Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly Winter 2012 by Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College

Meandering Career Paths • Alternatives to Jail Time • Mountain Day Goes Viral

A lu m n a e Q ua rt e r ly

Healthy Choices

What Might Lead You to Try Alternative Medicine? For Abby Greiner ’96, it was her ailing horse.

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Unexpected Destinations

From Homeless to Harvard Future physician Sara Martin ’10 was led to aspire higher by Sarah McLaughlin ’00.

22 Jail Break Alums work to build a smarter criminal justice system.

hemera/thinkstock

Cara Petrus

If your career path is complex and curved rather than straight, you’re not alone.

Mount Holyoke alumnae Quarterly Winter 2012 Volume 95 Number 4 Editor Emily Harrison Weir

Associate Editor Mieke H. Bomann

Class Notes Editor Kris halpin

Designers ALDRICH DESIGN design farm (class notes)

On the cover:

Accupuncturist Abby Greiner ’96 (cover, and at left) says alternative medicine works for people and animals. Photos by Ben Barnhart

Is Alternative Medicine Good For Your Health? Alums practicing complementary and alternative medicine share what they do and why you might want to “consider the alternative” too.

Viewpoints 2 Please write us, right now. Campus Currents 3 Energizing plastic; hunting dinosaurs; occupying Skinner Green; falling trees Alumnae Matters 28 Mountain madness; books alums are reading; Reunion ’round the corner

Ben Barnhart

Off the Shelf 34 Women and alcohol; Muslim American women; good eats in Norway Class Notes 38 News of your classmates, and miniprofiles Bulletin Board 80 Civil War exhibit at Skinner Museum; med school help

Quarterly Committee: Cindy L. Carpenter ’83, Kim Smith Dedam ’82 , Estelle Drent ’12 (student rep.), Catherine Manegold (faculty rep.), Sabine Scherer ’12 (student rep.), Shoshana Walter ’07, Hannah Clay Wareham ’09 Alumnae Association Board of Directors President* Cynthia L. Reed ’80 Vice President (Engagement)* Jennifer A. Durst ’95 Treasurer* Lynda Dean Alexander ’80 Clerk* Hilary M. Salmon ’03 Classes and Reunion Director Erin Ennis ’92 Alumnae Trustee Director Ellen Hyde Pace ’81 Nominating Director Antoria D. Howard-Marrow ’81 Director-at-Large, Human Resources* Joanna MacWilliams Jones ’67 Director-at-Large (Global Initiatives) Sharyanne J. McSwain ’84 Communications Director Sandy Mallalieu ’91 Young Alumnae Representative Tamara J. Dews ’06 Quarterly Director position open Clubs Director Jenna L. Tonner ’62 Volunteer Stewardship Director Katie Glockner Seymour ’79 Executive Director* Jane E. Zachary, ex officio without vote *Executive Committee The Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, Inc., 50 College Street, South Hadley, MA 01075-1486; 413-538-2300; fax: 413-538-2254 www.alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

The Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College serves a worldwide network of diverse individuals, cultivates and celebrates vibrant connections among all alumnae, fosters lifelong learning in the liberal arts tradition, and facilitates opportunities for alumnae to advance the goals and values of the College. Ideas expressed in the Quarterly are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of either the Alumnae Association or the College. General comments concerning the Quarterly should be sent to Emily Weir (eweir@mtholyoke. edu or Alumnae Quarterly, Alumnae Association, 50 College Street, South Hadley, MA 010751486). For class notes matters, contact Kris Halpin (413-538-2300, classnotes@mtholyoke. edu). Contact Alumnae Information Services with contact information updates (same address; 413-538-2303; ais@mtholyoke.edu). Phone 413-538-2300 with general questions regarding the Alumnae Association, or visit www. alumnae.mtholyoke.edu. The Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly (USPS 365-280) is published quarterly in the spring, summer, fall, and winter by the Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, Inc., 50 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075-1486. Winter 2012, volume 95, number 4, was printed in the USA by Lane Press, Burlington, VT. Periodicals postage paid at South Hadley, MA and additional mailing offices. Copyright Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College. Postmaster: (ISSN 0027-2993, USPS 365-280) Please send form 3579 to Alumnae Information Services, Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association, 50 College St, South Hadley, MA 01075-1486.

viewpoints Talking Up Midwifery Over five decades ago, my second child was born. While there was no midwife attending, my son was delivered without any anesthesia or chemicals of any sort. It took just three “pushes” on my part and he emerged whole and healthy. My doctor was present and watched, caught the baby, cut the cord, and then Jeffrey was in my arms. The third child, Sally, was born the same way. I had been practicing natural childbirth after the first child did not have that kind of help and was reluctant to “come out.” Midwifery then was not a part of the process but my doctor was aware of what I was doing for the second two babies and was supportive. Since then I keep reading and hearing about the reluctance of doctors to encourage natural birth. (My grandchildren were born through C-sections.) But every chance I get, I talk up the instinctive process and midwifery. Your article (fall) is hopeful. Suzanne Donaldson Poor ’55 Montclair, New Jersey Midwives Article “Rife with Bias” I’m writing to express my disappointment in the article “Alums Give a Big Push for Midwifery,” in the fall Quarterly.…[The] article is rife with bias and information potentially harmful to women and their babies. As a public relations professional who managed crisis communications for one of

the nation’s largest medical malpractice insurance companies, I have the unfortunate experience of witnessing first hand the negative outcomes of pregnancies— healthy and risky, medical and natural. After being privy to thousands of “normal” deliveries gone awry, and their tragic outcomes, I cannot stress enough the importance of being fully informed about all of a woman’s options when giving birth. If more women knew what I know, they wouldn’t give birth without emergency care instantly available. In most cases, midwives, doctors, and women won’t know something is an emergency until the very last moment in a situation where every second counts. I understand the sentiment behind natural birth, but why demonize the doctors who are responsible for saving the lives of women and children when something goes wrong? I respect midwives and think it’s a wonderful blessing to have a natural birth whenever possible, but the reality is that birth is inherently dangerous. Women and babies die and have been doing so for hundreds of years. Plain and simple. Women shouldn’t be fooled into believing that a natural birth is possible for everyone just because it’s a nice idea. I would have liked to see the Quarterly educate its readers more equally on this important topic. Nina Akerley ’04 Brighton, Massachusetts

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Modeling the HIV Epidemic Mathematically After reading “Thirty Years of Red Ribbons” (fall), I was surprised that Brooke Nichols ’09 was not mentioned. Even as a young alum, Brooke has made an impact on HIV research and helped inform policy and funding decisions on both a small and large scale. From her Mount Holyoke days through her master’s in epidemiology at UMass–Amherst, Brooke spent six months in Luderitz, Namibia, doing original research on the spread of HIV. She focused on migrant work patterns and alcohol consumption in informal drinking establishments to better understand the epidemic. (Nichols et al., “Density of Drinking Establishments and HIV Prevalence in a Migrant Town in Namibia,” AIDS & Behavior, 2011) Brooke is currently working on her PhD at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where she looks at the math modeling of the HIV epidemic in rural Africa. The first part of her PhD has focused on seeing if “treatment as prevention” or “pre-exposure prophy-

laxis” would be cost-effective interventions. Because of this model, she was invited to the HIV Modeling Consortium funded by the Gates Foundation. She published a second paper, in the Journal of Internal Medicine, titled “HIV Testing and Antiretroviral Treatment Strategies for Prevention of HIV Infection.” In October 2011, she met with policy makers and mathematical modelers from around the world to compare models and come to consensus on the similarities and differences among the models to help make funding decisions. She is now working on a mathematical model in partnership with the World Health Organization to investigate the potential emergence of drug resistance in Africa if treatment is scaled up. Brooke is the epitome of a Mount Holyoke woman; she works incredibly hard, with great dedication, and without thought of accolades, although she is most certainly deserving of them. Chelsea McCracken ’09 Madison, Wisconsin

