THE AMHERST
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVIII, ISSUE 2 l WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2018
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Students Voice Need for More Counseling Resources Shawna Chen ’20 Managing News Editor Editor’s Note: This article is the second in a twopart series on the the Counseling Center’s challenges balancing student need and financial resources. Resources for any person who is feeling depressed, troubled or suicidal are listed at the end of this article.
Photo courtesy of Natalie De Rosa ’21
Overenrollment of the class of 2022 has forced 60 first years to live in triple-occupancy dorm rooms, all of them converted from large one-room doubles or two-room doubles.
Overenrollment in Class of 2022 Leads to Triples Natalie De Rosa ’21 Assistant News Editor Sixty first years are living in triple-occupancy dorm rooms in the first-year residence halls this year because of overenrollment in the class of 2022. Though the Office of Admissions initially anticipated a class size of 460 to 485 students, 497 students matriculated into the class of 2022, producing a yield rate of about 40 percent — 3 percent higher than expected. Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Matthew McGann noted that the issue of overenrollment is not exclusive to Amherst. Colleges across the country, particularly other NESCAC institutions, are also seeing higher-than-expected yield rates for incoming classes. While this surge in applicants occured systematically, McGann added that yield rates are a product of individual choices and are therefore unpredictable. “Yield prediction is challenging because the students who we admit to Amherst have a lot of great options,” he said. “There’s some degree to which you can predict that, but at the end of the day, it’s a very human process and it’s a very individualized set of decisions.” The class of 2021, for example, witnessed a lower-than-anticipated yield rate, which led to an increased number of acceptances from the waitlist. While a low yield rate relies on the waitlist to reach the target class size, a high yield rate can
prompt a variety of scenarios. Some schools with dramatically higher yield rates might encourage students to take a year off, while others choose to be stringent with final grades and deposit deadlines, rescinding students from the class. McGann insisted that the decision to house students in triple rooms was the best-case scenario for overenrollment. “What we’ve got going is the ideal, McGann said “All the first-year students are living together on the first-year quad, they’re coming in the year that they intend to enroll in college and we’re treating students fairly and equitably.” Chief Student Affairs Officer Hikaru Kozuma also lauded triples as the best choice, noting that triples presented the least disruptive option. “Although [triple rooms] were not ideal, we tried to minimize the number of disruptions for students, including those who were housed in a triple,” Kozuma said. To compensate for the inconveniences that living in a triple room might provoke, affected students were provided $500 in ACDollars. The limited amount of space in triple rooms posed a clear problem, Kozuma said, but each room on the first-year quad was examined to ensure that the biggest spaces were used as triples. He also emphasized that square footage alone could not provide a fair representation of the room — room visitations by staff throughout the summer were also crucial to gauging the general feel of the rooms. “You can see blueprints and you can see square
footage, but once you get into the room you can see how it actually works,” he said. In addition to room size, location was considered to avoid putting an extra burden on resident counselors in first-year dorms. Triple rooms were spread across the first-year dorms rather than clustered in one area in order to distribute the high number of students more evenly across RCs. Willie Cohen ’22, who was assigned a triple room in Charles Pratt Dormitory, said that his living arrangement was better than he expected. “It hasn’t been that bad,” he said. “There are one-room doubles with less space, so I guess we lucked out.” Bernardo Luna ’22 echoed this sentiment. After working with his roommates to loft their beds and move their desks into alcoves, Luna’s reservations about living in a triple were diminished. “Living in a triple was something I was anxious about and believed would cause problems. The opposite has been true and my roommates and I are getting along fine,” Luna said. While housing shortages posed an issue for this year’s first-year class, Kozuma doesn’t think that the problem will carry on to upperclassmen housing in the future. He said that there are always enough rooms even if it initially seems tight, because students tend to make last-minute decisions to go abroad or take a semester off, creating space throughout the year. “It’s never the case that every single room on campus is filled 100 percent of the time,” he said.
Last week, The Student reported on the search for a new counselor to supplement resources at the Counseling Center. This week, students speak on their experiences with the center and areas they see for improvement.
Visiting the Center Alex Frenett ’18 started attending therapy at the Counseling Center in the spring semester of his sophomore year and continued through the end of his junior year. When Frenett was able to meet frequently with his counselor — once every week or once every two weeks — the two were able to “get deeper into what I wanted to talk about.” Frequent sessions ensured that the counselor retained more information about Frenett’s treatment and challenges, meaning that each session continued smoothly from one session to the next. Soon, however, the only appointments available to Frenett were scheduled three to four weeks apart. “It just wasn’t worth it for me,” he said. “It wasn’t frequent enough to be helpful.” His counselor advised him to see a psychiatrist to start medication, telling him he should see the psychiatrist once every two weeks to monitor the effects of the medication. The first two sessions, he said, were two weeks apart, but after that, even as he was increasing the dosage of the medication, the frequency of the appointments decreased. Frenett felt that he was stable enough and decided not to seek counseling off campus, but he acknowledged that continual counseling would have helped him better manage his senior year. “There were points during senior year where I thought I should [go to counseling], but I was just very discouraged and ended up
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New Chef Forages for More Customizable Dining Options Emma Swislow ’20 Managing News Editor Entering the kitchens in the basement of Valentine Dining Hall is like entering a more intense version of the seating area at noon on a Monday. It’s loud from the dishes being washed, it’s smokey from the burgers being grilled for burger night and it’s very easy to bump into the people and equipment that fill up the space. Yet Stefania Patinella, Amherst’s new executive chef hired in July, navigates the commotion-filled kitchens with ease. She first stops to chat with the garde manger, who’s slicing up cucumbers for the salad bar, and
then checks in with the chef making red pepper hummus. Patinella walks into the next room and checks on the burgers and the chefs grilling them. Then she almost pirouettes to another chef to work out a scheduling conflict, before advising someone else on whether the wedge-shaped potatoes will cook all the way through. When she finally steps out of the kitchens and walks out of the dining hall toward the first-year quad, Patinella jokes that she needs to be at least 20 paces away from the dining hall to do anything uninterrupted. Patinella grew up in an Italian family where “food was the most important thing you could possibly provide for your children,” she said.
Her childhood was filled with healthy, nutritious foods. This experience with homemade food from locally-sourced ingredients is something that Patinella plans on developing during her time at Amherst. “The chef before me came from a restaurant background and many of the items that have a lot of care in them are also very restaurant-y,” she said. “They’re somewhat rich and that’s nice to some degree … but my way of approaching food is to have a lighter touch. Things that are a little bit simpler, a little bit lighter and fresher. This is a direction that the whole country is going in, so I’m not unusual in this and of course not every-
body wants to eat this way, so there will always be variety.” Although she’s never worked in a college dining setting before, Patinella found herself drawn to the intersection between education and food. “I’ve done some work in restaurants, but not a lot, and this just feels like a great niche,” she said. “Working in restaurants has never been my thing because it’s a little bit of a passive experience, which can be nice. I want to go to restaurants and have someone prepare my meal sometimes, but the mission is not usually an educational space, whereas here the mission is education and I think
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