The Bowdoin Orient

Building community has been a major topic of discussion on campus, as students consider the best way to encourage dialogue around challenging issues. Dear Bowdoin Human speaks to just these issues. The anonymous pen pal program for Bowdoin students was founded by Talia Cowen ’16 at the start of last summer.

“I really think the heart of this program is just about facilitating discussion, but I think one of its strengths is that it defies definitions, so people use it how they need too,” she said.

Cowen’s inspiration came from a Dear Oxford Human program she observed while abroad.  “As a person who felt sort of isolated in the community at Oxford, I liked what Dear Oxford Human was doing,” she said. “I realized Bowdoin didn’t have anything like that and that it was such a powerful force in people’s lives there that I really wanted to bring it back.”  

Dear Bowdoin Human works in tandem with The Undiscussed, another student-run organization that works to break barriers and enable change through dialogue. Students who sign up for Dear Bowdoin Human are assigned partners to write letters based on topics chosen by Cowen.

“You can write about anything but I also give prompts. Sometimes the letters are funny with questions like ‘What’s your favorite kind of bread?’ and other times they aren’t, when students write things like ‘I’ve been struggling with depression for the last few months, what have you been struggling with?’” she said. “I think people take it how they need to take it.”

 All the letters are anonymous, addressed “Dear Bowdoin Human” and signed “Another Bowdoin Human.”

“If they want me to read the letters they put a star on the letters so it’s really cool to feel part of it by observation,” said Cowen. “I also post some of the starred ones to the Dear Bowdoin Human blog for everyone to read.”

The blog shows examples of anonymous letters students have written and shared with consent. It aims to make public the inner feelings and struggles of fellow Bowdoin students and provides a space for solidarity, companionship and community-building. 

Cowen hopes Dear Bowdoin Human will promote campus dialogue in a more meaningful way than forums like Yik Yak.

“I had a friend describe it to me as a kind of anti-Yik Yak, because it allows you to relieve stress and talk about issues but also go in-depth into things you are thinking about and really reflect on your own experiences,” she said. “I always feel like I want to hear people's views and ideas on different topics, but the constraints of Yik Yak sort of make that difficult.”

Cowen emphasized that through Dear Bowdoin Human, students can embrace anonymity, rather than exploiting it as some Yik Yak users do.

“It’s like using the ‘it could be anyone’ idea in positive way,” she said. “It’s community that’s not necessarily defined and I think that’s good.”

Students are encouraged to sign up at tinyurl.com/DearBowdoinHuman, while anonymous student-submitted letters can be viewed at dearbowdoinhuman.tumblr.com. 

Last Sunday, Sabina Hartnett ’18 finished the New York CIty Marathon with a time of 4:26:30, averaging 10:10 minutes per mile, despite a hamstring injury. 

However, for Hartnett, the most meaningful part of race was not the finish, but between mile 19 and mile 21.

“You start to question yourself at mile 19. You’re like, why did I sign up to do this?” she said.

Digging in and answering that question is what Hartnett said gave her the motivation to finish the race. 

“Mile 24 you enter Central Park, which is a game changer,” she said. “Mentally it’s a lot harder to run in the street than in nature. When you reach the finish line they put a medal around your neck and people cheer for you which is so nice.”

Hartnett noted that one of the greatest challenges of marathon running is a mental one.

 “You can stop whenever you want and it’s such a tempting thought. 61,000 people are going to cross the finish line anyways so it’s up to you how much you want to push yourself. There’s so many people,” she said. 

Last weekend’s race was Hartnett’s second marathon. She completed the 2014 Boston Marathon as a senior in high school with a time of 4:07:00. Growing up, she often went to watch the Boston Marathon with her grandparents because the halfway mark was in their home of Wellesley, Massachusetts. She said that running in it had been a long term goal.

In order to participate in both the Boston and New York City marathons, a person must either meet a certain qualifying time, or run to raise money for charity. Hartnett ran as a charity runner both times. 

For the Boston Marathon Hartnett raised money to benefit a fellow high school classmate, Hannah Randolph, who had passed away her sophomore year of high school. 