Please write us right away when a comment strikes you. We must receive correspondence shortly after one issue arrives to get it into the next issue. Send comments to: mbomann@mtholyoke.edu (or use postal address on previous page).

campuscurrents LEAP Program Marries Theory to Practice Thanks to LEAP, students connect coursework to life work around the globe. Every summer, Mount Holyoke students set off around the world as interns and researchers, hoping to apply their newly gained theoretical knowledge and skills to practical questions.

Pau l S c h n a i t tac h e r

Some students work closely with faculty advisors on a research project, while others find opportunities that introduce them to a new area of interest. At the LEAP (Learning from Application) Symposium hosted by the college in the fall, students share with their peers how these projects connect to their coursework at MHC and how they have helped to shape their academic, professional, and personal goals.

More than 125 students presented their discoveries at the 2011 LEAP Symposium. Following is a close look at two of the presenters’ work. You can check out all the LEAP presenters and their topics at https://symposia. mtholyoke.edu/symposia/ leap11/schedule.

Let us know how your MHC coursework connects to your life work with a post on our Facebook page (facebook.com/ aamhc).—M.H.B.

Student Helps Generate Energy From Plastic. Wait. Really? Sarah Dole ’12 set off for Singapore last summer excited but unclear about what to expect from her internship at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering located at the National University of Singapore.

rings for memory storage and characterizing their magnetic states; and then at the University of Melbourne, Australia, characterizing synthetic diamonds for their effectiveness in high-energy particle detectors.

Dole, a physics major, understood the benefits of interning and she’d done it twice before, first at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, fabricating nanomagnetic

But with graduation looming, she worried that her lack of real-world or industry experience might hinder her professional and graduate school prospects. She hoped

L E A P i n te r n

“The symposium is a celebration of our students’ summer achievements, providing them an opportunity to demonstrate the intersection of the liberal arts and work in the world to their peers, faculty, and staff mentors, and the wider community,” notes MHC President Lynn Pasquerella ’80. “Reflecting on summer internships and research projects is a critical component of learning from such experiences.”

Sarah Dole ’12 prepares for a lab.

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L E A P r esea r c he r

Having expressed an interest in nanostructures and energy harvesting during the application process, Dole was assigned to the design and growth lab group with four research scientists who were working on generating voltage and electricity from nanostructures after mechanical stress was applied to them. A related example of this process, Dole explained, is a dance club in Europe that has inserted electrical chips embedded with “piezo crystals” in the dance floor. The chips harvest the energy generated by the stress of dancing on them to power the club’s air conditioning system. Professors at the institute had conceptualized the project and were ready for an experimental setup of their theories. “I was characterizing the electrical properties of the materials we used— which are confidential—to show how much voltage and current came from these nanostructures when stress was applied,” Dole said. She did share that the secret materials were piezoelectric polymers, or specialty plastic materials, that are cheap to produce and biodegradable. “In my last week, we were really successful,” she said. “We were generating current from it.” Using nanotechnology to create electricity will help

power both small devices like flashlights and phone chargers and can generate larger-scale power through energy harvesting, just as the dance floor at the dance club does. Excitement was in the air at the lab—it’s one of only a few in the world working on this kind of project. And unlike the groups she worked for previously, the Singapore group was fully focused on getting patents and ultimately commercializing their discovery. “Singapore is known for their research,” Dole noted. “They’re very industry-focused and want to put it on the assembly line.” The quandary of Dole’s professional direction is solved. While she had been considering grad school in particle physics, she now wants to focus on materials science and engineering. She’s looking at programs at MIT, Cornell, and UC–Santa Barbara. “There is a demand for researchers in product development,” she added, and especially for products that are sustainable, such as the polymers she worked with. “Understanding the chemistry and physics of materials, tweaking materials at a molecular level to improve efficiency of devices, and the potential to innovate new technology—these things excite me about this field of science.” You mean you can make electricity out of plastic? Yes, really.–M.H.B.

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Pau l S c h n a i t tac h e r

her experience in Singapore might prove a bit more pragmatic. She wasn’t disappointed.

Tracking Dinosaurs in Utah

While introducing her presentation at the LEAP Symposium, Niehaus was frank. “The worst thing that could happen to you [in the Utah wilderness] is being struck by lightning,” she said. “The second worst thing is being swept away in a flash flood.”

Niehaus is in the process of getting her data together to submit to Bureau of Land Management officials in Utah. Together with MHC geology professor Mark McMenamin, she is working on dating the fossil and surrounding rock, getting

permission to house the fossil at MHC, and completing detailed excavation forms. A bureau paleontologist will examine the fossil to determine if Niehaus and a group of students will be allowed to unearth the discovery this summer.—Laurel Rhame ’12 Jennette Niehaus

Working toward a major in biology with a minor in sustainable development, Niehaus wanted to use what she learned during the academic year in an unexpected way. Paleontology, she says, “is a refreshing change” from classroom biology, and it has long been one of her many scientific passions.

she believes may be part of the pelvic bone of a longnecked dinosaur. She took pictures, reburied the fossil, saved the GPS coordinates, and put up markers at the site and nearest road.

campuscurrents

Jennette Niehaus ’12 spent her summer in Utah, hunting for dinosaurs—and she found one. But it wasn’t easy.

While she wasn’t buzzed by a bolt or washed away, rising waters did wash out roads and flood her chosen research site. So she gathered what soil samples she could, took photographs of various fossils, and studied the topography of the surrounding area. All good, but it wasn’t until the final days of her trip that Niehaus found what she was really looking for.

Pasquerella was greeted with a standing ovation. Niehaus with a bigboned companion in Clapp Hall.

The weather finally cleared, and her desired route was safe for travel. As Niehaus made her way across a canyon, she noticed a small protrusion of blue stone in the earth. Based on her research, Niehaus knew her location was prime for fossilized material. What she eventually uncovered is what Here’s a trilobite she found in Utah’s House Range. Niehaus also came across a fossilized leaf in Utah’s Strawberry Mountains (top right). Mou n t Ho lyo k e Al u m na e Qua r t e r ly

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Intercession is the New J-Term; Noncredit Courses Abound Staff, student, and community member interests such as Writing Ten-Minute Plays and Discovering Palestine will again be shared with students on campus in January—but this time with a twist. To accommodate the changing academic calendar of the Five Colleges consortium that will result in a shorter January term, only noncredit courses will be offered during the three-week winter session from now on. Formerly known as J-term, the January program has been renamed Intersession.

