At Bennington you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic and field work, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.
By building, articulating, and advocating for the substance of your education, you hone your ability to thrive in a world without givens, to tolerate ambiguity, and to steer your work in compelling directions even when a path is not laid out for you.
How it Works
First Year
Your first year is one of grounding and exploration. You take a variety of courses, explore new subjects, and begin to build an education around your interests.
Second and Third Years
The second and third years allow you to dive into a particular discipline, a cluster of disciplines, or a question, discovering the power and limitations of immersion.
The Fourth Year
The final year is an opening outward, when you explore how your own work relates to others’ and how your deepened understanding of a subject or craft might matter to the rest of the world. You may also choose to conclude your work at Bennington with a senior project or thesis paper.
Advising and Mentoring
In one-on-one sessions with your faculty advisor and in meetings with your faculty Plan committee, your teachers serve as both mentors and guides. They help you discover how your intellectual interests and professional ambitions might shape an education of depth, breadth, and rigor. They guide your progress to ensure that your Plan is challenging, academically sound, and significant. In addition, Bennington has a cadre of staff advisors with expertise in the first-year experience, international student services, Field Work Term and career advising, co-curricular experiences, study abroad, grants and fellowships, and accommodations and support. They work in concert with faculty advisors to help you develop the habits of mind that contribute to success in your Plan and Field Work Terms.
Grades and Evaluations
Students may request letter grades for any and all courses they take. In addition to the optional grades, all students receive written narrative evaluations at the end of the fall and spring terms for each course they have taken. Faculty summarize the student’s progress, appraise his/her work, and often make suggestions for further development. A narrative evaluation is issued whether the student elects to receive a letter grade or a pass/fail rating.
A Bennington Education: Capacities
A Bennington education allows students to develop, through iteration and self-reflection and in increasingly sophisticated ways, several fundamental capacities:
Inquire
As students formulate questions to advance their studies they define and refine a clear line of inquiry that elucidates the unknown while questioning the known.
Research
Students expand their knowledge through active, self-determined investigation, learning the steps needed to master a topic, and to distinguish deep research from surface familiarity.
Create
Students make and revise original work, develop new ways of understanding, and engage in generative and critical problem-solving, often in collaboration with others.
Engage
Students participate in a community of learning, both in the classroom and in the world beyond.
Communicate
Students learn to express their ideas with clarity and effectiveness, and learn to listen and respond to the voices of others.
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