Bryn Mawr College

The Sarah Elizabeths (and others) of the Class of 2012

It’s been a heady week and a half for the 377 students who make up the class of 2012.

Since arriving for Customs Week, they have moved into dormitories and met with new roommates, faculty members, deans, various student mentors and what probably seemed like every administrator on the campus.

There have been diversity workshops; presentations by Student Life, Campus Safety, and the Health Center; trips to Haverford; picnics; a dance party; a film festival; and even a scavenger hunt.

Their Bryn Mawr experience started with teams of students—hall advisers and “customs people,” who lead orientation activities for first-year students—helping the newcomers and their families haul bags, boxes and every piece of electronics and computer gear imaginable into dormitory rooms and begin the adjustment to campus life.

With temperatures topping out in the high 70s, this year’s move-in was considerably easier than those of years past, but it was still hot enough that the admissions “Water Ice Welcome Booth” offered a much-needed respite to parents and students.

In addition to the cool temperatures, a number of important changes to the registration process may have had the most impact on easing stress many students experience transitioning to college. New course-registration and lottery procedures allowed summer planning for course “wish lists. ”

The language and math faculties, with the help of Computing Services, moved more placement tests and exercises online and pushed the whole registration process (with deans and about 40 volunteer faculty and staff advisers) to a day earlier in the schedule. Within a few days of arrival, every new student was registered for classes.

“Our goal was to make that first week of classes less frantic,” says Associate Dean Judy Balthazar. “In the past, professors held lotteries on the first day of class and students’ schedules often didn’t firm up until the second week of classes.”

On Tuesday the class of 2012 joined returning students at a convocation in Thomas Great Hall, where they heard words of advice, encouragement and wisdom from Bryn Mawr President Jane McAuliffe, Haverford President Stephen Emerson, Dean of the Undergraduate College Karen Tidmarsh, Provost Kim Cassidy, Interim Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Liz McCormack, and Director of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research Marcia Martin.

While every speaker was well received, it was Tidmarsh’s tongue-in-cheek address to the Class of 2012 at the beginning of her speech that got the loudest response from the crowd.

“(Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid) Jenny Rickard told us at the official college welcome for them and their families that their most common first name is ‘Sarah,’ as it often is, and their most common middle name is ‘Elizabeth,’ as it always is. No excitement there. So many Sarahs and not a Sarah Barracuda among them, as far as I know,” said Tidmarsh.

“Jenny notes that their most common sun sign is Gemini—another coals-to-Newcastle story. I checked the description of Gemini traits on the Web, and I quote, ‘Geminis are bright, quick–witted, and the proverbial life of the party.’ Just what we need at the College once again ranked as one of the worst party schools in America,” she jokingly added.

More about the class of 2012 from Jenny Rickard

• The most popular areas of study are English, Bryn Mawr’s world-renowned and highly acclaimed “Undecided” major, International Studies, Psychology, and Biology
• Sixty-five percent are from the top 10 percent of their high school classes
• They represent 319 high schools from throughout the United States and the world
• Sixty-two percent attended public schools, 36 percent private and two percent parochial
• Fifteen percent are first-generation college students
• Twenty percent are international students

And even more from our first-ever “Completely Unscientific Survey of Incoming Students”
The below information is based on an online survey of the class of 2012. The entire class was invited to participate in the survey, which was completed by 168 students.

• Thirty one percent of students got their first iPod or mp3 player at age 16.
• Sixty percent of students got their first e-mail account at age 12. More than 30 students who responded to the survey had an e-mail account before age 10, and at least one student had her own account at 5 years old.
• Thirty-four percent of students had their own cell phone at age 14. Six students reported that they were using up minutes before their 12th birthday.
• The Harry Potter series, Pride and Prejudice and The Catcher in the Rye are their favorite books. Other favorites include Atonement, Good Omens, The Bell Jar and The Perks of Being a Wall Flower.
• When it comes to movies, action, adventure and fantasy lead the way. Favorites include The Lord of the Rings Trilogy , The Dark Night and The Princess Bride.
• Their musical tastes are so varied that it’s almost impossible to call any act a favorite, although the Beatles and the musical Wicked come the closest.
• The class of 2012’s favorite television shows are House and The Office, just beating out Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model.
• The news events that had the greatest impact on the lives of the class of 2012 are the 9/11 terrorist attacks; Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shooting.