Initiated in 1972 and originally called Winter Term, the program was designed to allow students and faculty to explore ideas and projects not available in the standard curriculum. Classes ran the gamut from Body Language: A Participation Sport, offered in 1976, to Feminism and the Language of Jewish Prayer, available in 1986, to Computing with the Sharks: Survival Skills for the Information Age, taught in 1995.

But there have also been an equal number of noncredit offerings to broaden the mind, including weaving, stress control, furniture design, welding, musical productions, cooking, Ukrainian egg decorating, juggling, and boat building. That will not change. As of last January, faculty members are no longer paid to teach courses for credit but all instructors are offered a modest stipend for teaching noncredit offerings. The schedule, name, and credit changes, administrators noted, essentially return J-term to its original format, offering students the chance to pursue their nonacademic interests. —M.H.B.

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Courtesy of the MHC archives

After working for a year to come up with a predictable academic calendar for all five colleges—so that students can integrate classes on other campuses into their schedules—the deans and registrars of all institutions arrived at a shortened January session. Looking ahead, MHC Registrar Elizabeth Pyle realized that the MHC spring semester would sometimes begin so early that offering credit coursework in such a brief timetable would make little sense.

J-Terms past featured activities such as Ukrainian egg decorating in 1997 and (top) a medieval banquet in 1972.

Mount Holyoke News/Evelyn Roberts ’15

Fall Storm Pummels Campus Trees; Students All Safe A freak October snowstorm downed hundreds of tree limbs still in their fall splendor, causing minor damage to buildings and leaving the campus without power for about thirty-two hours. Staff rallied to feed and warm students, who were all reported safe. “Lots of people said it was like the MHC experience of another era. People huddled under the emergency lighting in hallways to read and play board games. We had hall meetings to update everyone since there was little cell service and nowhere to charge phones,” said Sabine Scherer ’12. The arboreal scene after the storm was more devastating. The “tree belt” running down Route 116 and planted following the great hurricane

of 1938 was deeply marred. Luckily, the venerable copper beech outside Dwight Hall was spared. Elsewhere on campus, trees lost limbs large and small that were sheared from their trunks by the weight of the heavy snow. Groundskeepers, whose daily job is to care for the trees in MHC’s arboretum, were heartbroken. “They feel like they’re burying their own,” said Paul Breen, director of facilities management. Trees that had lost large limbs and were sagging in one direction were taken down for safety’s sake; others that were damaged but in better form were left to leaf out in spring, their condition to be noted over time. In the dorms, students adapted. “When we didn’t have cell phones or TV or internet, I made new friends and hung out with people that I haven’t seen in a long time,” Scherer added. —M.H.B.

View the Mount Holyoke News’s photo gallery at themhnews. org/2011/10/news/noreaster-hits-mount-holyoke.

Religion and the Public Square How religious thought and practice intersect with political and public life was the focus of the fall Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts series, “Religion and the Public Square.” Throughout the semester, the center held student leadership seminars and invited guest speakers to address what role religion should play in the public sphere. Each event included a seminar and an evening lecture.

Last in the series was Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. Elshtain’s seminar focused on how women can lead with the personal conviction that comes from religion and politics. Her lecture focused on the “voices of faith” in public discourse.—Megan Dean ’12

campuscurrents

A tree fell onto Wilder Hall, damaging one resident’s window, and a bicycle.

October’s guest was Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University. His seminar investigated the tricky topic of faith-based politics and religious pluralism. His evening lecture covered social movements during the past half-century and their interaction with religion and politics.

September’s guest was Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement. She led a seminar on faith, love, and inspiration for twenty-first-century leaders and lectured about Islamaphobia in the United States and the many myths surrounding American Muslims. She also addressed how Muslims and the rest of the US public can make new connections. Jean Bethke Elshtain noted how religious women can lead with conviction.

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News a n d N otes f ro m A ro u n d the Campus

S . P. S u l l i va n

Tidbits

Marcella Jayne FP’12 (middle) and Rebecca Brown ’11 (right) were in Zuccotti Park in New York City in October as part of the growing Occupy Wall Street protest. Jayne, who works for a tenant-advocacy group in Springfield, Massachusetts, told a newspaper she felt there was finally “something to have hope for.” On campus, about fifty students walked out of their classes on October 5 and occupied Skinner Green in solidarity with the NYC protest. Professor of History Daniel Czitrom told local television news station WWLP that “change can still happen when people organize.”

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Presidential Honors

The Buzz on ASIa

President Obama named MHC Assistant Professor of Physics Katherine Aidala one of ninety-four top young scientists this fall. Recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, Aidala was noted both for her research on nanoscale systems and her mentoring of women in science and technology. Nominated by the National Science Foundation, Aidala is the second MHC faculty member to win the award; psychology professor Becky Wai-Ling Packard received it in 2005.

The rise of Asia’s political and economic power was the topic of a campus conversation and lecture with noted visiting scholar Kishore Mahbubani (below), professor of public policy at the National University of Singapore. Mahbubani served as the Carol Hoffmann Collins Global Scholar-inResidence at the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives this fall and delivered the public lecture, “Is the West Ready for the Asian Century?”

Ben Barnhart

Students Occupy Wall Street + MHC

How to Govern the Earth

“A day will come, and not long from now, when Islam will be fully accepted as an American religion, and when the entire group won’t be blamed for the actions of extremists; when extremists won’t define the agenda; when the president will have a Muslim name and he or she will be a Muslim...That day will come sooner if we work together.”—Daisy Khan, who with her husband, proposed building a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York City. She spoke as part of the Weissman Center’s “Religion and the Public Square” series.

Richard Orr

Shara Robertson ’12 (jumping) rocks field hockey history.

The MHC field hockey team upset top-seeded Plymouth State University 4-2 to win the ECAC Division III New England Championship in November. With the win, MHC closed out its season with an overall record of 16-5. MHC received a boost from Tournament Most Outstanding Player Shara Robertson ’12, who collected a goal and an assist.

excellent moves, Robertson has continually found a way to put the ball in the cage despite constant pressure. With her two tallies against Western New England University earlier this year, she became just the second player in program history to reach the fifty-goal milestone. Robertson is currently tied with Krista Lindquist ’03 as the program’s all-time leading scorer. She is also closing in Robertson has enjoyed a on Lindquist’s career-points standout four-year career with record of 143. the MHC field hockey team. Arguably the top offensive Robertson has been an Allplayer in program history, Conference and All-Region the forward has racked up performer and is only the 142 points on sixty goals and second player in MHC twenty-two assists. hockey history to earn the NEWMAC Rookie of the Gifted with great speed, a Year Award her freshman tenacious work ethic, and year. She was also named

NEWMAC Player of the Week on two occasions. The forward was at her best in the Lyons’ 16–1 triumph over Elms College during her rookie campaign in 2009, when she exploded for nine points on four goals and an assist. Her point and goal totals both tied previous school records held by Bridget Gunn ’96 and Lindquist, respectively.

campuscurrents

Heard on Campus

campuscurrents

James Gustave Speth (above), one of the founding leaders of the environmental movement, cofounder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, delivered the Miller Worley Environmental Leadership Lecture this year, as part of the Environmental Center’s yearlong focus on international environmental governance inspired by the United Nations Conference for Sustainable Development set for June. Read his article on a new green politics at http://goo.gl/KhwNq.

