Angela

Right away, first semester of my freshman year, I was on Farm Crew for my afternoon activity. We fixed fences, worked in the fields, chopped wood, and did maintenance work in the barn. Towards the end of the semester we began bringing in the cows from the field for their afternoon milking. That was nice, but not nearly enough cow contact for me.

Now, though, I'm a milker. My favorite shift in the barn is the morning one. We trudge through the dark to be at the barn by 5:45; everyone else is still asleep. Especially in the spring, dawn is so beautiful. I've seen calves be born. I've walked Mavis the Wonder Cow in competition at the annual Tunbridge World's Fair. She won Supreme Dairy Cow! (Actually, she's so amazing that she usually wins.)

I don't think I'm overly romantic about farm life. Large animals aren't always as pleasant as Mavis. During Project Week once, I committed to walking a teenage calf in the Strolling of the Heifers parade in nearby Brattleboro. That calf didn't like me; whenever I put a halter on her so that we could practice walking together, she bolted around. During the actual parade she bellowed every few seconds; the crowd gave her a round of applause for each moo. That calf and I happen to be particularly good friends now. So what did we learn by that exercise? I can only speak for myself, but I believe I learned patience, for starters. How to deal with belligerence, certainly. Both are good lessons for someone who wants to be a vet.

AngelaI'm hoping to apply to college biology programs next year. To that end, I've taken a fair number of science classes at Putney. Right now I happen to be taking Physics, taught by Glenn Littledale. It's a wonderful, demanding class. Glenn has a way of teaching that integrates advanced math with an understanding of the history of science and an appreciation for how the world works. He requires us to at least be in Precalculus so that we can handle the computations, but some really intriguing concepts are simple enough to handle with algebra. Just the other day, for example, we started with the escape velocity equation, Ve=2Gm/r (where m is the mass of the earth, r is the radius and G is gravitation). He asked us to figure out how small r would need be to create an escape velocity of the speed of light. We generated a few derivative algebraic equations and ended up with a mass so tiny -- 10^-2 -- that we were scratching our heads wondering what in the real world the mass was that we were "looking at." And then it occurred to us—a black hole! "Discovering" that felt profound and exhilarating.

When I was in elementary school I always took advanced classes. Here almost every class excites me.

(Angela graduated in June 2011 and is currently a freshman at Colgate University.)