I’m wandering around Jewett at 6:30 p.m. on a Monday and the sounds of partying are seeping up from the floorboards. I cock my head to the side and wonder, “What the hell is going on?”
My first guess would be something conventional. Birthday parties and things of the like have no concern for days of the week and this would seem the most likely explanation to this seemingly untimely merrymaking.
Travelling to the source, I find a conclusion that is all the more satisfying, and one that requires less of a snackrifice in the next day’s academics: Class is cancelled on Tuesday: Undergraduate Conference, hell yeah.
The Undergraduate Conference is the best thing to happen to Tuesdays. No class is always a good thing, always. But, what has been proven to me in attending this particular event is that this conference offers more than a convenient excuse for Monday night debauchery.
The Undergraduate Conference, in a crudely summative definition, is a conference during which undergraduate students at Whitman are given an opportunity to present papers and research to their peers. It is a chance for collaboration amongst peers, a chance to see firsthand the fruits of your friends’ labor, a chance to be slapped in the face with the reality that people at this institution are, indeed, learning things. Most of all, however, it gives people the chance to explore topics that interest them, and explore topics with which they may be less familiar. All in all, it’s this concept of a ‘holistic education’ the Whitman Web site bludgeons its viewers with, enacted in reality.
My first impression of the undergrad was one of skepticism, a place where people can talk down to me from the heinous high horse of pretension and academic snobbery. But, upon further investigation, and by actually attending some of these presentations, I quickly realized this was not the case. The conference provided more insight than I could have expected, and shocked me from my own position of academic snobbery, bringing me to the grim reality that there are (several) people at this school smarter than myself. As unfortunate a realization as this was, it did give me the unique opportunity to learn from these people, and to crawl up to their level. In essence, I was learning amongst my peers from my peers.
This kind of education, as a collaborative effort, is the very thing Whitman strives for, to instill a sense of community in its students. As much as this concept has been beat senselessly into our subconscious, it remains interesting to see it carried out. It’s inspiring, in a sense, to see the immediate fruits of academic rigor borne before you. The nature of the conference’s presentations being put on by fellow undergraduates brings about a closeness and immediacy that a lecture or a graduate conference would lack. These are people whose shoes I could see filling, whose work I could see replicating because I am engaged in the same process as they are.
While it doesn’t take a hell of a lot of effort to see how Whitman instills community in the activities it sponsors and the parties it throws, it is much more difficult to realize this sense of community on the academic level. The Undergraduate Conference serves as a means to bring this level of community to the realm of academia, which, ultimately, is the goal of Whitman as a college.
