students in the class are on the pre-med track. 

“There are people in the class who are philosophy majors, anthropology majors, government and legal studies majors,” said Dhivya Singaram ’17, who is enrolled in the class. 

“You can tell that there are going to be a wide range of experiences and skillsets that contribute to our learning, and I know that the professors geared the class to us building off of each other’s expertise and applying it to the study of public health,” she said. 

Both Hecht and the students taking the class acknowledge that many aspects of the class are still being tested, but they all hope that similar classes are offered in the future. 

“I think that sometimes Bowdoin doesn’t like to focus on pre-professional because they want to be very open to everything, but sometimes it is good to have something very specific to help students decide if that’s something that they want to do,” said Michael Walsh ’19. “Even if it’s not a class on public health, there should be classes that are focused on more specific professions.” 

Hecht said that lessons from the class could help inform future public health courses at Bowdoin.

“At the moment this is just an experimental one-time thing,” said Hecht. “But we are hoping that one of the results of this class is that it helps us think about how best we can create public health programming for students and faculty in the future.” 

A technical error on December 1 caused students’ Polar Points to reflect the amount of points they have at the beginning of the semester. Students’ balances did not actually change. The issue resulted from the setup of spring meal plans and was fixed by Monday evening. Semester Polar Points are scheduled to reset on December 20. 

Polar Points were not removed from students’ OneCards and students were still able to spend their remaining fall Polar Points.

“The issue was only in the web application, not the card system itself,” Assistant Director for OneCard Coordinator Chris Bird wrote in an email to the Orient.

The incident was caused by spring meal plans and Polar Points being loaded onto student accounts in order to produce spring billing information. A setting on the OneCard website failed to notice that spring plans were inactive, resulting in the program showing students their spring account balance instead of their fall ones. 

Several students emailed Bird over the weekend with screenshots that demonstrated the problem.

Some students who noticed the error believed that their Polar Points had been reset, but discovered this was not the case.

“I think most people working at places where Polar Points were usable were aware of the issue. When I went to buy something from the [convenience store], they said that Polar Points weren’t reset and that the spring funds weren’t usable yet,” said Amanda Trent ’20. 

Staff from the OneCard Office and Bowdoin Information Technology staff fixed the display error.

Residential Life (ResLife) and Bear in Mind, a club designed to facilitate discussion around mental health, organized the first-ever Put-Yourself-First Week to help students with self-care. 

“This program is intended to remind us of how important it is to take care of ourselves, especially during potentially chaotic times, such as this moment right now with elections going on, diseases spreading around campus and the natural stress that comes with being a Bowdoin student,” said Gina Fickera ’18, Residential Life Assistant and coordinator of the event.

The week’s activities included yoga, tai chi and meditation sessions. A student panel on mental health, originally scheduled for Thursday evening, was postponed until next Thursday, November 17. 

“There wasn’t much of a connection between ResLife and Bear in Mind before this project happened,” said Fickera. “Which just shows how much the different student groups on campus can collaborate to make these things happen.” 

Fickera noted that members of the Counseling Center and the Health Center also helped with planning for the week. 

“We’re exposed to many of the issues that are going on campus, both individually and collectively for some people, so a constant thing that we look out for is to make sure that people are taking care of themselves,” said Fickera. “So it feels nice to be able to extend that to the entire campus rather than just the first years and the programs that you do with them.” 

She added that the week would hopefully teach people the importance of taking time to take care of themselves.

“Self-care is an ongoing process and it should definitely be extended beyond this week,” she said.

Over 150 students will deliver poster presentations at the first annual President’s Research Symposium today. In the past, there has only been a forum for science research, but President Clayton Rose opted to expand the symposium to include research across all disciplines this year. 

“The president’s interest is in all students and it seemed like such a wonderful opportunity for science students to showcase the work that they do over the summer, but we have students in the humanities and the arts and the social sciences,” said Interim Dean of Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon.

Michael Amano ’17 is presenting posters in both the neuroscience and East Asian studies departments, after presenting neuroscience research at the symposium last year. 

“I’ve been able to present on my neuroscience research at the symposium because I was here doing research for that  [last year], but I think it will be exciting to tell people I did this research [this summer], especially for the Hiroshima project.”

Amano split his summer between Brunswick and Japan. On campus, he spent four weeks studying crickets for a neuroscience project. He spent the rest of his summer tracking down survivors of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing. 

Amano and his project partner Ginny Crow ’18 are curating an exhibition based on drawing made by Hiroshima schoolchildren, which will open at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in the spring.

“We found four of them, and I interviewed them and learned about their drawings. And then in addition to that the question kind of developed into ‘what does it mean to grow up in a city devastated by a nuclear weapon?’” Amano said. 

“It was an incredible experience to be able to fit both of those projects that I really think are representative of my interests into one summer,” he added. 

Hyungyu Lee ’19 spent the summer in a chemistry lab, trying to synthesize Phenylphosphabenzene, an ingredient used in household items such as soap. 

“I’m excited about [the upcoming presentation]” he said. “I’m presenting about my favorite things, chemistry and just can’t wait to see other people presenting about their science.”

Evan Baughman ’17, a recipient of a Community Matters in Maine fellowship through the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good, will also be presenting at the symposium. He worked with the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in Portland over the summer. 

“I think that there couldn’t have been a better time to work with an immigrant legal aid clinic that serves low-income residents than this summer,” he said. “It has definitely made me far more informed about such a divisive and important issue in our current political situation.”

Baughman recognizes that his presentation topic is different from the majority of students’ topics at the symposium.

“It’s good that there’s a forum where students that were on campus doing work can display their achievements,” he said. “However, I think that it should be renamed if there’s going to be the Community Matters Program participating because there [are] a lot of fellowships that aren’t research.”

Unlike in past years, the President’s Research Symposium also coincides with Family Weekend, so some students will have the opportunity to share their summer research with their relatives. 

“We got to thinking how wonderful it would be for parents of first-year students to be here for Family weekend, to walk through that event and to see ‘wow, these are the kinds of things that Bowdoin students do as they get a little bit further in their work,’” Scanlon said.