My Struggle With Panic Disorder
By Kara C. Baskin ’00
Photo by Scott Suchman
I’m twenty eight years old, recently married, happily employed and, for two months last fall, I was terrified to leave my house. Things should’ve been peachy, really. I had a book deal in the works. Brian and I had just gotten married. My life was hectic, Type A, and organized just the way I liked it. But suddenly my fancy “happy hours” gave way to TV Land reruns; my posh dinners with media clients were replaced with yogurt and bananas; and my “for better or for worse” marriage vows were being put to the test before my wedding gown even came back from the dry cleaner’s.
I have panic disorder. An acute, debilitating form of anxiety, it affects six million Americans. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from it, and the attacks usually begin in one’s twenties. Sufferers tend to be overachieving, highly creative, and dare I say it?—a little neurotic. Trembling, sweating, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, choking, chest tightness, and intense nausea are a few of the lovely symptoms that come on like an impromptu acid bath.
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Opening the Door to Ethical Capitalism
by Mieke H. Bomann
Sheila Lirio Marcelo ’93 needed help. An entrepreneur-in-residence at Matrix Partners, a venture-capital firm, she was busy trying to get her own Internet start-up off the ground. But first on her to-do list was finding a nanny for her two boys, one of whom also needed a tutor, and personal care for her father, who had undergone heart surgery. Her two dogs also demanded some regular exercise. The convergence of those personal needs, combined with a desire to find work she was passionate about, helped her to formulate Care.com, a Web-based service company aimed at people who need outside help for some of life’s most important tasks, but who don’t have the time or the information resources to get it. “I really wanted to focus on [building] a for-profit company that had a social mission,” she explains. “So I started looking at families and children.”
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MHC Fellowships Help Fund Alumnae Dreams
By Susan Bushey '96
How many people can get money back from their alma maters? Mount Holyoke alumnae can.
The Alumnae Association and the college both fund fellowships annually, awarding nearly $50,000--this year the total was $47,425--to chosen alumnae. Some ninety to 130 apply for the thirteen to twenty awards given in a typical year, a low percentage of the 30,000-alumnae body.
Of the seven awards available, one--the Mary E. Woolley--is supported by the Alumnae Association's Founder's Fund and it is the largest, $7,500. The other awards average $1,500 per recipient.
Past fellowship recipients have used the funds to continue their education, teach in other countries, study women's education, and write a book, to name just a few. Alumnae from any class may apply, and the requirements are not stringent about what will be funded or how the money will be used. The only thing that these diverse recipients have in common is their ultimate goal--to pursue a dream.
Following, we highlight how four women have chosen to be lifelong learners with the financial help of the association and the college. If you'd like to join them, see the How to Apply section.
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By Vincent A. Ferraro
Globalization is one of those words that is often used, but rarely defined. It is a fudge word, like “security” or “power,” that reflects the user’s bias. For some, globalization is the promised land; for others, it is a circle in Dante’s hell.
The first thing we should know about globalization is that it is a highly politicized idea, and that the only productive way to discuss it is to make explicit one’s own definition. Thomas L. Friedman’s accessible book on globalization, The World is Flat, is a good starting point for understanding the term’s possible meanings. For this essay, I define globalization as the process by which all human activities on every part of the planet are increasingly interconnected and interdependent.
The second thing we should know about globalization is that it is an old process. The human species has proven very adept at expansion. Whether its beginning was in the Garden of Eden or Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, humanity has now inhabited virtually every land area on the planet, even those, like Antarctica, that are largely uninhabitable. Similarly, the political history of the species is one of expansion (and decline). Every empire has had the same goal: the subjugation of others to a presumptively universal political authority within the largest geographical framework possible.
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Starting to Talk About the End of Life
by Emily Harrison Weir
Photos: Andy Duback • Illustrations: © Deidre Scherer
Death: it will happen to each of us, but few want to admit it or—worse—talk about it. Camilla Rockwell’s film, Holding Our Own: Embracing the End of Life, aims to smash that cultural taboo and open a dialogue about life’s final passage. The powerful and touching documentary uses art and music to, Rockwell hopes, “attract people and gently seduce them into engaging a topic that they would rather run away from.”
Rockwell understands that reaction, but has seen firsthand the anguish that ignoring impending death can cause patients and their families. Five years ago, Rockwell became a Hospice volunteer; one of her first clients passed away without her family ever acknowledging she had terminal cancer. “It was my first real vision that suffering is caused when people can’t speak about their fears, make plans for the end of life, and say goodbye,” Rockwell recalls. “I wanted to find a way to help people begin to talk about the end of life.”
