Slideshow: Purposeful Work (and play) at this year’s Parents & Family Weekend
They came, they saw, they hugged.
This year’s Parents & Family Weekend welcomed 850 parents and more than 1,800 guests in all, a record turnout that effectively doubled the campus population for the three-day event, Oct. 10–12.
Parents and students crisscrossed the campus from morning to night, attending wall-to-wall programming and other opportunities to get up to speed on Bates goings-on, especially the college’s Purposeful Work Initiative.
Photographs from Parents & Family Weekend 2014
You’ve heard the mantra: “A liberal arts education doesn’t prepare you for one job. It prepares you for any job.”
Within months of becoming president, Spencer sounded an alarm. The days when a liberal arts college could have a smug attitude toward career and work are over — at least at Bates.
“What we’ve done at Bates is think deeply and comprehensively about the question of work.”
“Our students are graduating into a job market where the competition for talent is fierce and global,” Spencer told a Parents & Family Weekend gathering on Friday afternoon. Today’s economic realities won’t support the “any job” approach.
To be sure, U.S. colleges are responding to the pressure to better meet their students’ career needs, often by pressing harder on the gas pedal of their existing career program.
Bates’ approach, Purposeful Work, is different and distinctive, Spencer told parents. “What we’ve done at Bates is think deeply and comprehensively about the question of work.”
Purposeful Work sits directly within the college’s liberal arts mission, Spencer said. It is “developmental in its approach, woven into all aspects of the student experience, and highly intentional and pragmatic.”
Designed to include curricular, co-curricular and internship programs, Purposeful Work will touch all areas of “the personal growth that happens to our students throughout the arc of their career here, from the moment they come in the door,” Spencer explained.
Spencer’s remarks came during a panel discussion in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall featuring students who’ve been on the ground floor of new Purposeful Work programming, including last spring’s Practitioner-Taught Courses that “exposed students to hard skills to augment the classic liberal arts experience,” Spencer said. “We will have five more such courses in 2015.”
The panel also included a student who participated in last summer’s Koru skill-building program and another student who has taken two of the 23 Bates courses that have been infused with Purposeful Work concepts.
Set to debut in summer 2015, a new Purposeful Work internship program will complement existing and traditional internship offerings, Spencer told the audience. At the same time, the new internships will be their own species, existing directly under the umbrella of each student’s liberal arts experience.
More than ever, these internships will be geared toward “helping students test their interests, build skills, develop networks, reflect on what they’ve learned and connect their experience to what they are learning on campus,” she said.
“That means we’re doing something right.”
Based on her own crisscrossing of the campus during Parents & Family Weekend, Spencer told a gathering on Saturday morning that “what makes me happy is how many of you tell me that your son or daughter is having a fabulous experience. That means we’re doing something right.”
She credited the positive feedback to two bedrock Bates realities.
Spencer said that “there is something substantive about the sense of community here. We are not about individual competition, and each student is on his or her own path to optimization. There is real caring, community, respect and the kind of simple friendship that carries so many of your sons and daughters along.”
The second Bates reality is “the quality and accessibility of our faculty” that enables “our students to engage with professors and get help when they need it.
“I would put a stake in the ground and say that the Bates faculty does this better than any other college I know.”
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