Image: A 1967 photograph of Lauren Levey '69, who worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York. She is shown operating a bank of computerized electronic recording equipment. Among other things, her duties included editing, copying, and splicing tapes.

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Washington Post readers who opened up the paper on the morning of March 9, 1958, were greeted by the face of a Bennington student: Sarah Southern '59.

Southern wasn't famous; she wasn't a socialite, celebrity, or criminal on the lam. What earned her a place in the paper, in fact, wouldn't be considered unusual today. At the time, it was revolutionary enough that it garnered mentions of Bennington students in newspapers around the country—and yet the College had been requiring students to do it for more than two decades.

Sarah Southern was completing a winter internship.

The phenomenon was so uncommon that the newspaper, lacking another word for it, referred to Southern's work at the Friends Committee on National Legislation as a "training program." Translation: The Bennington junior was revising a ten-page pamphlet on disarmament and regularly observing hearings of Senate subcommittees, including one overseen by then-senator Lyndon Johnson.

Bennington went co-ed in 1969, but in the first three decades of its life, it was a women's college. The reporters who first covered the presence of the "Bennington girls" in the workplace seemed amazed not only by the fact that young women were out there thriving in the world of work, but also by the variety of jobs they were doing. These students were assisting in laboratory research, translating Russian texts, working at the Metropolitan Opera Company, and proofreading newspaper copy. They worked equally hard at jobs less glamorous: some found positions as a "girl Friday" in a variety of office settings, or worked at factories, especially during World War II.

Even in those less glamorous jobs, students found the practical experience—then called Non-Resident Term, now called Field Work Term—to be an excellent complement to their other studies at Bennington. One student in those early years wrote with good humor about the first job she took after discovering, at age seventeen and in her freshman year, that paid employment as a poet was not readily available: "That first winter, I was everybody's errand girl on my hometown newspaper." And yet, she says, "Nothing before or since ever equaled the satisfaction I felt at securing this humble task on my own."

Far from causing her to abandon poetry, the reality check spurred her to become a better writer and enrich her literature study with other disciplines. "A look inside a newspaper office sent me back to college with greatly modified notions about my qualifications as a writer. I saw that there was more to it than a passion for Yeats and T.S. Eliot and went to work at gaining more literacy in subjects like history and economics as well as literature."

The combination of driving passion and learning-the-ropes realism crops up again and again in Field Work Terms past and present. Last year, David Dibler '07 researched the history of FWT, compiling a collection of historic photos and newspaper articles like the ones mentioned above. Dibler was struck by the adventures students have sought out over the years. "People have taken the opportunity to do really interesting things," he says. "For a while there was a frontier nursing operation in a very rural part of Kentucky where they'd actually ride horses to get to some of these places. One student talked about doing that job and having her jeep stall out in the middle of a creek." A 1969 College publication shows students doing everything from architectural drafting to assembling harpsichords. It also offers an impressive roster of the places where Bennington students were making their mark: the American Museum of Natural History, Condé Nast Publications, Planned Parenthood, United Artists, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Today's Field Work Term jobs are no less varied—or challenging. (Click here to see a sampling of recent Field Work Terms.) And because students complete the seven-week FWT for each year they attend the College, they graduate with both a diploma and a resumé that includes at least four jobs.* Many have made professional connections along the way, and some are offered full-time positions by their former FWT employers.

The most distinctive thing about Field Work Term, though, might be what students do with it when they get back to campus. Bennington students design their own plans of study, and they choose their internships fully anticipating that the jobs will help shape their ideas. A student concentrating in computer science might decide to intern with a software company, but then again, he might also create database systems for a grassroots political campaign. Or, for that matter, work in an art gallery. Whichever choice he makes, the experience is pretty much guaranteed to deepen his perspective on his coursework. Students may come back from FWT with a renewed enthusiasm to push on with what they're already doing, or to make course corrections in their Plans, or to investigate a new avenue of study discovered on the job. But few students come back unchanged.

*Some students finish with three positions and a major self-designed project: Upperclass students may use one FWT for an independent study, such as writing a novel, doing original lab research, or curating an exhibition. Transfer students, like other students, complete one FWT for each year they attend the College, so they may graduate with fewer FWTs.

More:

• A sampler of some recent FWTs
• Field Work Term FAQ

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