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“The main obligations of the gardener are to be mindful of the garden’s needs and to be observant each day of what is going on in the garden.” Those words from the late U.S. poet laureate and thoughtful gardener Stanley Kunitz were particularly relevant to the work of three MHC interns this summer who planted and cared for the Mount Holyoke Student Garden.
Hatched as an independent study by two students long since graduated, the project and its supporting hands have been given a small piece of land by the college for a pilot program that is just beginning to define its vegetative and curricular goals. The three interns—Sarah Lince FP’09, Morgan Lindsay ’09, and Ally Neher ’07— were paid by the Center for the Environment to make the garden’s first season a productive one. A founding gift from the class of 2007 helped launch the project.
Acorn squash, pumpkins, potatoes, basil, parsley, dill, and cilantro grace the plot’s half acre at the south end of Prospect Hill, next to the college’s botanic garden nursery. The vegetables and herbs were sold to Dining Services in the fall. Thus, students had a bigger taste of truly local produce, which is rapidly becoming a mantra for consumers of all stripes concerned with transportation costs, freshness, and support of community producers.
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As Darren Hamilton, associate professor of chemistry, enthusiastically relates, the department is in a multidimensional process of enhancing its teaching labs with the more efficient use of nontoxic and recyclable materials; focusing on more efficient technologies like microwaves instead of hotplates to carry out basic experiments; and having students make better use of chromatography and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, state-of-the-art instruments that are currently underused.
“Using a glass flask, solvent, and a hotplate for recrystallization tends to leave our students with the idea that everyone does it like this,” says Hamilton, a British-born and educated organic chemist who has led the charge to reevaluate the teaching labs. While it’s still important that students know how tried-and-true procedures work, he says, “we want to look like the outside world.”
Part of the department’s efforts relate to an academia-wide movement to “green” chemistry, which involves using less-toxic solvents and thinking critically about the scale of experiments and how much waste they produce. A clean working environment is not only safer but mimics the functioning of pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline—places MHC chemistry students routinely intern and work. —M.H.B.
How many students applied
3,194
How many were accepted
1,671
How many enrolled
522
How many are African
American, Asian
American, Latina,
and Native American
121
How many states are represented
42
How many countries are represented
24
Critical Social Thought 252: Literature and Politics
As conversation jumps from Academy Award winner Helen Mirren to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses to the sexualized concept of “the Orient,” Five College visiting assistant professor Constantine Pleshakov pushes the far-reaching, all-inclusive dialogue even further. In Critical Social Thought 252: Literature and Politics, everything is up for discussion.
The syllabus for the class reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century novelists and includes not only Rushdie but also Yukio Mishima and Arundhati Roy. Students relate the literature to its historical context, approaching the novels as forums for political change. “Literature is politics, remember that,” Pleshakov repeats. What were the novelists’ causes? What were their solutions to the problems of the twentieth century? How do their stories reflect social realities?
Offering an inter-disciplinary major, the Critical Social Thought (CST) program prompts students to turn intellectual traditions upside down for a new look at social realities through the colorful lenses of history, anthropology, culture, and language.
One cold day last winter, class discussion revolved around Edward Said’s Orientalism as students discussed its place on the class syllabus. It’s not beach reading, but it’s useful in a theoretical way, claimed most readers. The book addresses the question of “Orientalism” as a construct and how this construct fits into our culture—from foreign policy to vacation destinations.
This is critical social thought at its organic roots: taking social theories and using them as a jumping-off point, rather than a destination. The conversation is lively and intelligent, with Pleshakov alternating between a precarious perch on his desk and pacing the crowded room, eyes widening as he emphatically nods the debate along.
“I was skeptical at first, jumping right into a 200-level critical social thought course with no prior experience,” says Natalya Goykhberg ’07. “As it turns out, CST is a combination of every discipline I have studied— philosophy, politics, literature, international relations, and history.” Lauren Senchack ’07 concurs. “I’m not an English major, so I was initially concerned about the level of discussion, but Pleshakov has a wonderful way of validating every person’s opinion.” — Stephanie Miedema ’07
Photo by Andrea Burns
Students, faculty, staff, and alumnae signed their names or left written sentiments on nine pieces of structural steel that became part of the new residence hall this summer. Traditionally, the steelworkers sign the final piece of steel erected in a building, says John Bryant, director of facilities management. But the act of leaving a mark on the world is so popular at MHC that nine beams were ultimately offered and indelibly marked. Other buildings on campus are also repositories of names and messages, including Blanchard, where the plywood under the rotunda is a veritable signature scrapbook. The new hall will open to students in fall 2008.
