For each year they attend the College, Bennington students go out into the world to complete seven-week winter internships in areas that fascinate them and complement their studies. They bring back stories from across the country and across the globe—tales from political campaigns and research laboratories, law offices and art museums, hospitals and theaters, newspapers and national parks.

This internship period is called Field Work Term, and it’s been going strong since the College's founding. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be presenting stories from this year’s FWT.

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This is the Soundstation, located in Liège, Belgium.

It used to be the train station for the city of Liège, one of the country’s main transportation hubs. But these days, the stately stone building is a center for electronic music, with a dance club, concert hall, café, restaurant, and recording studio under one roof.

And this is Owen Henry ’10, of Bemidji, Minnesota.

Owen’s main areas of concentration at Bennington are psychology and dance—but, like the Liege train station, he is a multi-purpose kind of guy. He began taking French during his first term at Bennington, and, a year and a half later, he decided to use his Field Work Term to venture into the francophone world. “I wanted to see how I could do in that type of environment,” he says.

“I spoke to Jean-Fred [Hennuy, one of the French faculty], and he said that one of his childhood friends owned a recording studio in Belgium. I was blown away—I’d taken recording classes at Bennington and done some recording back in Minnesota. I told him I’d love to work there. So I called his friend, I wrote a CV, all that kind of stuff.”

And voilà—Owen was offered a position as a production assistant, which included helping to organize an electronic music festival, Les TransArdentes.

"I got to watch as this band was throwing together a new album."

As it turned out, the title of “production assistant” gave him access to a broader slice of the field than he’d expected. “I did everything,” Owen says, including gaining a host of new skills as a sound technician: “setting up the mikes, getting the speakers going, putting effects on vocals, running the mixing boards, sound checking.”

He also observed in recording sessions. “My boss knew I was interested in sound recording, and told me that this Belgian band called Malibu Stacy was coming through. He said, ‘Do you want to check them out?’ So I got to sit in the back and watch as this band was throwing together a new album.”

And he got to see the workings of how a large concert is organized. “For the festival, they rented out this huge hall, and I was actually able to go there with one of the artists who was decorating it,” he says. “We walked around and met with all the big executives from different investors and sponsoring companies.” With only three terms of French study under his belt, Owen soon realized he wasn’t quite as fluent as he thought—“I was pretty quiet for most of those meetings, and the people were like, ‘Who’s this guy? He’s so silent. What’s he doing here?’”—but as the weeks passed, he began to gain more confidence.

"The language program at Bennington is so amazing. It made going in there and just getting to a general level of French so much easier."

“After a while, I’d be in conversation with someone,” Owen says, “and they would ask me, ‘How long have you been taking French?’ and when I answered, they’d be so surprised—‘Wow, only a year and a half?’ The language program at Bennington is so amazing. It made going in there and just getting to a general level of French so much easier.”

Although he says he wasn’t quite “having deep philosophical conversations,” he was fluent enough to probe into the cultural tensions in Belgian society. “I had read this really good book in my Social Psychology class called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and I brought it with me to re-read. I’d spend a couple hours just sitting in a café and watching interactions, how people talked, how it differed from our own society.”

Belgium encompasses three basic subcultures: the Walloon (French-speaking) subculture (and other French-speakers from Brussels); the Flemish subculture (which speaks Flemish, a dialect of Dutch); and the German-speaking subculture. Owen made it a point to speak with someone from each group, asking them the same questions, to gain insight into Belgian society. “The more I spoke with people, the more I was excited. I asked them about how they feel about their national identity and about each other, and stemming from that, they’d go off tangents that allowed me to ask about other things.”

"I asked him, ‘How do you do it?’ He told me that every day, he picked up a newspaper..."

One of the many conversations Owen had actually led to a new technique he used to improve his French. “One of the guys I worked with spent three months out of the year in South America, and I asked him, ‘How do you do it?’ He told me that every day, he picked up a newspaper, to try to understand how they viewed life and society. As he read the paper, he’d sit there with the dictionary and internalize the words. So that’s what I did. They have free newspapers on the metro, so I’d grab one on the train and do this every day, and it made my conversational French so much better....

“Overall, I think I matured so much in Belgium. It clarified what I want to do; I can articulate myself a lot better in all my classes…People always say ‘Field Work Term changed my life,’ but it really has forever changed.”

More:

• Field Work Term
• More Field Work Term stories
• A sampler of recent FWT jobs

Click here to read more stories about Bennington.