Hannah Upp ’07 Reported Missing

Recent Bryn Mawr graduate Hannah Upp, a New York City public-school teacher and graduate student at Pace University, has been missing since Friday, August 29, from her home in the vicinity of Hamilton Terrace, Harlem. According to her roommates, she had been planning to go away for the weekend but intended to return on Saturday, perhaps Sunday at the latest. When she had not returned by Monday night, they entered her room and discovered her keys, her phone, and her handbag containing her wallet. Her ATM card, her subway card, and her ID were all in the handbag.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact Detective Perez, 30th Precinct Detective Squad, at 212-690-8842 or 212-690-8843.

Hepburn Center appoints new fellows, announces plans for fall semester

The Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center will be welcoming three Hepburn Fellows to campus this year: Amy Murphy, managing director of Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company; Maya Ajmera ’89, founder and president of the Global Fund for Children; and Ana María López, ’82, associate dean for outreach and multicultural affairs, associate professor of clinical medicine and pathology, and medical director of the Arizona Telemedicine Program at the University of Arizona.

Hepburn Center Director Leslie Rescorla is working with the three Fellows to arrange a set of campus visits and events involving students, faculty, staff, and alumnae. Events planned for the next few months are posted on the Hepburn Center blog.

The first Hepburn Center events planned for the year involve Amy Murphy, who co-founded the Arden in 1988 with Aaron Posner and her husband, Terry Nolen. Under Murphy’s leadership, the Arden has grown into a $4.2 million operation that serves more than 100,000 audience members annually. Murphy leads the theater’s operations and administration, including all marketing, fundraising, and financial management. In addition, she oversees the Arden’s long-range planning process and works closely with the Board of Directors. As a member of the board, she serves on the executive, finance, and development committees.

A Philadelphia native, Murphy graduated from Susquehanna University and received its first-ever Young Alumni Achievement Award in 2002. In 2003, she completed the Executive Program for Non Profit Leaders-Arts, a joint program of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Social Innovation and National Arts Strategies. She has served on the executive committee of the League of Resident Theatres, the board of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the development committee of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, and the Non-Profit Financial Fund Advisory Council.

Murphy was on the founding board of the Performing Arts League of Philadelphia, which became the Theatre Alliance of Philadelphia. She has also served on funding panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council. She lives in Rose Valley, Pa., with her husband, Terry Nolen, and two young sons, Liam and Flynn.

A number of events this fall focus on the Arden’s upcoming production of Gee’s Bend, a play about a group of African-American women who turned to quilting as a way to cope with poverty, segregation, and family problems; the play is based on the stories of a real community in Alabama.

The first of the Gee’s Bend events, to take place Sunday, Sept. 14, at 6 p.m., is a discussion at the Arden with award-winning playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder and a group of the celebrated quilters of Gee’s Bend, facilitated by Producing Artistic Director Terry Nolen. Murphy has reserved 24 places for members of the Bryn Mawr community.

On Sunday, Oct. 5, at 11 a.m., the Hepburn Center will offer an outing to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt” to about 20 members of the student body, faculty, and staff. This exhibition takes a fresh look at the quilting traditions in the community of Gee’s Bend, introducing new artists and motifs in works dating from the early twentieth century through 2005.

The Gee’s Bend events scheduled by the Center culminate in a performance of the show at the Arden on Thursday, Nov. 13. Complimentary tickets are available for a group of 24 members of the Bryn Mawr community. The Hepburn Center and the Dean’s Office will sponsor a light supper before the show in a nearby restaurant.