Field-Hockey Powerhouse Reaches 60-Goal Milestone

In addition to her exploits on the field hockey pitch, Robertson has been one of Mount Holyoke’s top squash players in the past four years. She is a double major in psychology and education. —Mike Raposo

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Ben Barnhart

Is Alternative Medicine Good For Your Health?

A Master of acupuncture and oriental medicine Abby Greiner ’96 says alternative medicine works for animals and people.

By Melinda Blau

bby Greiner ’96 learned about holistic medicine from her horses. While in her twenties and pursuing a career in dressage, she sought equine treatments that were natural and safe. “My first horse had arthritis, loved acupuncture, and was less stiff after treatments,” she says. “My second horse hated acupuncture, but chiropractic and homeopathy worked for him.” She “came fairly close to the top” of the dressage circuit, “but my life was unbalanced.” Working to pay for lessons, room and board, and the upkeep of her horses, she “just about broke even.” On top of that, she developed carpal tunnel syndrome from years of sweeping stalls and shoveling manure. “I went through a spell where I was taking Advil pretty much all day,” she says. “Some days I’d walk around with ice packs taped to my wrists. My next options were cortisone and surgery. I was amazed at how effective holistic medicine had been for my horses, so I tried it myself.” After seeing a chiropractor, Greiner says the pain went away but not the nagging doubts about her future. “Being a groomer for horse trainers is a young person’s profession. Holistic medicine

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seemed like a better fit as I got older. I wanted balance in my own body, and I thought it would be good to help others find theirs.” Today, Greiner is a master of acupuncture and oriental medicine and works out of a chiropractor’s office in Framingham, Massachusetts. She is in good company. At least twenty MHC alumnae have similar career trajectories–not surprising, says Greiner, because the college “has a really good science program.” They are part of a growing cadre of health professionals who practice “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM). Also labeled holistic, natural, New Age, or nontraditional medicine, it is called “complementary” or “integrative” when used with Western, or allopathic medicine, and “alternative” when used instead of mainstream medicine. Like Greiner, many other alumnae CAM practitioners discovered the field as patients. For example, Karuna (Ramona) Sabnani ’97, a Wall-Street-bound international relations major, had “weird pains in her back and leg” as an undergrad. “I started getting better when I was treated by a chiropractor and Shiatsu practitioner,” she says, noting that “both were foreign modalities to me at the time. I was told how my eating was affecting my body and how the stress was contributing to my pain. None of this was even considered by allopathic doctors.” Admittedly, alternative medicine is a constantly changing, still controversial, and often confusing universe (see p. 14). Ancient healing systems, such as Ayurvedic

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and Chinese medicine, that are accepted as mainstream in other cultures are grouped in the United States with newer modalities, products, and devices. And yet, four out of ten Americans turn to CAM to reduce stress and combat disease. Women with higher education and higher income are the biggest users. Since 2002, therapies involving deep breathing, meditation, massage, and yoga have seen the greatest growth. This is partly because an expanding body of scientific evidence suggests that such modalities are effective. “Science is being brought to these areas,” explains Josephine Briggs, an MD and director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which has been part of the National Institutes of Health since the early 1990s. “We rely heavily on evidence-based studies—not a single study, but a review of the entire literature.” The center educates the public, supports researcher training, and funds studies at medical facilities where CAM is used to augment traditional treatment.

What’s CAM Good For? Perhaps this sea change is long overdue. In the last half century, health problems in this country have shifted from infectious diseases to conditions you live with. Half the adult population, according to the Centers for Disease Control, suffers from at least one chronic illness—an

Abby Greiner ’96 holds needles used in her acupuncture practice.

Ben Barnhart

“ Mainstream medicine is the perfect thing when you break your arm or your appendix bursts, but [CAM] is about consumers understanding that they have other options.”

ailment for which traditional medicine is not always effective. At the same time, the mandate for doctors to lower costs translates into office visits lasting twenty minutes or less. Studies cited by the National Hemophilia Foundation show that MDs interrupt patients’ initial statements after twenty-three seconds on average and spend a single minute providing information. In contrast, the alumnae practitioners interviewed by the Quarterly schedule at least ninety minutes for first visits. CAM patients say it’s a relief to talk to someone who sees you as a whole person instead of being bounced from one medical specialist to another, and given pills instead of attention or advice. Whether a patient walks in complaining about a rash, a headache, or heartburn, a CAM practitioner will look beyond her skin, head, or stomach. “I really listen to their history,” explains Kimberly Iller ’99, a naturopathic doctor in Seattle. “I ask about their parents, where they live, what kind of job they

have, what they think about their illness, and what they believe to be the cause, not just what medicines they’ve tried.” No surprise, then, that formerly unconventional practices, such as meditation and relaxation techniques, are now offered at revered health institutions, including Harvard and the Mayo Clinic. This trend is likely to continue as other therapies are proven effective. Briggs cites a partial list of “promising” areas of research, including pain management for conditions such as fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, and back pain; fish oil as an anti-inflammatory; and the use of physical strengthening, yoga, and breathing techniques for postmenopausal symptoms. (For more information, visit http://nccam.nih. gov/health/.) Although some use CAM as a preventive measure, the most common reasons for seeking alternative practitioners are pain and anxiety. “Most of the patients I see feel like they’re losing their quality of life and that there’s no one else to help them,” says Iller, who shares an office with an MD who studied acupuncture and sometimes prescribes herbs. “We work quite well together, but most other MDs treat me as if I’m not a real doctor.” Sara Burks Ohgushi ’85, a midwife and naturopathic doctor in Portland, Oregon, who was drawn to naturopathic medicine when she had her first child, adds that many of her patients would be considered normal on conventional lab tests. “There is no diagnosis code for an exhausted mom who hasn’t felt good since she had a baby or someone whose adrenal glands have been stressed out by an abusive relationship. Mainstream medicine is the perfect thing when you break your arm or your appendix bursts, but [CAM] is about consumers understanding that they have other options.” Critics of CAM claim there’s only limited evidence that these “fringe” practices are effective. They point out that patients are a self-selected group, disillusioned with mainstream medicine in the first place. “Success,” detractors claim, is due to the placebo effect: merely spending time and building trust makes patients think they’re better. However, disease is a complex mix of physical, social, psychological, and spiritual factors unique to each person. It’s hard to tease out cause and effect or to apply Western thinking to ancient healing practices. It’s even more challenging to measure trust and hope or the depth of connection between patient and practitioner—elements that, even critics acknowledge, promote healing. In the final analysis, if you feel better, does it really matter why?

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Complementary and Alternative Medicine:

Can It Help You?

any of us don’t know much about complementary and alternative medicine. So start by keeping an open mind and preparing yourself with enough information to interview a prospective practitioner. “It’s important to know your own health needs and to ask good questions,” says Kimberly Iller ’99. Here are five to help you survey this vast landscape.

What are your symptoms? Are you stressed out, plagued by tension, fatigue, recurrent pain, depression, or vague feelings of “dis-ease” that traditional medicine has failed to address? Perhaps it’s time to have a dialogue with your doctor about holistic therapies. NCCAM offers “Time to Talk” guidelines at nccam.nih.gov/timetotalk/.

