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Welcome Home!

The Bates Class of 2028 arrives to join a community of learners

By Bates College

September 6^th, 2024

August 28: Opening Day

On Opening Day, the 491-member Bates Class of 2028 was met by a high-energy team of nearly 200 upperclass Bates students, along with dozens of professional Bates staff members, who helped to greet the new Bobcats and move their gear into campus residences. (Fun fact: the move-in helpers will use 61 two-wheel dollies on Opening Day.)

With Opening Day’s arrival, the college’s award-winning First-Year Experience support program swung into action, guiding the new students through their first week on campus and into their first year.

Check in here — And meet President Garry W. Jenkins

“People matter here. We are individuals, each with something unique to offer, but we are together a powerfully strong community that cares deeply about each other and about the world around us.”

— Bates President Garry W. Jenkins, welcoming new students and families on Opening Day

Over to Chu, Kalperis, and Parker

Full Welcome

“All of you are coming to Bates with palpable intellectual curiosity and a generosity of spirit that’s been on full display today, along with an authentic, compassionate, and welcoming way about you. We are so proud of you and we welcome you to Bates and the Bates community fully.”

— Vice President for Enrollment and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Leigh Weisenburger, welcoming new students and families on Opening Day

Greetings and Goodbye

“It’s a proud day for me I get to be the one to welcome students officially into the Bates community. We all know how special this community is, and we know how much Bates means to the members of this community over their lifetimes. To be able to set the tone and to be the one who gets to do that is a real honor.”

— President Garry W. Jenkins

August 30: First-Year Seminars

On Friday, the new students attended their first class, a get-to-know-you session of their First-Year Seminar, a course that all first-years take and where instructors serve as the new students’ academic advisers. Some sample seminar topics this year are “Sex in the Brain,” “Holocaust on Stage,” “Physics of Climate Change,” and “Heroes or Villains? Columbus and Castro.”

August 30: AESOP Kickoff

On Friday evening, AESOP, the Annual Entering Student Orientation Program of on- and off-campus overnight trips led by current students, kicked off with a boisterous meet-and-greet welcome party, where trip leaders arrive in wild costumes to announce their trips to the first-year class assembled at Keigwin Amphitheater.

This year’s edition of AESOP featured 120 student trip leaders who guided 445 first-year students on 55 trips over two nights and three days.

AESOP dates to the late 1980s at Bates, but its welcoming vibe goes all the way back to the college’s founding decades, when a legendary professor and birder, Johnny Stanton, led all new students on a picnic and birdwalk at a local park (by trolley!).

The program is challenge by choice, so first-year students select from a wide range of experiences. There are backpacking adventures in the Bigelow Range and Grafton Notch, relaxed beach and lake trips for those seeking a laid-back start to college life, and, closer to campus, culinary and farm experiences, city explorations, community engagement projects, and creative endeavors like filmmaking and photography.

August 31: AESOP Museum and Art Adventure

August 31: AESOP Lewiston Community-Engaged Adventure

August 31: AESOP Maine Lake Adventure

AESOP: Bates Dining Adventure

September 1: AESOP Woodworking Adventure

September 1: AESOP Dance Adventure

September 3: A Season Opener

September 3: Opening Convocation

“My hope for all of you, and my request of you is this: That you join this academic and social community with a spirit of openness. You are to be adventurers, seekers, learners. Give in to your curiosity. Take that class in a department you maybe you’ve never even heard of. Try a sport or an activity or an art or a club that perhaps you never had a chance to check out until now. Assume that there are sides to yourself even you do not yet know and take them for a spin.”

— Bates President Garry W. Jenkins, speaking at Convocation

Timeless Advice

“In the most practical sense, growing community is built on growing one’s empathy, the ability to perceive the world through someone else’s eyes. Grow your empathy to understand others' experiences to help build a broadly interconnected community. Together we are Bates.”

— Sonja Pieck, Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, speaking at Convocation

Time to imagine

“There are so few moments in our lives where we can actually feel palpably and concretely the sensation of hope running through us. This is one of those moments.”

— The Rev. Brittany Longsdorf, multifaith chaplain, offering the benediction at Opening Convocation

Memorial Tree Planting Service

The tree-planting service after Convocation is held in memory of members of the campus community who have died in the past year.

“I invite you in this shared moment of remembrance to feel those layers of grief those tangles of emotions,” said the Rev. Brittany Longsdorf.

“This is a moment of spaciousness for those complexities, those tangles to settle in. We can breathe into that space, we can name how much we miss our departed colleagues and friends, feel the depth of that sadness — and also creatively dream of the way they live among us in memory and impact.”

September 4: Happy First Day of Classes

Among the many classes that had their first session on Sept. 4, 2024, was ECON 343, a seminar class on international finance taught by Daniel Riera-Crichton, the Betty Doran Stangle Professor of Applied Economics.

Curous what other disciplines were in the mix this week?

Courses in: Africana, American studies, anthropology, art and visual culture, Asian studies, astronomy, biology, chemistry, Chinese, classical and medieval studies, dance, digital and computational studies, earth and climate sciences...

Plus, courses in economics, English, environmental studies, European studies, French and francophone studies, gender and sexuality studies, German, Greek, Hispanic studies, history, Japanese, Latin American and Latinx studies...

Plus, courses in Latin, mathematics, music, neuroscience, philosophy, physics, politics, psychology, religious studies, rhetoric, film, and screen studies, Russian, sociology, and theater!

Footnotes

Produced by the Bates Communications and Marketing Office with photography by Theophil Syslo, Btittney Lohmiller, Matthew Hamilton '25, David Ernst, and Jay Burns. Text by Jay Burns.

Button Label

FootNotes

Produced by the Bates Communications and Marketing Office with photography by Theophil Syslo, Btittney Lohmiller, Matthew Hamilton '25, David Ernst, and Jay Burns. Text by Jay Burns.