Students enjoy summer without leaving Vermont

While most of campus packed up and left Middlebury in May, others packed their bags and moved all the way to… Battell?

For some Middlebury students, the dawn of summer meant back to school (and, for most, living in a modest Battell double). About 300 Middlebury students live and work on campus every summer, doing everything from working at the Help Desk to assisting professors with research projects.

For Whitney Obr ’13, working at Middlebury over the summer was an obvious choice. Obr, a native of Paris, knew that French labor laws making it difficult to fire workers also discourage employers from hiring students; practically none of her friends who returned to France over the summer found jobs. Obr found a job in admissions, where she worked with seven other paid interns in the Admissions Office, giving tours twice daily as well as performing typical office tasks.

As with Obr, for Cody Gohl ‘13 unfavorable job prospects at home were the initial motivation in choosing to stay at Middlebury over the summer. However, Gohl also saw it as an opportunity to work in a field he’d always planned to explore.

“I have always been super intrigued by the college admissions process,” Gohl said. “I’ve wanted to be a tour guide since I was a freshman in high school, so it was always my intention to work in admissions for a summer and the cards just kind of lined up for this.”

For Casey Mahoney ’11, spending the summer at Middlebury has become somewhat of a tradition. After working as an intern in Career Services after freshman year and attending Russian language school after sophomore year, Mahoney returned this summer to do research. The prospect of beautiful Vermont summers and few opportunities at home have drawn him to Middlebury for three summers in a row.

“I’m from Arizona, so summer just means sitting by the pool and trying to stay inside in air conditioning… and the summer in Vermont is so idyllic,” Mahoney said. “It’s hiking and swimming and going to Dunmore every weekend.”

Mahoney returned from his junior abroad in Russia to do research with Associate Professor of Economics Will Pyle. Although Mahoney had virtually no economics background, save an “Introduction to Economic Theory” class he had taken while studying abroad, Pyle was recruited through the Russian department because his research on post-communist enterprise land use in Russia required a student who could translate Russian. Mahoney was responsible for finding sources for different aspects of Pyle’s research and typing up the annotations and summaries of possible sources for Pyle. He also worked on translating a survey sent to 360 Russian firms regarding the economics behind the privatization and government ownership of land.

Whereas Gohl and Obr worked weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Mahoney was able to choose his own work hours to complete his weekly projects, which Pyle would explain at their weekly debriefings. But even those with a rigid schedule found that they had plenty of downtime. Gohl and his friends took the opportunity to explore Vermont, visiting a swimming hole in Vergennes, a café in Bristol and Shelbourne Farms. Gohl visited Burlington about three times every month.

For the first time ever, the school hired an RA for Battell, Dan Khan ’11, whose specific responsibility it was to organize activities for student workers. Khan set up trips to Lake Dunmore, hiking expeditions and shuttles to various towns, making it even easier for student workers to discover the area.

“Even if you didn’t have a car, you’d be able to get off campus,” Gohl said.

John Montroy ’12, a German language school student, found that language schools worked hard to ensure that kids had enough to do in their spare time, scheduling well-attended dance parties at the Grille, a Frisbee tournament between German and Chinese school, clubs and groups for each specific language and various pickup sports games. They even planned a soccer tournament between all of the different language schools although Montroy said the language barrier tended to provoke some distrust between schools.

“Everyone got so suspicious of each other so fast because you’d yell something and point at someone and people would automatically think you were talking about them, when really you were just saying ‘Oh, isn’t the weather nice today?’” Montroy said.

Students who spoke second languages found that they had slightly more activity options on campus— like the ability to eat downstairs at Proctor if one spoke a romance language and attending foreign film screenings, for instance.

But with two tours per day and work all day in between, Obr and Gohl, who both attended language school events in their respective languages, didn’t always have time to take advantage of all the offered activities. Admissions interns have varied responsibilities; they entered incoming data from members of the class of 2014, answered questions for prospective students who couldn’t make the info sessions and were paired with an admissions officer for projects. For Gohl, this meant working with Manuel Carballo, the Associate Director of Admissions and the Coordinator for Multicultural Recruitment, in order to develop strategies to increase the yield from his home state of Texas.

Obr discovered that answering prospective students’ questions all day was surprisingly challenging and required deep knowledge of the school.

“Before I started there I was thinking, ‘Oh, this’ll be easy.’ I thought people would ask about distribution requirements or the dining plans or if people were allowed to have cars on campus —the kinds of questions I had or I heard when I went on tours,” Obr said. “But people have really specific questions about different majors and different study abroad programs. You could definitely tell that people came prepared and had done their research; they really had their game faces on.”

Although there were plenty of familiar faces at work, the campus had a distinctly different feel with an entirely new group of students.

“It was definitely not typical Midd Kid after Midd Kid; language schools are a lot more diverse … even in age, because there are people coming back to get MA’s,” Mahoney said. “It’s cool to see the diversity in terms of age and backgrounds.”

Although the language schools are decidedly college kid-dominated, the number of adults enrolled still struck students workers; there were even a couple of nuns and priests enrolled in classes this summer.

“It was interesting because during the year, you don’t know every face you walk past, but they’re kids you know you can relate to because you know that you both go to Midd, so you must have something in common,” Obr said. “On campus over the summer, you’re walking past people and don’t know whether they’re undergrad or grad or even out of school… The school definitely had a different vibe, so I guess it just goes to show that a lot of what makes Middlebury great is the people who go here.” “But at the same time it’s a little depressing when those people aren’t here,” she added.

Especially for Montroy, whose time in German school gave him little contact with Middlebury students during the day, it was always surprising to see a familiar face around campus.

“When you saw a Midd kid you kind of looked at each other like, ‘what the hell are you doing here?!’” Montroy said. “It felt like a totally different place in the summer.”

But was that a good or bad thing? Although student workers complained of having been “corralled into a small corner of Proctor,” to eat, said Gohl, and getting in trouble for speaking English in front of language school students, that tension appeared to be minimal. Even if there had been hard feelings between language school students and Middlebury kids, the language school students would not have necessarily been able to articulate them.

“When you can’t really speak a language, everyone becomes really pleasant and nice,” Montroy said. This meant that within language school, “Everyone got along really well.”

For the most part, students workers found summer at Middlebury over the summer to be idyllic and relaxing.

“[The best part is] having the stress level be next to zero. During the year you have classes, and afterwards you have homework and extracurriculars and the nagging “I should be studying” even when you’re done with work,” Mahoney said. “When you’re here over the summer, after you’re done with your work, you really do have zero responsibilities. You really get to enjoy Vermont and Middlebury and what the college has without all of the extra pressure that we have on us during the year.”

Mahoney also found that fewer people on campus means less crowding.

“It’s all the amenities of Middlebury, just with less people using them,” Mahoney said.

While exploring Vermont was a high priority on Gohl’s summer to-do list, what made the summer so special for him was doing something he has always loved: giving tours.

“[I enjoy] this knowledge that I’m making a difference in people’s lives,” Gohl said. “Whether I give a bad tour can affect whether or not people apply to Midd, which can affect their lives ten, twenty years down the line. It’s cool to say that after meeting hundreds of kids this summer and giving so many tours I’ve made a difference for them.”

So, whether working a job or learning a language it was undeniably a summer at Middlebury well-spent.