Senior Profile | Avery Farmer
Common Sense Leadership Shows the Way A leader, scholar and friend, Avery Farmer does it all. Though his senior year was cut short, Farmer continued to show commitment through his service as president of the AAS. —Zach Jonas ’22 When I started out as a news writer for The Student during my first year, I found myself constantly interviewing one student: Avery Farmer ’20. His name appeared over and over again in the paper, as if he had a connection to every event on campus. He seemed to be in the know about everything, and everyone knew who he was. I eventually got to know Farmer as a club soccer athlete whose tireless work ethic kept him in excellent shape on the team. I remember introducing a prospective student to Farmer, who was then the president of the Association of Amherst Students (AAS), during one of our club soccer practices. I was insistent that the student know how profound it was to act as student body president, but with a quick smile and a witty comment about the importance of campus newspapers, Farmer brushed off the compliment. Because of his humble attitude, you would never know how much Farmer accomplished while at Amherst. But just a glance at his resume will leave you speechless as to how he achieved it all in four short years. Known on campus as a Black studies and English double major, Farmer found time to work as a Resident Counselor (RC) for three years, intern at The Common Magazine, serve in the AAS, write a thesis on the role of soccer in Africa and hold executive board positions with
the Amherst College Democrats (AC Dems) and the men’s club soccer team, endearingly called Amherst Football Club (AFC). To top it all off, Farmer had the small task of being president of the AAS his senior year — and amid the coronavirus pandemic, too. In sum, Farmer exemplified the Amherst experience.
First Steps at Amherst Originally hailing from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Farmer said he found his way to Amherst by luck. He attended Community High School, an alternative public school that allowed Farmer to take several classes at the nearby University of Michigan. Though more than half of his classmates either attended college in Michigan or not at all, Farmer’s college search spanned outside of Michigan. It was only by happenstance that Farmer heard about Amherst. While with the jazz ensemble during his sophomore year of high school, Farmer witnessed his fellow bandmate Dan Langa ’18 open his Amherst acceptance letter. By his senior year, Amherst was on Farmer’s short list of colleges. Though Langa “showed him the ropes” once he arrived at Amherst, Farmer credits his smooth transition from high school to the friends he made in his first-year seminar. “I got lucky with the friends I made early on,” he said. “Later on, once my academics really started to challenge me, I could
22 | The Amherst Student | May 31, 2020
rely on them for support,” Farmer said. As an RC, Farmer was sometimes the first impression that incoming students received of Amherst. “Avery was my firstyear RC, so he was one of the first people I really got to know at Amherst,” Bella Edo ’21 said. “He has always had this calming demeanor about him that makes you feel like he knows what he’s doing.” “He somehow manages to be so intellectual without being arrogant and an authentically engaged person in our Amherst community without the frivolity of superficial relationships,” she added. Farmer did not come into Amherst with an intended major. Instead, like a true liberal arts student, he took a wide breadth of classes and let his interests guide him. By the end of his sophomore year, when he had to declare his major, Farmer looked back at the classes he had taken and realized his love for Black studies and English. Of particular interest to Farmer was one English class that he took with Professor Daniel Hall, the writer-in-residence at the college in 2018. “Writing Poetry with Professor Hall was one of the most formative classes I took at Amherst,” Farmer said. “It was a creative writing class, but he put such a focus on reading. In high school, I had written a bit of poetry, but I hadn’t been exposed to the full breadth of what poetry could be … I found
Photo courtesy of Avery Farmer ‘20
After graduating from Amherst, Farmer will work at Berkeley Legal Group in Boston before attending law school on the East Coast. that Professor Hall was such a generous reader of my poems, it made me much more confident in my writing, and fostered a love of reading and writing in me.” “If there had been a poetry major, I would have done that,” he added with a laugh. And Farmer’s love of poetry and writing certainly translated to the work he created. During his sophomore year, Farmer completed a special topics course with Hall on poetic revision, who praised the depth of the work Farmer produced. Farmer would complete assignments independently and meet with Hall once a week for a discussion. As the semester drew on, Farmer would come to examine drafts from poets including Richard Wilbur ’42 and subsequently revise his own poetry.
“Though his work that semester was rigorous and deeply intellectual, the project finally felt to me less like scholarship than something closer to poetry itself, with its intuition and vitality, its human heartbeat,” Hall said about their course. “It was one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had as a teacher, and I still think of it as a farewell gift and a sendoff, better than any gold watch.” Farmer found similar success in his Black studies classes. During his first semester at the college, he took Black Panthers, Black Power, a course with John Drabinski, the Charles Hamilton Houston ’15 professor of Black studies. Farmer credits the relationship he had with Drabinski with his love for the subject. “From day one, he treated us all as equals in the conversation.