What does the practitioner do? “Every physician has a tool box,” explains Iller. “Mine is different from an MD’s.” The problem is that most of us didn’t learn about “chi” or “vital force” in our high-school biology classes,

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so we need to educate ourselves about CAM practices. As Vicki Rhoades ’78, a licensed naturopathic doctor in Seattle, quips, “Acupuncture diagnosis can sound like a weather report—for example, ‘damp heat invading spleen.’” Complicating matters, even practitioners who use the same “tool” might wield it differently. “Some styles of acupuncture call for aggressive needling and others something more subtle,” explains Greiner. “But one isn’t necessarily stronger or more effective.” Also, many holistic practitioners use more than one modality. For example, a naturopath might use energy healing, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and/or spinal manipulation and prescribe herbs or vitamins. Reputable therapists follow specific protocols. “We don’t make guesses,” says Arden Sundari Pierce FP’99, a structural yoga therapist—a discipline that evolved as Ayurvedic doctors began to use yoga for healing. “We measure what muscles are tight, which are weak or strong. It’s very scientific, but the paradigm can be a challenge to translate.”

What are his or her credentials? Some modalities have more rigorous professional requirements than others, so learn about training standards and the various levels and types of therapists within a given field. For example, Pierce, already a certified yoga instructor, had to have extensive in-depth training and a period of strict supervision to become a certified structural yoga therapist. Acupuncturists and chiropractors are licensed in all states, but naturopathic doctors are licensed in only seventeen. Certainly, a license is a measure of reassurance. Vicki Rhoades has had an education “as hard as med school,” she says, and can order standard lab tests and prescribe most of the same drugs as MDs. But, she says, “anyone can call herself a naturopath after taking an Internet course or a few workshops, whereas a doctor of naturopathy (ND) has a degree from an accredited four-year college and has passed two board exams.”

What do others say about her/him? People often hear about CAM practitioners from satisfied patients. But a friend’s recommendation can only partially predict your experience, since your body (and the mind that comes with it) is unique. Because CAM treatments are tailored to each patient’s individual profile, you won’t have the same experience as your friend, even if the practitioner does exactly the same things.

How ready are you? Holistic practitioners, who see themselves as coaches and teachers, tend to ask more of their patients than traditional doctors do. But success also depends on you. As Arden Pierce puts it, “When a client says, ‘What can you do for me?’ I put it back to them.” Ask yourself: Are you ready to give up caffeine, start exercising, take vitamins, get to bed earlier, change your diet, and take herbs, if necessary? Can you afford the out-of-pocket expenses (most treatments and supplements are not covered by insurance)? Are you comfortable with the type of therapy offered? Are you expecting a quick fix? “Some people may not be ready for change,” adds Karuna Sabnani. “The patients that come to you,” she stresses, “are about to embark on a new relationship with themselves. Ultimately, there has to be trust.” Arguably, the wisest approach is to seek the best of both worlds. “If I had cancer, I would be first in line for chemo, radiation, and surgery,” says Vicki Rhoades. “I respect the strides that [traditional] medicine has made. But I would also be using herbs, supplements, and acupuncture. There is a place for MDs and NDs to work together for the good of the patients we treat.”

What’s Under the CAM Umbrella?

he National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine defines the field as “a group of diverse medical and healthcare systems, practices, and products that are not generally considered part of conventional medicine.” Categorizing such an array of health practices is challenging, though, because some fit into more than one category. Acupuncture, for example, is considered by NCCAM to be a part of mind and body medicine (which includes—among others—yoga, hypnotherapy, and breathing and meditation techniques). It is also a component of energy medicine (qi gong, Reiki healing touch); manipulative and body-based practices (chiropractic, massage); and at the same time, a part of Chinese medicine, which is a whole medical system (as are Ayurvedic medicine, homeopathy, and naturopathy). Two other broad categories of CAM are natural products (herbal medicines, dietary supplements, and probiotics) and movement therapies (Feldenkrais, Pilates). source: http://nccam.nih.gov/health/whatiscam/

Online Bonus: Naturopathic doctor Sabine Thomas ’97 writes about how she came to study CAM, and about research she’s conducting for the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. See alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/altmed.

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Jail break

Building a Smarter Criminal–Justice System

By S h osh a n a Wa lt e r ’ 07

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Knight, the coordinator of the Children’s Hospital/Martha Eliot Health Center trauma response team, isn’t there to treat the bloodshed—she’s there to make sense of it.

above: Pattie Knight FP’98, The concept of law and shown in the Jamaica Plain order used to encompass area of Boston where she only police, prosecutors, and coordinates a traumadefense attorneys, but these response team, provides days—with dwindling state “psychological first aid” and federal budgets—govto the violence-plagued ernment leaders have begun neighborhood. to realize that alternatives to arrests and incarceration can save both money and lives. From crime prevention to reentry and rehabilitation, Mount Holyoke alumnae are involved in every aspect of building what they call a smarter criminal-justice system.

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Earlier in the night, a young woman escorting her children home from choir practice had been shot and killed by an assailant on a bicycle. Neighbors had poured out of their homes, pummeling the guilty teenager. Now they crowded the street, a jostling mixture of mourning friends and family, some wailing and grasping flickering candles, others chugging bottles of beer. Police had arrived, but the children remained in the middle of the hysteria, wondering what had happened to their mother.

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Pattie Knight FP’98 steps out of her car. It’s 8:30 p.m. The sky is dusky and still, but the street, a block of brick apartment buildings in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, is full of disquiet.

More than 2.3 million people are incarcerated in US jails and prisons, according to the most recent numbers available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. America has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. Mou n t Ho lyo k e Al u m na e Qua r t e r ly

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For Knight, who majored in psychology and education, this means responding to chaotic crime scenes, and teaching residents and youth in violence-inflicted neighborhoods how to heal from trauma. By helping communities recover, she can help prevent future violence. She calls it “psychological first aid.” “Historically and statistically, anyone who’s been a victim of violence usually becomes either a victim again or a perpetrator,” says Knight, who joins other counselors at crime scenes, and provides follow-up counseling to victims and their families. “It’s about prevention and intervention in the streets.” To some in the criminal justice profession, the philosophy isn’t new. In the 1970s, as crime in the United States continued a meteoric rise, the federal government began to offer scholarships to students interested in pursuing PhD programs in criminology. Merry Divinchi Morash ’68, then a social worker, was among those who signed up. Morash says scholars in the then-emerging field espoused ideas similar to contemporary trends in criminology. Researchers were focused on rehabilitation and the intersection between crime and poverty. “That continued into the ’80s, when we saw this shift toward punitiveness,” says Morash, the former director of Michigan University’s School of Criminal Justice, and the first woman hired at the department. “The Reagan administration really started this dramatic shift and the overincarceration of huge groups of people.”

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In the ’90s, especially under President Clinton, more than twenty-five states passed some form of the controversial “three strikes” law, which imposed mandatory minimum sentences on offenders convicted of certain crimes. But as

that people who are coming out of prison and jail are living free lives, holding jobs, and supporting their families,” says Leah Kane ’00, a policy analyst for the DC-based Council on State Governments.

