Initiative Priority: Fostering Teaching and Mentoring
Personalized teaching and close mentoring relationships between faculty and students are at the heart of a Middlebury education. To ensure small classes, excellent advising, and meaningful mentoring, the College intends to add 25 new faculty positions, create professorships to honor exceptional faculty achievement, provide additional funds for curriculum development, and support collaborative research by professors and students.
Aylie Baker ’09
- Hometown:
Yarmouth, Maine - Major:
History
Links
Learning to listen
Aylie finds lifelong passion in audio storytelling
Middlebury. It was once intimate and unfamiliar, changing yet comfortable. It was a world where I would shoot a basketball and learn to throw clay, write for the paper and try my head, and feet, at modern dance. It was the place where I learned to listen to myself, and more importantly, to others.
As a basketball player from a small town in coastal Maine, I never imagined beating top-ranked Bates my junior year or topping Wesleyan in one of the lowest scoring games in NESCAC history. More than that, I never envisioned myself joining an Argentine men’s team in Buenos Aires, as the sole female player.
I would never had predicted that it was Middlebury that would lead me to recording youth radio stories in refugee camps in Northern Uganda...that through Middlebury, I would spend a week listening to the lives of an indigenous community in the mountains of northeastern Argentina, or have a five-hour dinner conversation with an eighth generation family faming in Starksboro, Vermont.
Joining a team of student journalists to ask the question, “How did you get here?” of our Middlebury peers, I found myself opening new doors and unearthing new questions. The audio-visual exhibition was extremely moving; the testimonies of the different students were profound, unexpected, and earnest.
Though I was a student on financial aid, I never felt encumbered by it. The generosity of others goes a long way. Through grant to pursue a Kathryn Davis Project for Peace, the support of the Dr. Michael Kolligian ’44 scholarship, and finally the support of a Watson Fellowship, I felt encouraged to pursue my dreams.
As I embark on what is to be the most challenging journey of my life–a Watson Fellowship to visit different islands around the world and explore the use of audio storytelling to build community and great dialogue about sustainability, I feel ready. Middlebury gave me the skills to use my academic studies as a springboard to engage with my community and with my peers to find solutions.
I’ve learned that Middlebury isn’t just a town or an institution, but a living, breathing place. Is stately halls echo with the footsteps of those who came before me and those who will follow. It’s a place where people from all different backgrounds, from all over the world intersect, if only for a moment.