The Bowdoin Orient

As the college application process concludes for high school seniors, newly admitted students are faced with the decision to enroll—or not—at Bowdoin next fall. As a current first year, this seems like a distant memory, though it reminds me of what convinced me that Bowdoin was for me.

Comparable to many other NESCAC schools, Bowdoin offers a multitude of resources, rigorous academics and a picturesque campus. While I heavily considered these factors, what ultimately drew me to Bowdoin was how I instantly felt at home; after all, the first line of the Offer of the College is “To be at home in all lands and ages.” Perhaps I’m still in the honeymoon phase of my time here, but Bowdoin has definitely become a home for me in the last seven months. This became far clearer upon return from an Alternative Spring Break trip to Pontotoc Valley, Miss.

Prior to the trip, the student leaders assigned the reading, “Have faith in understanding,” an Orient article written by Steve Kolowich in 2006 about his experiences on the trip. Kolowich acknowledged the preconceptions he had prior to his arrival in the South, which were comparable to my group’s collective thoughts about “red states, religious yahoos, ‘values’ voters, country bumpkins carousing around in pickup flatbeds with their shotguns and hounds, stopping periodically to participate in a hootenanny and/or elect Bush.”

Soon after the doors of Studzinski opened on Saturday evening, the auditorium filled to capacity with alumni and students there to celebrate the longstanding a cappella tradition of the Bowdoin College Meddiebempsters. 

Alumni and current members of the Meddies, Bowdoin’s oldest a cappella group and the third oldest group in the nation, got together over Homecoming Weekend to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the group’s creation.

Peter Grace ’52 delivered opening remarks on the rich history of the Meddies. In 1937, the year the group was founded, a cappella recruitment began with an advertisement in the Orient looking for “eight men who weren’t tone deaf” and these talented gentlemen filled the ranks of the original ensemble.

In a true demonstration of crowdsourcing for a cause, Simon Bordwin ’13 is organizing a Relay for Tay fundraiser at Bowdoin this Sunday in honor of his late friend Taylor Matthews, who died from a type of bone cancer called osteosarcoma at the age of 16. So far, 27 Bowdoin students have signed on to participate in the fundraiser and Bordwin has raised $1,123 for children’s cancer research on Crowdrise, an online fundraising site. Taylor received her diagnosis at age eleven, when a malignant tumor was found on her ribs. After battling the cancer for five years—undergoing countless surgeries and treatments—she passed away in February 2008, during her junior year at Edgemont High School in Scarsdale, New York.