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“It’s in everyone’s best interest

Pattie Knight FP’98 sits in the “peace park” in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Each named brick memorializes a young person lost to homicide. Helping people cope with such violence is Knight’s mission.

Treatment is “far more cost-effective” than jail time, says Sarah Churchill Tabone ’99, a defense attorney in Portland, Maine. state prison populations nearly doubled, the country began to see a very slow reversal of the law-and-order philosophy of the Reagan era.

Treatment is “far more cost-effective” than jail time, says Sarah Churchill Tabone ’99, a defense attorney in Portland, Maine. “As budgets get tighter and tighter, you look for alternatives.”

Since the mid-’90s, community policing—which requires officers to build relationships with residents to spot and solve crime—has become the national standard for policing. And Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, an intervention program for gang members, has spread to countless cities. But it’s the recession that finally catapulted a preventionand-intervention strategy, not incarceration, into bipartisan favor.

Tabone is among many alumnae who pursued law after Mount Holyoke, where she majored in politics, but in recent years, she’s noticed some changes in the court system. In 1995, Maine instituted Project Exodus, an alternative program that allows offenders to go through a regimented substance-abuse treatment program, rather than serve time. In addition to handling her usual high-profile cases, Tabone works in the alternative court alongside a judge, probation officers, and substance-abuse counselors.

In 2008, Congress passed the Second Chance Act, providing funds and resources to cities interested in reducing rates of recidivism, the frequency with which released convicts reoffend and return to prison or jail. Suddenly, cities throughout the country had an incentive to provide parolees with employment and housing assistance, counseling, and substance-abuse treatment.

“It costs far, far less to treat someone on the outside than to incarcerate them,” she says. “If you can treat that issue and get them sober, you’re bettering society as a whole because then you completely remove them from the criminaljustice system.”

Kvork D jansezi an/Gett y Im ages

Inmates at a California State Prison sit inside a metal cage waiting to be assigned permanent housing or for other appointments. In 2010, more than 144,000 inmates were incarcerated in prisons there that were designed to hold about 80,000.

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The time after an offender is released from jail or prison is particularly crucial, according to Elizabeth Aaker ’05, who manages two related research programs in the psychiatry department at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Sarah Churchill Tabone ’99, a defense attorney in Portland, Maine, consults with a client. She participates in an alternative program that allows some offenders to go through a substance-abuse treatment program, rather than serve time.

“There’s a critical period after they’re released—approximately six months— when they’re at higher risk for reoffending,” she says.

Aaker’s two programs are designed to reduce recidivism among women coming out of Massachusetts’ primary women’s prison, in Framingham, and to keep war veterans out of the criminal-justice system. Like Maine’s drug courts, the programs require collaboration among previously separate government entities, including the court system, the Department of Public Health, the Department of Mental Health, and the state prison system. Aaker says she’s found that few judges, probation officers, and prosecutors take into account an offender’s status as a veteran when determining punishment, or an often better alternative: treatment. “Those folks coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, 20 percent are coming back with some sort of mental-health condition, and alcohol abuse is 25 percent higher than predeployment levels,” she says. “You start coupling these things together, and when they’re not treated, it’s going to lead to criminal-justice involvement.”

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Aaker says she’s also found that a large percentage of female inmates are victims of domestic violence too, or have substance-abuse problems. Which problem came first is often unclear, she says, but treating both problems can reduce a female offender’s chances of returning to the system.

Morash, the criminology professor, has drawn the same conclusions in her research. In her recently released book Women on Probation and Parole: A Feminist Critique of Community Programs and Services, Morash describes the various ways that support and oversight for women on probation and parole could be improved to meet their unique needs more fully. “If you get public housing, and somebody in your household is violent, you can be evicted in many states,” says Morash, describing one common policy problem. “And so, if a woman who’s doing fine gets evicted and is homeless now and has to live in a drug house, that can undermine everything.” She is now following and interviewing more than 400 women on probation and parole over a six-month period to analyze obstacles and determine “what really works” for women. But like many alumnae working to improve the criminaljustice system, Morash has found that funding her projects is a constant struggle, especially when those projects focus on

“Yes, there’s a lot of push

toward prevention, but there’s not a lot of money for it,” says Mary Howell Sirna ’91, first assistant at the Story County attorney’s office in Iowa. women. Even in a political landscape that has begun to look more favorably at reform, alumnae find it can be difficult to convince government leaders to make the investment. Leah Kane ’00, a policy analyst for the DC-based Council on State Governments, says it’s not unusual for organizations working in the criminal-justice field to struggle to raise funds. Kane oversees programs throughout the country funded by the Second Chance Act.

aggressors and victims, a particularly tricky task in cases of domestic violence. She also speaks regularly at batteredwomen’s shelters and trains volunteers. The visits, she says, remind her of her days as a wide-eyed Mount Holyoke student, when she volunteered at a domestic-violence shelter. Like so many of the women she met back then, Sirna hid her bruises underneath thick sweaters. While hers were from MHC rugby, theirs, she discovered, came from violent domestic disputes.

“Especially in tight fiscal times, you’re asking legislators to spend money on people who have been to prison, as opposed to someone who hasn’t,” she says. “There are lots of different people who can pull the rug out from under us at any given time.”

Sirna’s glad for the opportunity to teach police officers and victims about the cycle of abuse, which she first learned about in MHC Professor Emeritus of Politics Jean Grossholtz’s Sex and Politics course. “You can’t do it by yourself,” she says.

Thousands of agencies across the country applied for the government grants, which favored cross-department collaboration. But in order to renew the funds, Kane says the grantees have to prove, in a short amount of time, that their programs work, and legislators have to convince their colleagues that it’s worth the expense.

Even Pattie Knight, the head of the pioneering trauma response team at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, has found that prevention and intervention can be a slow and difficult battle.

“So you spend a lot of time trying to convince them that you’re trying to save them money,” Kane says. “It’s in everyone’s best interest that people who are coming out of prison and jail are living free lives, holding jobs, and supporting their families.” Not every organization and city participates in the national competition for money. As cities and organizations battle for the scarce funds for prevention programs, many still operate within a more traditional criminal-justice system. Mary Howell Sirna ’91, first assistant at the Story County attorney’s office in Iowa, says the reality of the court system means prosecutors do not have enough time to take most cases to trial. Most defendants, she says, negotiate plea deals.

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“Yes, there’s a lot of push toward prevention, but there’s not a lot of money for it,” she says. “So we unfortunately deal with a lot of the aftermath.” Because her specialties are crimes of violence including sexual assault, domestic assault, child abuse, and homicide, Sirna says she frequently trains police officers on how to identify primary

When the young woman was killed in the Boston shooting, Knight worked her way through the rowdy crowd, urging calm. She told gangbangers to put away the alcohol and drugs, and tried to quell rumors about the shooting suspect and victim that were coursing through the clusters of neighbors, until she reached the children, who needed the most help of all. But two days later, violence struck again. As residents gathered around a makeshift candlelit memorial dedicated to the young woman, another shooter fired rounds into the crowd. It was a crime of opportunity, an alarming trend; the shooter had seen someone he was looking for at the gathering. No one was injured that time, Knight says, but it was a reminder of reality. “It’s really hard on us as providers and caregivers to see the cycle never end,” she says. “But good people, good organizations are trying to do things to make a difference.” Mary Howell Sirna ’91 (right) often trains police officers such as Sgt. Sara Jensen in handling domestic-violence cases, and is also first assistant at the Story County attorney’s office in Iowa.