Students, faculty members, and staffers interested in attending any of these events should contact Leslie Rescorla.

Athletics and fitness facilities and programs to be enhanced; $1 million gift launches $15 million fundraising effort

President Jane McAuliffe has announced a $1 million pledge from Ruth “Tulsa” Kaiser Nelson ’58 to inaugurate fundraising for “Smart Women, Strong Women,” a $15 million project to enhance athletics, fitness, and recreation facilities and programs.

“Tulsa’s deep and abiding love for Bryn Mawr shines through in this magnificent commitment. She wants the College to continue to be a leader in higher education, and this means we must continue to attract and retain the very best students. In today’s world, fitness and wellness are a way of life for the young women we want here, and we must have facilities and programs that are first rate. Smart women are strong women, and our students embrace that,” said McAuliffe.

Nelson, who served as chair of the recent Challenging Women Campaign, has generously supported Bryn Mawr’s top priorities over many years. In making this new commitment, she expressed her belief that modernization and expansion of the Bern Schwartz Gymnasium, including a planned bridge linking the facility to student-activities buildings on Cambrian Row and to Merion Green, will have important benefits for community life on campus.

“This project will link the two ends of campus, and provide both new social space and much improved sports facilities. It will clearly be a destination for students, faculty and staff alike. I am delighted to be able to move this project forward and hope others, who love Bryn Mawr as I do, will join in the effort,” Nelson said.

Bryn Mawr becomes charter member of College Board’s effort to increase access for lower-income students

Bryn Mawr College has a long history of leadership in providing low-income students access to a top-quality liberal-arts education. In its survey of highly selective liberal-arts colleges, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education ranked Bryn Mawr among the top five institutions in the proportion of low-income students enrolled.

In joining the CollegeKeys Compact, the College has now partnered with the College Board and hundreds of colleges, universities, and school districts throughout the United States as part of a coordinated effort to make sure all students are able to fulfill their education goals.

“What sets this effort apart is the fact that it’s focused on institutions sharing information in an effort to put students first,” says Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jenny Rickard. “Every college and university in the Compact does an inventory of its programs and procedures for recruiting and retaining low-income students, and shares that information with each other and with participating school districts, so that we can all learn from each other.”

The Compact is an initiative of the College Board. While it is known by many simply as the group that runs the SAT, the College Board is an association composed of more than 5,400 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations. Each year, the College Board provides seven million students and their parents, 23,000 high schools, and 3,500 colleges with major programs and services in college admissions, guidance, assessment, financial aid, enrollment, and teaching and learning.

As one of the early schools to sign on to the Compact, Bryn Mawr has been designated a charter member of the initiative.

“There’s often a hesitancy to join something like this early on because you don’t want to put all this work into it only to have the initiative not really go anywhere,” says Rickard. “But we think this program has great potential, and much of the work involves things that we’d planned on doing ourselves as part of an internal effort to formalize our policies.”

In addition to conducting an inventory of current recruitment and retention efforts regarding low-income students, the Compact calls on the College to:

• Engage a team of senior leaders to review Bryn Mawr’s current commitments to supporting the college aspirations of students from low-income backgrounds and identify opportunities for expanding those efforts
• Establish measurable institutional goals for expanding its current efforts to support the college aspirations of students from low-income backgrounds and implement strategies for achieving these goals
• Monitor and publicly report its progress in achieving its CollegeKeys goals.

“We’re thrilled to have a liberal-arts college of Bryn Mawr’s caliber on board with the Compact this early,” says College Board vice president Ronald Williams. “Ninety percent of high-school students express the desire to attend college. We have to make sure that dream is achievable for all those students, regardless of income.”

Bryn Mawr College consistently ranks among the top liberal-arts colleges in the percentage of students receiving federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to students from families with incomes under $40,000.

The idea for the Compact came out of a comprehensive 2007 report by the College Board’s Task Force on College Access for Students from Low-Income Backgrounds.