“It really made me think about all of the things you can do as a young person that she would never get to do and I wanted to run in honor of that and in honor of her,” said Hartnett.

For the New York marathon, Hartnett ran to benefit the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society. 

“I have always been interested in education and have been so lucky in my early childhood to have the education and the resources I’ve had,” she said.

Hartnett plans to continue running marathons in the future, but for her the most meaningful thing gained from this experience was finding out she was capable of it.

“I do enjoy running long distances, but when it gets to 26 miles, it’s not fun anymore. It’s more about being able to do it, and the feeling after, rather than the feeling during the marathon”

This year, the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC) and the McKeen Center for the Common Good worked together to create a  series of hybrid pre-orientation trips that combined outdoor adventures and a service aspect. 

These Service and Adventure Orientation (SAO) trips provided a third option for incoming first years, one that was welcomed by both trip leaders and new students.

“I absolutely wanted to lead one of these trips because it was kind of like a new guinea pig idea,” said Lloyd Anderson ’16, one of the leaders of an SAO Trip to Carrabassett Valley. 

For both Anderson and his co-leader Bailey Moritz ’16, however, it was more than just the novelty that drew them to lead these trips.

“I requested to do a hybrid trip because I felt like the idea to combine adventure and service was very Bowdoin and represented Bowdoin really well,” said Moritz. “In the Offer of the College, it talks about how important place is, as well as giving back to the community and contributing to that place that you’re enjoying.” 

The types of service on the SAO trips included working on trails, digging and implementing an outhouse pit—which Anderson christened—clearing beaches and removing trash. 

“The trail maintenance was actually the best part,” said Moritz. “I had never thought about the people who actually go to maintain the trails. The guy who helped us maintained a 60-mile part of the the Appalachian Trail. It really gave me an appreciation for the people who do this work.” 

For Erik Liederbach ’19, the service aspect of his trip helped his group bond. 

“We were hiking through the rain carrying a giant plank of wood to cover boggy areas, and I was like, ‘wow, this is the epitome of team bonding,’” he said. 

Anderson also believes the service activities of the SAO trips helped bring their groups together in a more meaningful way.

“It’s a special kind of bonding that I don’t think would have happened if they hadn’t had this work to do,” Anderson said.

According to BOC Assistant Director Adam Berliner ’13, BOC trips had featured a larger service component in years past. Berliner said that future student opinion would dictate whether service once again becomes a substantial part of the BOC’s repertoire. 

“In the end, because the BOC is a student club, whatever the students are interested in becomes the focus of what we do,” said Berliner. 

Students walking into Hawthorne-Longfellow Library this Monday may have been surprised to see a new installation involving music, water columns and chimes. 

The new public art installation, “#Carbonfeed,” created by artists John Park and Jon Bellona was designed to show how online behavior is directly connected to the physical world.

“#CarbonFeed” uses tweets from Twitter users around the world in real time. Based on a customized set of hashtags, the work responds to incoming tweets, which generate a real-time sonic composition. A visual counterpart, consisting of compressed air being pumped through tubes of water, provides a physical representation of each virtual tweet.

“We hope that the project will help viewers understand that there is a physical infrastructure supporting their online behavior. We are still amazed when we see a viewer recognize this fact, and say things like ‘I had no idea my online use generates carbon,’” Jon Bellona said in an email to the Orient.

For each tweet, an estimated 0.02 grams of carbon dioxide is released. While at first this may seem like a small number, when this is multiplied by 200 billion tweets per year, the released carbon adds up. This piece aims to reveal the physical environmental costs of online actions.

“It’s been cool to watch. A lot of students have stopped to look at the exhibit on their way to study. I don’t think they expected it to be in the library,” said Meredith Outterson ’17, who works at the library. “Overall, I think it’s a pretty positive installation. I think it’s positive to raise awareness that tweets have a carbon footprint. I think that’s something not a lot of people are aware of.”  

Other students felt something was missing from the installation.

“I don’t understand why the focus is just on Twitter, I feel like there are so many social media platforms that are also used,” said Molly Stevens ’15.

