By Hannah Wallace ’95
Online learning is one of the latest trends in higher education. Institutions such as Bowdoin, Duke, and Wellesley are offering downloadable lectures on iTunes U, while MIT is posting entire classes—exams and readings included—on its OpenCourseWare Web site. “Coursecasts,” such as the popular lectures of physics professor Walter Lewin, are not for credit, but they’re free.
Mount Holyoke is taking a slightly different approach. Last fall, the college became one of the first in the country to launch online courses in conjunction with the New York Times Knowledge Network. The two classes—Ruth Lawson Professor of Politics Vinnie Ferraro’s “The End of History or the Clash of Civilizations?” and “Inside the Art and Craft of Film,” taught by associate professor of film studies Robin Blaetz—were open to the public, though MHC alumnae got first dibs. Because these classes were more interactive than mere lectures—including live Web chats and e-mail contact with professors as well as readings and other resources (including movies for Blaetz’s class)—they came with a small price tag: $140 for four sessions.
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Fresh Teaching Attracts the Next Generation of Scientists
By Shoshana Walter ’07
Rebecca Jablonski-Diehl ’09 steps into the murky water of Lower Lake. In front of her is the serene reflection of trees stretched out across the water. It is a familiar sight. But the experience of treading cautiously down a slimy slope in thigh-high waders is definitely new. “The bottom was mucky. We were scared we were going to fall down and not make it out,” Jablonski-Diehl recalls, laughing.
She wasn’t venturing into the muddy lake just for kicks. Jablonski-Diehl and her classmates were collecting water samples for a lab project in biology professor Martha Hoopes’s ecology course. The students gathered samples for nearly two months, comparing and contrasting water conditions at sites around campus.
It is challenging work for 100-level students, but the payoff can be big. With this kind of hands-on experience, students often develop a passion for scientific exploration and discovery early in their college careers. Eventually they may become science majors, or something just as important: informed and scientifically literate citizens.
“I’d never actually done experiments myself,” says Jablonski-Diehl. “Going into the lake was probably the most fun thing I’d ever done in any class.” She was hooked, and became an environmental studies major.
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Julie Holley ’87 Says Crew’s Lessons Linger
By Maryann Teale Snell ’86
Julie Holley ’87 looks pretty serious. But behind that near-scowl of concentration are a ready laugh and spirited confidence when she tells how she wound up at Mount Holyoke, and how she joined the crew team despite using a steel hook instead of a right hand.
Rewind to spring 1983, awards night at a high school in Queens, New York. Holley, on the brink of graduation, is getting several. Jean Sudrann ’39, an MHC English professor, is also being honored. She and department colleague Marjorie Kaufman are impressed with Holley and ask where she’s going to college. To SUNY Purchase, she replies, to study music. The professors tell her, “You need to come to Mount Holyoke.” After a year at Purchase, she transferred.
In browsing MHC’s course catalogue, Holley was taken with a photo of rowers on the water. Although a star swimmer and competitor in track-and-field events (she was on the winning U.S. team at the 1984 International Games for the Disabled), she had never rowed before. But she looked at that picture hard. “I said to myself: That’s what I want to do when I get to Mount Holyoke.”
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By Stan P. Rachootin, Professor of Biological Sciences
Note: This is the second in a continuing series of “What everyone should know about …” essays by MHC professors.
The great evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
It is true that any topic in biology, and many scientific questions that impinge on our lives, can be illuminated in revealing and useful ways by considering evolution. How and why does HIV change? Why did domesticated plants and animals happen? What new human diseases are cooking themselves up, and how are they “stirred” by our domesticated animals and “seasoned” with our antibiotics? Can genes from one organism prosper in another? What happens during a mass extinction? What were consciousness, language, and prayer cobbled together from, before there was consciousness or language or religion?
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One Woman Brings Hope to Cambodian Kids
By Elizabeth Eidlitz
While her mother was listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats on the radio, Nancy Woodward was ministering to baby dolls in the pretend hospital she set up in the sunroom of the family’s Hanover, New Hampshire, home.