Getting to know us: a new president takes a “pillar to post” tour of Bryn Mawr

During her first weeks in office, President Jane Dammen McAuliffe has been “enchanted by the stunning beauty” of the Bryn Mawr campus. She has also acquired a familiarity with furnaces, boilers, and ductwork that is unusual in a chief executive.

As McAuliffe undertook a thorough walking tour of the buildings and grounds, her guides–Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Berenson, Facilities Services Director Glenn Smith, and Assistant Director of Facilities Harold Maryea–quickly learned that “every inch of the campus” included basements and attics.

The three men observed the new president’s intense curiosity about the work of every staff member. They experienced it, too. Maryea is an expert in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems, and McAuliffe spent about an hour a day in his company for nearly a month: thus the president gained a comprehensive understanding of the systems that control the College’s interior environments and of the people who keep them running.

On most days, McAuliffe’s tour culminated in a mid-morning meeting with a group of Bryn Mawr staff members. “I’ve met with the staff in small groups so that I could understand, person by person, what the function of each individual office was,” she says. “I wanted to people the narrative that comes out of the reams of documentation that one receives as a candidate in a search. It was a very gracious effort on the part of staff units to host me,” she says, noting that she probably ate more pastries than were strictly good for her.

“Occasionally I’d have so many questions that we wouldn’t complete all the spaces that were allocated to that morning’s tour,” McAuliffe says. “I wanted to do it thoroughly.”

Boilers and furnaces didn’t obscure her view of the landscape.

“It was fabulous to have a chance to relish the architectural variety, the breathtaking beauty of the campus,” she says. “I loved seeing it up close, getting a solid sense of the geography of the campus as a whole and of the individual buildings.”

She was especially enamored of the architectural detail and diversity she saw in dorm rooms.”There are wonderful rooms with nooks and crannies–they were so far from the typical boxy dorm room. There were rooms with window benches and little overlooks. And the fact that so many of our rooms are singles is in and of itself an extraordinary advantage for students.”

Smith and Berenson provided a history of the “wonderful renovations” that were completed during the tenure of her predecessor, Nancy Vickers.

The buildings, McAuliffe says, “embody an attention to the quality of student life” that she encountered in the College’s staff as well.

“The dedication of the staff was almost palpable,” she says. “They care deeply about the institution and are eager to do the things that will help it move forward. But what emerged most clearly from these meetings was their obvious affection for the students and their commitment to ensuring that the overall student experience is a positive one. That was consistently articulated as a primary professional goal, and I saw many of the extra efforts staff members make to achieve it.”

McAuliffe herself is enjoying the return of students to campus. When she entered Dalton to meet with students who are participating in the Tri-Co Summer Institute, she says, “It was so exciting finally to hear a hubbub of student voices.” In the absence of the student population, “the place had seemed a little bit sedate.”

A planned series of dessert meetings with students in each dorm will give her more exposure to individual students’ voices, she says.

McAuliffe also plans to launch a yearlong series of faculty lunches this week. “The guest list for each lunch will be generated randomly because I’d like to mix faculty from different departments and from the several faculty ranks,” the president says. “I look forward to getting to know individual members of the faculty through these lunches and, perhaps, to introducing some faculty members to colleagues whom they have not yet met.”

With the help of the Alumnae Association, the new president is scheduling a series of receptions with alumnae/i in cities around the country.

McAuliffe’s agenda for the first year of her presidency is “a full immersion in the institution.” The process she undertook with the staff this summer will be repeated with students, faculty, alumnae/i, donors, and representatives of other institutions who have a stake in Bryn Mawr’s future.

“Much of what I’ll be doing is meeting with people, discussing what I’m learning about the College, and encouraging the renewed sense of attention that any leadership transition permits an institution. Out of that, I expect that the community’s priorities for my tenure in office will emerge. The community voice expresses itself and clarifies itself in a process of leadership transition.”

Photos by Amanda Cegielski ‘09