Lisa Beneman
“After graduation, I am immediately heading out on the U.S.-Mexico border trip with [Associate Professor of Politics] Aaron Bobrow-Strain and 10 other awesome Whitman students. It is an amazing program that I am excited to be a part of and learn from. After the trip I am moving to Siena, Italy for the summer to work at Tenuta di Spannocchia, a diversified organic farm in rural Tuscany. I will be working in the vegetable gardens, in the olive orchard and with farm animals as a first step towards my dream of one day having my own farm. The farm is part of a larger 1,100-acre estate run by the Spannocchia Foundation. Present-day life at Spannocchia attempts to show in a very fundamental way how the past of this historic rural agricultural community can be preserved and its traditions maintained in a manner that affords a viable existence within the modern world … After the summer I plan to travel for a little while overseas and then return home to Maine to figure out the next adventure.”
“In the future, I have hopes to go to graduate school in marine biology, and I don’t know yet if I want to be a researcher or a teacher or some combination of the two. But what I really hope to do is to save the oceans one way or another. I think that there is [worth] in teaching people about the oceans and protecting it with research . . . [Next year] I am helping a writer do research for his book on the ecology and behavior of marine mammals. He wanted a student with a strong scientific basis and a liberal arts perspective to help him sort out the North American species. The book is sort of a behind-the-scenes guide to what these critters do beyond just existing and looking the way they do. I will be building a bank of scientific references and composing the details for each chapter, then he will go in and do all the nice writing . . . I will also be volunteering at the America’s Cup Sailing Competition in San Francisco and finding work at a marine lab to get experience before grad school.”
Julia Bowman
“I did my thesis on Lincoln High School, and through that process it was interesting to see how they perceive Whitman students and to see how the whole community supports the high school. And it’s been compelling seeing the connections there … I probably want to ultimately work with at-risk youth. Next year I will be the manager of an ice cream shop in Malibu, Calif . . . I have been working at Malibu Yogurt during breaks for the past four years. It is an old school surf friendly ice cream shop where you can sit in the courtyard and smell the beach air. When I was offered the position of store manager in charge of the shop and its 15 employees, I thought it would be a good experience while I work on my yoga teaching certificate and decide on graduate school plans.”
