December 16, 2025

And that’s a wrap on Fall term 2025. 

As your student heads off to Field Work Term (or home to recharge), we are making plans for their return. 

A majority of my role here at Bennington is focused on finding ways to engage our alumni with students and the college. To that end, I’ve helped create a course titled Life After Bennington: A Curated Exposition of Bennington Alumni and How They Transitioned from College to Career, which will feature roughly a dozen alumni over the course of the Spring term. 

This course is proving popular, as we filled all 40 students with requests for additional slots! This course will feature presentations and conversations with Bennington alumni to provide guidance to current students about how to leverage their own experience in designing their education to the next step in their growth: designing a career. Most of the alumni will be in-person, allowing us to connect them with students over dinner before the evening course. In a future newsletter, I’ll share more details once the list of visiting alumni is finalized.

I’m also working with Student Life, and hopefully other campus departments, to provide some parent webinars in the Spring. If there is a topic you’d like to discuss or to be addressed, please let me know. For general questions, you can always check out our Families page on the website, which has lots of helpful links and information.

Happy holidays to you and enjoy time with your student over break. We can’t wait to see them again in February!

If you’re in NYC on January 22 and would like to join a gathering of alumni and students, please let me know, and I’ll forward you details.

 

Onward,

Shay Totten '91 
Director of Alumni and Constituent Engagement