Almost sixty years later, while some retired classmates from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School were playing golf and booking cruises, Nancy Woodward Hendrie ’54, MD, was repeatedly flying 8,713 miles to build Roteang Orphanage, a cornerstone project of The Sharing Foundation (TSF). It aims to improve conditions for Cambodian children, an estimated 45,000 of whom die each year from preventable starvation and treatable diseases.
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Gary Gillis, assistant professor of biological sciences. Interests: biology of animal locomotion, playing tennis and Ultimate Frisbee, watching horror movies, reading good books (broadly defined)
Pee-Wee the guinea pig. Interests: Unlike my owner, I am completely uninterested in locomotion. Just the thought of running appalls me, and whatever you do, don’t mention the word treadmill around me. I love to eat, especially clover, hay, and dried fruit. (Banana chips are my weakness.)
Summa the chameleon. Interests: Like Pee-Wee, I too love a good meal, but have a penchant for moths and crickets.
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My Struggle With Panic Disorder
By Kara C. Baskin ’00
Photo by Scott Suchman
I’m twenty eight years old, recently married, happily employed and, for two months last fall, I was terrified to leave my house. Things should’ve been peachy, really. I had a book deal in the works. Brian and I had just gotten married. My life was hectic, Type A, and organized just the way I liked it. But suddenly my fancy “happy hours” gave way to TV Land reruns; my posh dinners with media clients were replaced with yogurt and bananas; and my “for better or for worse” marriage vows were being put to the test before my wedding gown even came back from the dry cleaner’s.
I have panic disorder. An acute, debilitating form of anxiety, it affects six million Americans. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from it, and the attacks usually begin in one’s twenties. Sufferers tend to be overachieving, highly creative, and dare I say it?—a little neurotic. Trembling, sweating, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, choking, chest tightness, and intense nausea are a few of the lovely symptoms that come on like an impromptu acid bath.
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Opening the Door to Ethical Capitalism
by Mieke H. Bomann
Sheila Lirio Marcelo ’93 needed help. An entrepreneur-in-residence at Matrix Partners, a venture-capital firm, she was busy trying to get her own Internet start-up off the ground. But first on her to-do list was finding a nanny for her two boys, one of whom also needed a tutor, and personal care for her father, who had undergone heart surgery. Her two dogs also demanded some regular exercise. The convergence of those personal needs, combined with a desire to find work she was passionate about, helped her to formulate Care.com, a Web-based service company aimed at people who need outside help for some of life’s most important tasks, but who don’t have the time or the information resources to get it. “I really wanted to focus on [building] a for-profit company that had a social mission,” she explains. “So I started looking at families and children.”
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MHC Fellowships Help Fund Alumnae Dreams
By Susan Bushey '96
How many people can get money back from their alma maters? Mount Holyoke alumnae can.
The Alumnae Association and the college both fund fellowships annually, awarding nearly $50,000--this year the total was $47,425--to chosen alumnae. Some ninety to 130 apply for the thirteen to twenty awards given in a typical year, a low percentage of the 30,000-alumnae body.
Of the seven awards available, one--the Mary E. Woolley--is supported by the Alumnae Association's Founder's Fund and it is the largest, $7,500. The other awards average $1,500 per recipient.
Past fellowship recipients have used the funds to continue their education, teach in other countries, study women's education, and write a book, to name just a few. Alumnae from any class may apply, and the requirements are not stringent about what will be funded or how the money will be used. The only thing that these diverse recipients have in common is their ultimate goal--to pursue a dream.
Following, we highlight how four women have chosen to be lifelong learners with the financial help of the association and the college. If you'd like to join them, see the How to Apply section.
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By Vincent A. Ferraro
Globalization is one of those words that is often used, but rarely defined. It is a fudge word, like “security” or “power,” that reflects the user’s bias. For some, globalization is the promised land; for others, it is a circle in Dante’s hell.
The first thing we should know about globalization is that it is a highly politicized idea, and that the only productive way to discuss it is to make explicit one’s own definition. Thomas L. Friedman’s accessible book on globalization, The World is Flat, is a good starting point for understanding the term’s possible meanings. For this essay, I define globalization as the process by which all human activities on every part of the planet are increasingly interconnected and interdependent.
