During his senior year, Brian Pietras ’07 was a student worker in Alumni Relations, where he got an up-close look at the diverse accomplishments and world travels of Bennington alumni. In the introduction to his commencement speech, he described going back and reading speeches from years past.

I found that the central message of many of the senior speeches was that each graduating class will be able to survive and thrive in the real world because we have survived and thrived at Bennington. In our years here, the speeches remind us, we have learned both heady, life-changing concepts, and practical skills: we discovered how to design our own educations even as we mastered the art of regularly packing up all our earthly possessions. We assessed the complexities of Middle Eastern feminism while measuring the acidity of the local pond water—and, we still know exactly how many nickels and dimes will buy us a box of Ramen in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Portland. We are a tough and talented lot, tempered by experience in the supposed “real world” but still driven by our passions.

All these things are true. But I would also like to suggest that the reverse of the “survive Bennington, survive the world” equation is also true: the world will be able to thrive because it has Bennington students who will help its stories unfold.

"The college viewbook does not promise prospective students that '100% of Bennington alumni lead fascinating lives' without good reason."

And this unfolding will take place in the most obvious, and subtle, of ways—some of us will become the heart surgeons, the acclaimed novelists, the independent-yet-ubiquitous musicians, the research scientists, and the Oscar winners. But we will also be the ones who use music therapy to help the disabled; we will work alongside indigenous peoples to transcribe and translate their songs and stories; we will help design new dairy farms in rural China; we will film documentaries and open food banks in an effort to stop the problem of hunger right here in Vermont.... The college viewbook does not promise prospective students that “100% of Bennington alumni lead fascinating lives” without good reason. For every future I just suggested, there’s a Bennington alumnus or alumna who has made it a reality—actually, usually more than one....

I don’t know what it is about Bennington that produces such remarkable human beings—or, it may be more accurate to say, what about Bennington ensures that we learn to craft ourselves with such care. But I do know that when alumni write about their time at Bennington, they describe experiences that are remarkably similar to our own.... Mary Lou Peters Schram from the Class of 1956 once said, “When someone asks me for a brief bio, I usually start with: ‘I went to Bennington College...’ because that stands out in my mind as the beginning of my life.”

"Our paths, although they were certainly individual, were never solitary...."

A little over a year ago, I was reading a senior speech that was submitted by Emily Rand from the Class of 2006. She finished a long list about the attributes of Bennington with a single phrase: “the upside down.” Initially, I was taken aback. What exactly did she mean? Was there some kind of secret playground with amazing monkey bars that I had never dangled from? But then I thought for a minute, and realized that in those few words she had captured the pervasive strangeness of Bennington....

We will probably never be able to explain to the outside world exactly what it meant to be here—how it felt to be a part of the “upside down.” ...Bennington drew us all back from summers, internships, and terms spent abroad and away. We could spend the rest of our lives working out the intricate tangles of our own complicated but exhilarating times here, the patterns that formed as we spiraled our way through one another’s paths. In the future, as we trace out these lines, I suspect we will see something of how intertwined our journeys really were; we will understand that our paths, although they were certainly individual, were never solitary....

"We went to a college that was constantly asking us what intrigued and inspired us, and what we planned to do about it."

We went to a college that was constantly asking us what intrigued and inspired us, and what we planned to do about it—one that worked, furthermore, to instill this kind of questioning into our way of thinking. We went to a college where we savored each term’s new curriculum, emailed our teachers with minute questions.... We went to a school where, while walking back to our houses after sunset, we could recognize one another from a hundred feet away. This recognition did not always come because we saw one another’s faces, or were very close friends, but because of the intimacy that came with living and working in such close proximity. We knew one another by our ways of moving, by the sounds of our laughter, by our silhouettes.