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By Eric Goldscheid e r

Harvard From Homeless to

Determination, and an alum’s backing, helped future physician aspire higher

IN HER FIRST ESSAY for eleventh-grade AP American history, Sara Martin ’10 wrote that she was looking for a challenge but that she wasn’t college bound. “We’ll see about that,” her teacher, Sarah McLaughlin ’00, wrote in red ink at the bottom of the page. So began a friendship between a teacher determined to make a difference and a young woman who, now twentythree, just started Harvard Medical School. § Later that year, “Ms. M.,” as Martin still calls McLaughlin, “made me apply to Mount Holyoke,” she said, surrounded by packing boxes strewn around the West Springfield apartment she was vacating for the next chapter of her life in Boston. Made her apply? “She gave me the application and a fee waiver and said, ‘You are going to apply,’” says Martin, “I remember crouching down next to her desk and looking at Mount Holyoke’s website with her.” Growing up in northern California, poverty was a constant because her mother, a dental hygienist, raised Sara alone while suffering from chronic debilitating health problems. During Martin’s sophomore year in high school, her mother had seven surgeries. “I coped by throwing myself into schoolwork,” she says, recounting a moment when she “broke down bawling” upon learning that her mother was scheduled for yet another operation. Good grades usually came easily to Martin, but higher education seemed an “unattainable dream,” a concept so foreign that she couldn’t picture herself as a college student. Because she “skated” through freshman year doing minimal work and getting terrible Sara Martin ’10 (right) grades, Martin says she was initially and her former teacher rebuffed when she signed up for honors Sarah McLaughlin ’00 reunite at the 2010 laurel chemistry. “They didn’t think I would do well, but I fought them and got parade. in. That was the first time I was really challenged academically.”

Senior year, she was waiting tables at Applebee’s from 4 to 10 p.m. “I was taking five AP classes. I would get home at 11, do my homework, and have to be at school by 6 a.m.,” she says. When Mount Holyoke accepted Martin, she went over the catalogue with McLaughlin to pick courses. “That was a very good thing,” Martin says, “because if you don’t start off with a science it’s very hard to get on the science track.” McLaughlin also told her not to miss out on Professor Joe Ellis’s history classes. Martin had a near-perfect academic record while completing a double major in three and a half years. A succession of internships and campus jobs through the chemistry department built her résumé while helping her bank account. She constantly volunteered for service activities, which included teaching catechism to fourth graders at St. Theresa of Lisieux Church in South Hadley every Sunday. McLaughlin, who still teaches at Angelo Rodriguez High School in Fairfield, California, says when Martin came to her, she seemed overwhelmed by her own brain. Everything fascinated her, and she was lapping up knowledge. “She didn’t know what direction was up,” says McLaughlin. “She had an innate inquisitiveness I find in people who go to Mount Holyoke. I knew it would be a great place for her because she didn’t know who she was, but she loved everything.”

Ben Barnhart

McLaughlin was on campus for her tenth reunion the year Martin graduated. As they watched the commencement procession together, Professor Ellis thanked his former student for “sending Sara our way.” He remembers getting Martin’s first mid-semester exam and asking himself, “Who is this creature? She can write, she’s very smart, and she knows a lot about American history.” In time, he learned that “Martin comes from a background that is not normally associated with elite education.” He was impressed with her manner, describing Martin as “deceptive” in that “she is not constantly and neurotically attempting to demonstrate

how hard she’s working. In fact, she’s quite the opposite; she glides.” Martin did independent studies in both history and biochemistry, her other major. The summer between sophomore and junior year, she had an internship with a doctor at a free clinic in Albany, New York. He later took her along on a two-week medical mission to Uganda. After graduating, Martin found it next to impossible to find work. “It’s really hard to keep yourself motivated, to look for that next job, to keep hoping, when you’ve applied for fifty plus. I was pretty desperate,” she says. At one point she didn’t have a home and was living out of a friend’s car. Eventually she got a position as a pharmacy technician and then a job teaching chemistry in a Springfield, Massachusetts, charter school. Martin loved teaching, Sara Martin ’10 and students appreciated her started medical despite a reputation as a tough school this fall at grader. “I modeled that after Harvard, and now Ms. M.,” she says, knowing wears the coveted that if she wasn’t pushing white coat of a students she was doing them a future physician. disservice. “It has its pros and its cons, because you are always trying to catch that bottom half while challenging the top half. It’s very difficult to achieve that balance at a low-income school,” she says. That same year she applied to medical schools, adding Harvard to her list “as a joke.” She wants to be a family doctor, whereas top-tier institutions usually attract aspiring specialists. “An MD from Harvard will open many doors for me,” she says. “I am interested in the methods and standards used to set up clinics in developing nations and in building resources for setting up global clinics.” Looking back and looking forward, Martin’s instinct is to reflect on poverty, both in how she experienced it and what she witnessed in places that include rural Kentucky, Costa Rica (where she went on a Mount Holyoke-sponsored service trip), and Springfield’s New Leadership charter school. She gets most animated when talking about the students she encouraged to seek higher education. “After all this time of people pouring time and energy into me, I was finally able to pay it forward,” she says. Through it all, Martin exudes a sense of wonder about life and its unexpected twists and turns. Sitting on a packing crate with her cat Kiki on her lap, she says, “from homeless to Harvard in a year and a half. It doesn’t get much crazier than that.”

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Unexpected

Destinations By Christina Barber-Just Illustr ations by Car a Petrus

Ellie Skeele ’75 could not have predicted that she would end up in Nepal as the founder and president of a company introducing the world to a new, sustainable fiber derived from the Himalayan stinging nettle plant. No, that would have been unthinkable to her, back in 1975. “I graduated without a clue as to what I was going to do,” says Skeele, who majored in political philosophy. Having grown up outside New York City, she fell into the idea of looking for a job there, and dabbled both in high tech, at IBM, and finance, at J.P. Morgan. “Neither was really appropriate for me, but it was what I thought I was supposed to do,” she says. Jolted by her father’s early death from cancer, she quit her Wall Street job and spent three years as a professional sailor. Later, Skeele gave corporate work another try as a manager at Novell, but it wasn’t meant to be. “I’m just really not a corporate person,” she says. Consulting suited her a bit better, though, and she built a successful strategic marketing consultancy. But a three-week trek in Nepal changed all that. She fell in love with the beauty of village life in the mountains and decided not only to move there, thirteen years ago, but also to adopt two Nepali children and start two Kathmandu-based businesses. Himalayan Wild Fibers is the most recent; it aims to bring nettle fiber to the international textile market.