The second thing we should know about globalization is that it is an old process. The human species has proven very adept at expansion. Whether its beginning was in the Garden of Eden or Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, humanity has now inhabited virtually every land area on the planet, even those, like Antarctica, that are largely uninhabitable. Similarly, the political history of the species is one of expansion (and decline). Every empire has had the same goal: the subjugation of others to a presumptively universal political authority within the largest geographical framework possible.
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Starting to Talk About the End of Life
by Emily Harrison Weir
Photos: Andy Duback • Illustrations: © Deidre Scherer
Death: it will happen to each of us, but few want to admit it or—worse—talk about it. Camilla Rockwell’s film, Holding Our Own: Embracing the End of Life, aims to smash that cultural taboo and open a dialogue about life’s final passage. The powerful and touching documentary uses art and music to, Rockwell hopes, “attract people and gently seduce them into engaging a topic that they would rather run away from.”
Rockwell understands that reaction, but has seen firsthand the anguish that ignoring impending death can cause patients and their families. Five years ago, Rockwell became a Hospice volunteer; one of her first clients passed away without her family ever acknowledging she had terminal cancer. “It was my first real vision that suffering is caused when people can’t speak about their fears, make plans for the end of life, and say goodbye,” Rockwell recalls. “I wanted to find a way to help people begin to talk about the end of life.”
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The Tiny World of Nanoscience Is a Big Thing on Campus
By Christine Palm
If ever a branch of science embodied “small but mighty,” it would have to be nanoscience. In this world, the properties of objects change so dramatically that the tinier something is, the more powerful it often becomes. And the myriad possibilities stemming from those changes makes nanoscience riveting to faculty and students at Mount Holyoke. With passion and acumen, researchers here are probing this new, invisible frontier that is already an integral part of all our lives—whether or not we know it. Within nanoscience’s tiny, mysterious world lies the key to solving everyday problems from medicine to manufacturing.
To the uninitiated, nanoscience seems ineffable; experiments and procedures are conducted at so infinitesimal a scale that it’s hard to conceive of their size, much less their importance. However, chemical, physical, and biological changes taking place at the nanoscale affect virtually every aspect of our lives, allowing us to experience everything from the smell of freshly baked cookies to the sound of the 1,000th song on our iPods.
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Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 Traces Her Journey From Theatrical Underdog to Topdog
By Leanna James Blackwell
Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 knew she had arrived well before she got to Broadway. Go back about 20 years to the late 1980s—before the Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog, before the MacArthur “genius grant,” before the Obie for best new play. Leave the Times Square theatres, the lights and the crowds behind.
Look instead for a grimy little neighborhood bar that was formerly a gas station, a place you’d never hear about unless you happen to live around the block. Walk into the bar and that’s where you’ll find Parks, sitting on a stool behind a makeshift curtain. It’s opening night of her first play and there are five people in the audience.
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Faith Meets Science for Katie Alton ’05
By Emily Harrison Weir
Prelude
The road that led Katie Alton ’05 (above, wearing purple) to spend forty days and forty nights in a Midwestern abbey started at a bioethics conference in Washington, D.C. A month after hearing about a case discussed there, the aspiring physician was still troubled. Doctors couldn’t cure a seriously ill infant, but easing the baby’s pain was possible. However, the baby’s parents declined medical intervention, believing that by watching their child suffer, they were showing faith in God. “I saw this kind of case as a potential problem for me and my future patients,” Alton says. A request like that “would make me angry, because that kind of deep faith didn’t resonate with me at all.”
The neuroscience major’s job at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics exposed her to many cases involving conflict between patients with a strong religious faith and healthcare providers with a strong faith in science. So when the opportunity arose to audition for a Learning Channel reality show—The Monastery—that brought five women to Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Iowa, Alton applied. “I wanted to study monastic life from the perspective of a scientist confused about how people could hold onto what I saw as antiquated religious beliefs in the light of amazing scientific discoveries,” she explains.
Alton was the youngest of five participants who spent January and February 2006 with the abbey’s thirty sisters. Practically nothing about the experience was as Alton anticipated, and it changed her life profoundly.
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