Latest still image of new residence hall under construction:
Visit the Mount Holyoke College web site for a live video feed.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
Standing at the podium in a Kendade classroom, Grace June Kim ’07 was not visibly nervous. But her presentation in the college’s second annual Senior Symposium was the culmination of ten months of research and fieldwork, and naturally, she wanted it to go well.
The symposium illuminates the academic passions that seniors have cultivated in the company of their professors and peers. Ninety seniors from twenty-seven departments were showcased this year, including Kim, whose topic was, “Adolescents’ Pursuit of Career Possible Selves: Examining the Relationship Between Social Capital and Procedural Knowledge.”
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Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist and professor of geology at MhC, spent three weeks this summer studying rocks in the Boston Basin near hingham, Massachusetts. But they weren’t just any rocks. these rocks were fossils of some of the oldest complex life forms on the planet. McMenamin and a group of geology students from across the country, together with a colleague from the university of Pittsburgh, determined not only that these 575 million-year-old fossils of the soft-bodied organisms called the ediacara biota were exactly that (which had been in question) but also that they had lived in beach environments, and not just in deep water, as is the general consensus among paleontologists. An abstract with the group’s findings will be presented to the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in November and “will shake things up quite a bit,” says McMenamin. —M.H.B.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
Do you remember life before you had a cell phone? Microwave? Computer? From the moment you added each item to your life, it became hard to imagine living without it, right? Facebook is the same.
I started my Mount Holyoke career as many of you did—I received my roommate’s name from Residential Life, then exchanged introductory letters and a timid phone call. On move-in day, I tried frantically to organize the sea of new faces in my dorm. During my first year, I sat in the back of classrooms and then cursed my shyness whenever I had a homework question and didn’t know the name of anyone in my class to ask. I’d chat with someone at dinner, then never cross paths again.
And then in my sopho-more year, Facebook struck.
For those who have heard the name but wonder what it’s all about, Facebook is a Web-based networking tool. You create a personal profile with as much or as little information as you want. Typically, users include a picture, contact information, interests, education details, and a photo album. Initially, you are connected to those with whom you share a workplace, school, or geographic location. Then you desig•nate others as “friends”; only they can see your profile.
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Led by tour coordinator Debby Hall ’74 and conductor Cathy Melhorn, professor emeritus of music, Glee Club alumnae went on tour to China this summer. Sponsored by the Alumnae Association, fifty-five singers from the classes of 1962 to 2009, and thirty guests visited Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi’an, and Beijing, with some extending their trip for a Three Gorges Yangtze River cruise. Joining with outstanding Chinese women’s and mixed choirs, they performed in distinguished venues for large, enthusiastic audiences, and despite very hot, humid weather, managed a full itinerary of sightseeing, shopping, and eating! (For more pictures of the group’s trip, go to www.alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/go/gleeclub.)
Photo by John Lemly
Late fall is a good time to get ready for the spring job search, and getting an effective research strategy in place is part of that process, says Cori Ashworth, career and professional consultant for the Alumnae Association.
As a first step, it’s essential to make your job search manageable by narrowing your focus in terms of location and industry. “When you’re doing research, start at the macro level and move to the micro level,” Ashworth says.
Select a city where you’d like to live and work your research around that place, she advises. If you’re recently graduated and clueless as to which fields are best suited to your major, Ferguson’s Facts on File Career Guidance Center gives lots of ideas on how to apply a particular major to the real world. It’s available on the college’s Career Development Center (CDC) Web site.
One of the best places to start your job search homework is by doing the self-assessments Ashworth has put up on her career service pages on the Alumnae Association’s Web site. Once you have a handle on your work identity, you can begin to research relevant industries by looking at the database Vault Online Career Library, also at the CDC site. It gives you overviews of industries, Web sites, associations related to particular fields, and salary and hiring information.
Another useful site available through the CDC is CareerSearch, which contains millions of profiles of employers from the business and academic worlds. It enables a job seeker to do a geographical sort of companies by industry.
Armed with all that information, you then can make use of LifeNet, Ashworth points out, which is the Association’s networking tool that enables you to find alumnae working in particular fields and contact them for informational interviews and insights. —M.H.B.
My Struggle With Panic Disorder 
