On choosing Marlboro

I was told about this school by a friend. At the time, I wasn’t being very proactive about the college search. I had visited a few universities, and there was nothing interesting about them. I came up to visit Marlboro, and it was one of two schools I ended up applying to.

I liked the idea of Plan, the freedom to study rigorously what you want to study, but with guidance rather than instruction. It’s personal. It’s not about walking out with a degree, necessarily. It’s about walking out having learned something and having gone somewhere with yourself and in your education.

On faculty

The one thing that I will absolutely say is that the professors here are fantastic. The thing about it is that if anyone is going to come to a hill in the middle of nowhere with long winters to teach a bunch of know-it-alls, you really have to be dedicated. I think every professor that’s here is here because they’re passionate about teaching, and about learning too, the give and take that can go on in a dynamic class environment, rather than what can go on in a lecture hall. And the chance to work one-on-one with professors is pretty sweet.

For Plan I’m working with Heather Clark and John Sheehy. I’m doing a Plan on literature. I’m studying the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Cormac McCarthy’s novels. There’s something in both of those writers about absence and longing and a need for fulfillment, just about a combination of life’s futility, and, somehow, in that futility, there being some kind of meaning in the world. How complicated it all is, how nothing is black-and-white, how nothing is simple.

The thing that’s interesting about working with John is that there’s always writing. In his literature seminars, there aren’t papers but there are responses, which I hated. But what’s interesting about it is that you’d hand in one every class, and in the next class he’d hand them back, and he’d have put as much writing on it as you had in the first place. What is going on there, at first, is not him looking at your writing, but him looking at your ideas and responding to your ideas.

Heather gives you the tools to approach poetry, and in a class she’ll sit down and lay out rhythm and meter and rhyme and form and all of the things that make the bones of a poem. She’s also really good at bringing peoples’ ideas out. She’s not there to tell you what she thinks a poem means. She’s there to get the conversation going, which can be remarkable at times. A bunch of twenty year old kids are sitting around having a really active and exciting conversation about a poem that was written 150 years ago, which I love because I love poetry, but in a lot of ways I didn’t before I came here.

On social life

It’s a very small community. The best thing about that is that people up here get to be like family in a lot of ways. I really believe that, that the friendships that can form here are not like the friendships I’ve had anywhere else, and like not like most friendships I’ll have again.

The same virtues of the small community can really turn against you and it can be claustrophobic here. Sometimes you just don’t want to be on a hill in Vermont with seventeen books to read in the middle of winter. But that’s the strange thing about this place. For the most part, the things that I like least are really tightly bound up with the things I like best.

People talk a lot of trash about the social life here, but I tend to have a good time. But I also don’t mind sitting and not doing anything, just sitting around and talking about things and shooting our mouths off at each other, which is really a big part of the social life here. We’re all talkers. And that, I really think, is the main source of entertainment here, using our brains at each other.

On Advice for Prospective Students

Prepare to be surprised. Chances are this place is not what you think it’s going to be. The way things work here, there’s potential for a lot of great things. You have to know when to talk and when to listen.

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