Q: What changed your mind about the Naval Academy?
A: I spent a week there my junior year of high school. This is the beginning of their application process. They bring you on campus to administer all of the preliminary physical exams and that sort of thing, and also to give you a peek into the life there. It was really interesting; there were some things I liked and some things I didn’t. But what it came down to was the education. The curriculum is geared toward engineering and the hard sciences, and I felt that if I went through a regular day with its ups and downs and then had to come back to my room and study fluid dynamics for the rest of the evening, I wouldn’t be very happy. Their Philosophy Department offers all of two courses, and obviously they don’t offer ancient Greek.
Q: So how did you decide on Vassar?
A: The summer after junior year, we were on vacation in Maine, and I went to visit two liberal arts colleges, and they seemed like good places. I thought I could be happy at either of them, academically and socially. And then I thought to myself — Vassar is a lot like these places. Why don’t I just go to Vassar? I mean, I love the Hudson Valley — it’s beautiful here. So I ended up applying early decision.
Q: You’re double majoring in philosophy and classics. How did that come about?
A: History was the subject I was really interested in during high school, and the more I studied history, the more I liked ancient history. Classics sounded really interesting to me because it’s historically focused, but there’s also language study, art and architecture, literature, and philosophical work as well. And then philosophy and classics just seemed to fit together well.
Q: How has the study of these fields changed your understanding of the world?
A: No event or anything that’s happened in my life has changed the way I see the world the way the study of philosophy has. I can’t imagine something that would give me a richer set of ideas and concepts and ways of thinking about the world. Philosophy doesn’t really have limitations. It deals with anything and everything, from what we know about the world, and what we can know, to what the best societies are or the best forms of government are.
Q: Is there a particular philosopher that you find especially interesting?
A: Heidegger and phenomenology and existential thought. I can’t explain it in 10 words or less, but one of the ideas that really struck me — and this is present in other thinkers like Foucalt and Sartre — is the idea of the everyman, and the way people unconsciously conform to that everpresent, but at the same time almost nonexistent, composite of social norms. What’s really interesting is when you start to look at different aspects of modern society — advertising, for example — through the framework of this everyman concept.
Q: You spent a summer on an archeological dig in Greece. How did that come about?
A:The program is open to students from all across the country. Our Classics Department funds several fellowships for Vassar students to participate. They paid all our costs, including airfare, and we also got academic credit for it. There were about 40 undergraduates all together and a handful of graduate students, plus our trench supervisors, the archeologists. So the team, all told, was about 60 people.
We stayed in a hostel in ancient Corinth, which is a tiny little village, very traditional. You had to take a bus to get to the Internet. The hostel is run by a Greek family. They host a lot of archeological teams. They would cook these fantastic meals for us every night, four or five courses of really great Greek food. We would take buses to get to the site early in the morning — a place called Kenchreai, on the Saronic Gulf. We were excavating a Roman cemetery that had been used from about the first to the seventh century BC. The team I started on was looking for a Greek temple to Aphrodite. It had been described by Pausanius, an ancient Greek travel writer, and based on ground penetrating radar probes, the archeologists had a good guess that maybe this was where it was. Eventually we stopped finding pottery and then hit very rocky soil, so they decided to close the trench and move us to the tombs, which is where most of the others were working.
Q: Did you find anything?
A: I found a couple of coins. Those were really cool. We found figured lamps, with images of people wrestling, images of palm trees. We found an ivory charm of a person’s torso...found a glass perfume bottle that was mostly intact. That was pretty cool, anywhere from 2,000 to 1,500 years old. Where we were digging, there were complete skeletons, not articulated, but a large number of bones. At one point I found myself holding a mostly intact lower jaw, 2000 years old — that was a pretty strange feeling.
Q: Do you have any idea what you want to do when you graduate?
A: I’ve thought a lot about going to grad school, either for philosophy or classics, or in a combined program. I’ve really loved all the interactions I’ve had with my professors here, and I think that teaching and doing the scholarship and working with students and being in a collegiate environment is something I’d really love and enjoy. But at the same time, in the immediate future, I think I need to take a break from school and do something else. So I’m looking at things like Americorps, the Green Corps, the Peace Corps. I’d like to get a job with a nonprofit, make some money, or maybe travel abroad and do volunteer work — something that seems like its benefiting people on immediate pressing issues, and not these more abstract or historically removed ideas and concepts. And then, we’ll see.
Q: Aren’t you a rugby player?
A: I am. I rowed in high school and really enjoyed that, but I also had an interest in rugby, even though I’d never played it. Coach Brown sent me a nice little handwritten letter with all the reasons why I should play rugby. The interest he took in persuading me to play and his obvious enthusiasm for the game sort of won me over. Rugby has been a really great experience. I’ve played all four years. It’s the ultimate team sport because you’ve got 15 guys on the field, and everybody plays offense, everybody plays defense — the individual cannot do anything on his own. When you see people scrummage, it’s not one person, it’s eight people physically bound together. It’s physically demanding, mentally demanding, and at the same time forces you to work with other people in a way that builds really strong friendships. Plus it’s been really satisfying to blow away bigger and more established teams by 50 plus points.
Q: Where did you live on campus your first year?
A: Cushing House. Now I’m in the THs (Town Houses). I really like the old TAs (Terrace Apartments). But people always push for the THs because of the community aspect — because of the circle where people hang out. At the THs, you see people outside in general more, going over to each other’s houses, playing soccer, making noise, cooking dinner together as a block. So I’ve really enjoyed that aspect. A lot of my good friends from over the years live out there now. I’ve got a house that I really like — all my housemates, we’re very close. And then to be able to walk next door and have a number of great friends as your neighbors is a pretty nice living situation.
