Kaya Patel

Professors are such fundamental presences in students’ academic lives, so the thought that they have a life outside of their teaching can come as a shock. But professors, like students, are not singular in their interests.

Many professors have passions and hobbies outside of their teaching. Whether they’re researching biology, history or English, there is space for a robust and fulfilling life beyond the boundaries of their vocation.

For Professor of English Aaron Kitch, music is a calling. To him, the word “hobby” doesn’t even begin to describe the passions he holds outside of the classroom.

“For me, ‘hobby’ is not the word for [music]. It’s like, I need it. I need to play, or I don’t feel like I am fully human,” Kitch said. “My issue is with the word [hobby], which I think sometimes can be a demeaning word.”

Before the formation of “True Believer,” his synth-pop concept album and Racer X, his band, Kitch recalls expressing his love of music prior to even being able to walk.

“I kept crawling up on piano benches before I could walk….  My parents ended up getting a piano, and I started piano lessons,” Kitch said. “And then, my parents again, very generously, because they supported all of this, also bought me a synthesizer.”

Music is only one of Kitch’s passions—he is quick to include teaching in that category as well, emphasizing his devotion to his profession.

“I should say for me, obviously teaching is also a passion, and I’m lucky that my main profession is my passion,” Kitch said. “[But], there’s a bit of a bias against professors that we secretly don’t work very hard. It’s an old cultural bias.”

Music and teaching are highly connected passions for Kitch, linked with his long-running love of theater. While he is now a professor of English, he views himself as an amalgamation of all his passions.

“I did music and theater all through school…, [but] I knew that if I went down those roads, they would be extremely difficult for me,” Kitch said. “So in some ways, my profession is calculated out of that. But it is still in continuity because I got into studying and reading Shakespeare through theater…, so there’s a connection between what I do and teaching and writing and then the music. They’re all associated.”

Growing up reading “Little House on the Prairie,” Laboratory Instructor in Biology Bethany Whalon would tell her family that she was born in the wrong era. Nevertheless, that did not stop her from living her dream life on a farm, connecting with the land through her hobbies and lifestyle.

“We have two dogs, two cats, five chickens, three sheep, one goat and three horses,” Whalon said. “That’s my every morning, every night—take care of the animals.”

In addition to caring for her animals, Whalon gardens, operates a local soapmaking business and raises sheep for wool, all enhancing her connection to Maine and her land.

“I just love feeling connected to the land. We also have a vegetable garden, and we raise a lot of our food. And we try to get our other food, as much of it as we can, locally, just try to stay close to the land, the people who raise our food and all the work that people do to make our lives so rich,” Whalon said.

Whalon comes from a strong maternal lineage of avid knitters who encouraged her to start her craft at the age of four.

“My mother was a knitter, my grandmother was a knitter, my aunts were knitters, so they were all knitting. And I wanted to, of course, learn what they knew. So they got me started when I was four, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” Whalon said.

In her early 20s, Whalon would often visit a sheep farm, which piqued her interest in raising sheep herself and learning how to process their wool into yarn. She then joined a group, where she met two women who own a fiber mill and goat farm in Monmouth and taught her how to shear, process and dye wool.

Thirty years later, Whalon continues to knit often and learn new techniques. Currently, she is working on a scarf that encompasses decades of labor and care.

“All of the different colors that are in this scarf were all experiments trying to spin a new fiber, or trying a new dyeing technique, or trying a new combination of whatever. So they’re all scraps of yarn that I’ve been collecting for 30 years, turning into this,” Whalon said.

Now, Whalon hosts a knitting club on campus every Thursday afternoon in Druckenmiller Hall to share her passion with the Bowdoin community.

Assistant Professor of History Caylin Carbonell spends her days researching and teaching  about households and labor in colonial New England, but in her free time, she loves to get outside and play frisbee.

In addition to frisbee, Carbonell has recently started to enjoy winter sports like cross-country skiing and ice skating in Brunswick.

“I have that space to turn on a different type of thinking, or to turn off my history brain,” Carbonell said. “I’ve tended toward more outdoors or more active hobbies because sometimes those are the kinds of things that allow us to fully take a break from thinking.”

Carbonell was introduced to the sport during her sophomore year at Bates College, where she found a great community that shaped her experience. In graduate school, frisbee continued to be an important part of her life that served as a break from her academic work.

“It was an opportunity to meet people and make friends outside of school and work, but it’s also been a very fun way for me to both feel like I’m exercising and doing something that’s completely removed from what I do for a living,” Carbonell said.

When she returned to Maine to work at the College, Carbonell joined a summer frisbee league in Portland, where she connected with professors at Bates and Colby College as well as Bowdoin students. In the league, she met Sandy Ganzell, Bowdoin’s frisbee coach, and got involved as a coach in the program.

“It’s been a really nice way to take something that’s a hobby of mine, that’s something I really enjoy doing, and get to know students outside of the regular classroom setting,” Carbonell said.