Bellona and Park focused on the interdisciplinary nature of the installation project.

“I think ‘#Carbonfeed’ provides an entry point for so many disciplines and viewers. You may approach this project from social media, science, environmental studies, music, physics, business or just plain wonderment of curiosity,” said Jon Bellona. “Art can provide a platform for thought and discussion that may reach across boundaries. I like that about this project.”

Bellona and Park have hope for further progress in prompting action, not just awareness.“Once we can acknowledge and understand that our virtual behavior is grounded in reality and has an associated carbon cost, we may begin to have larger conversations,” said Jon Bellona. 

“Today, 1.3% of all the world’s electricity is solely being used to power data centers to support our online computing” wrote Twitter designer David Bellona in an email to the Orient. Bellona is the elder brother of creator Jon Bellona.

To learn more about “#Carbonfeed,” visit carbonfeed.org or watch “The Weight of Digital Behavior” on Vimeo.

In 1870, a young doctor by the name of Henry Marble signed his diploma to graduate from Bowdoin Medical School. A few decades later, photographer Guy Shorey took a photo of some men on a mountain. Almost a hundred years later, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Scott Meiklejohn uncovered the connections of these seemingly unimportant events to both himself and to Bowdoin.

Meiklejohn has been at the College for almost eighteen years. He never saw coming to Bowdoin as fated, despite the clues he found that linked him, through time, to the College. He made these discoveries through two of his favorite hobbies—hiking and collecting old black and white photos.Meiklejohn loved growing up close to the mountains in New Hampshire and would often go hiking with his parents.

“We lived in a very ordinary town near Hartford, Connecticut originally, but my grandmother had a place near the mountains in New Hampshire,” he said. “We visited there when we were children and eventually my parents moved there.”

His parents bought a home in the area, only two hours away from the base of the White Mountains. This house would prove to be the first tie to both Guy Shorey and Henry Marble.

Meiklejohn told the story of his parents holding their wedding reception at what was then the Carlton Brook Inn, where a member of the Marble family had lived. Fifteen years after the reception, his parents bought the inn and live there to this day. 

“After I started working at Bowdoin, we were looking in the basement and we found a diploma from the Medical School of Maine belonging to a man named Henry Marble,” he said.

The diploma is made with genuine sheepskin and Meiklejohn has kept it in his office as a memento since he started working here.

While it no longer exists today, when Henry Marble graduated from Bowdoin in 1870, the Medical School of Maine was housed in Adams Hall.

Meiklejohn said he didn’t see this first clue as a sign of his inevitable arrival here at the College.

“I don’t know about that inevitability, but it’s been fun to find these connections” he said.

The second connection he found was also tied to his parent’s house. During his lifetime, Guy Shorey was well-known for creating postcards that were often sold at local inns. One of those inns was the Carlton Brook Inn.

“His studio was actually inside the Inn’s tea house where the Inn served guest’s meals. Shorey’s studio was right there across the brook. He was just sort of a legendary figure that I knew about growing up,” said Meiklejohn.

Meiklejohn said they always had photos lying around the house, but he really began to take interest in collecting them in his twenties and has been doing so ever since.

“I found a great one recently. It is a group of hikers on top of Mount Madison and one of the hikers is wearing a Bowdoin shirt. On the back of the post card it says it was taken one hundred years ago. I have it hanging in my house,” Meiklejohn said.

Certain photos like this one, which Meiklejohn found only three years ago, are particularly special.

“All of his photographs are of places that I know but the photographs are all from one hundred years ago. My favorites are the ones that give you a sense of what it was like at a different time. I keep them in albums. Most of these mountains I’ve hiked so often that I feel that there are a set of images that I own in my head,” he said.

Meiklejohn views all of these connections to Bowdoin as just a wonderful chance occurrence.

“I don’t believe much in fate,” he said. “I think you make your own path and make your own choices but I certainly believe in good luck and I’ve been very lucky to make it here.”

Editor's note: The article originally stated the Shorey's photo and Marble's graduation were both in 1890. The story has been updated to reflect that Marble graduated in 1870 and it is unknown when Shorey's photo was taken.