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“At fifty-eight years old, I’m struggling to put food on the table, whereas most of my peers have socked away a lot of money and are ready to retire. But I’m really glad that I made this choice,” Skeele says. “When I left New York to go sailing, and again when I left to come here, people said to me, ‘Oh gosh, you’re so brave. I wish I could do that.’ And I said, ‘Well, you could do that.’ And it’s not about bravery; it’s about survival. I think I would wither and die if I didn’t do something like this.” On some level we know life shouldn’t be all highways and no side streets. But when it comes to our career paths, we worry that if we take a detour we won’t live up to our potential, or we’ll disappoint ourselves or someone else, or we won’t make as much money as we could. Still, for alumnae such as Skeele, the quest for meaningful work trumps the desire for job security, and a meandering career path almost inevitably ensues. The good news? Detourfilled, “wandering” careers are becoming the rule, not the exception. “People have a sense that there is, or should be, a linear [career] track. But given the upheaval in the economy in recent years, I don’t think it’s like that anymore,” says Steve Koppi, director of the MHC Career Development Center (CDC). “In a previous generation, a thirty-year career at IBM would be the ticket. Today that’s less true: maybe a forty- or fifty-year career in a variety of different occupations or industries.”

Career, redefined

Seven alums exit the career highway and drive the side streets seeking satisfying work

Higher education has become so vocational, Koppi says, that students come to Mount Holyoke—a liberal-arts college—expecting a major to be directly related to a career. To break down the myth that “major equals career,” the CDC gives first-year students a quiz in which they must match an alumna’s major with her current job title. At first, students are stumped, but then they’re let in on the big secret: The classics major is a strategy analyst at Target Corporation, the English major is a fundraiser at Wellesley, the critical-social-thought major is a clinical assistant at Planned Parenthood. “There’s a lot of social pressure that students and alumnae feel around career and job title and the status that goes with that,” Koppi says. The idea is to get people thinking about careers in a broader, more integrated way. Many alumnae would agree that a major does not dictate a career field. Take Ellen Malmon ’88, an architect who majored in English. Or Gretchen Schmelzer ’87, a German-literature major and one-time Olympic rowing hopeful who became a sports psychologist, a psychotherapist, and, now, a senior consultant at a leadership institute.

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“There’s a lot of empirical research suggesting that liking your job is the most important factor in determining your happiness.” Malmon found her way to architecture circuitously, as women frequently do. “Boys often find it through drafting class or working construction when they are young— things not many girls participate in,” she says. Schmelzer says her “amazingly curving path” may not be for everybody, but it’s been an asset for her. “I’ve worked in banks, foreign countries around AIDS, insurance companies, and engineering. As you go into each of the worlds, you gather a lot of data and then bring it to the next one. You become kind of a Wikipedia as you move along.” She adds, “I wouldn’t be able to be as helpful to my clients if I had done a straight career path—no way.” Sometimes an alumna’s journey is one of degrees—academic degrees. Olivia Velez-Benenson ’98 has five: two bachelor’s, two master’s, and a PhD. “I was always switching jobs, always doing something different,” says VelezBenenson, who is currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow in the field of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. “Maybe I could’ve gotten where I am now a faster way if I had known where I was going, but I couldn’t have gotten these skills any other way.” Goodbye, gold watch Twisting, turning career paths inspire more anxiety than confidence in some alumnae, especially those still searching for a job that syncs. French major Mary Reed Kelly ’75 only recently made peace with her unusual path. “I went from French and teaching, then business school, to corporate ed, to freelance training and writing, to delivering sales training in China, India, Singapore, and Brazil this past summer,” she says. While she was doing these disparate jobs, friends who’d gone to law school or med school were at the peak of their ambitious, high-powered careers, making lots of money and establishing themselves as experts in their field. “There are times when I thought, ‘Boy, I sure missed the boat,’ ” Kelly says. “But after this summer”—when she took the worldwide sales-training assignment—“I thought, ‘Well, I guess it was pretty good I did it that way.’” As a mother of two, Kelly has enjoyed the flexibility of freelancing. And although her career path was unplanned, it’s fulfilling. Besides, she says, “Everybody’s going to be doing

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more meandering these days. It’s not going to ever go back to [the time when] you work fifty years and get a gold watch.” Economist Nancy Folbre confirms that times have changed. “What we see now is fewer people on a linear trajectory because there’s more job turnover than there used to be and jobs are shittier than they used to be,” says Folbre, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and a regular contributor to the Economix blog at the New York Times. While we may be a long way from an economy that encourages people to explore and develop their own capabilities, Folbre applauds those who take risks in the workplace despite the rocky economy. “There’s a lot of empirical research suggesting that liking your job is the most important factor in determining your happiness,” she says. Women’s work Folbre also points out that, whereas the job trajectories of both men and women are subject to more involuntary meandering now, for most women the meander traditionally comes from taking time out to care for family members. Barbara Maclay Cameron ’90 is one alumna who took a detour from her career path for child-rearing reasons. But instead of getting back on the fast track, she turned motherhood itself into a job opportunity. Cameron is the project director for an initiative working toward improving breastfeeding support in child-care centers in her area of North Carolina. It’s the perfect job for her, she says, but she couldn’t have planned the path she’s taken. A summa cum laude biology major at Mount Holyoke, Cameron dropped out of Duke graduate school after her MA and took a “therapeutic decompression job” making wedding cakes before moving on to teacher training and earning a master’s degree in social work. She got involved with La Leche League—the international nonprofit that promotes breastfeeding—after giving birth to the first of her two children. She was busy homeschooling them (“a full-time job in itself ”) when the director of a University of North Carolina-based global breastfeeding institute offered Cameron her current position. “My dream job

snuck up on me when I wasn’t even looking,” she says. The ten-hour-a-week post draws on her varied background and allows her to make family her priority. When that job ends, she says, “the journey continues.” “I am glad for every time I followed my gut and my heart about making a change, even when intellectually it didn’t seem like the smart move,” says Cameron, who advises surrounding yourself with people who support an unconventional career path. “When I was working as a cake decorator, my parents, who were extremely supportive, got a certain number of snide comments about my expensive college education going to waste. My mother would say, ‘At Mount Holyoke, Barbara learned to follow her own path, and that is what she is doing.’ ” Indeed, Cameron says she uses the substance of her education all the time, no matter how she earns her living.

mental stimulation than the cloister permitted. “It’s just amazing how it comes back around,” says Gracey, who’s finishing her first year of the three-year program. Gracey seems to speak for all alumnae with circuitous career paths when she reveals that, for her, the important thing is never to stop seeking. “I think people want to get it right the first time—settle down, put down roots, make a career out of it, save up. That’s considered success,” she says. “I did that for twenty-nine years, but it wasn’t success. So that taught me to go with my heart. If I don’t feel it’s a good fit, I keep searching. It’s important to be in a job where you feel you fit, and that brings you joy and peace.”

Seek and ye shall find Of course, you needn’t have children to make a career change. Amy Gracey FP’07 spent almost three decades as a cloistered Dominican monastic before depression led her to give up that way of life. “The issue was my ability to live such an enclosed life,” says Gracey, who, at sixteen, dedicated herself to prayer, sacrifice, and work within a monastery that was all but cut off from the rest of the world. Leaving, she says, was scary: “Well, everything was scary after I left. Twenty-nine years in the cloister doesn’t prepare you to step out into the world.” But step out she did, going back to school and earning an associate’s in communications from Holyoke Community College in 2004 and a bachelor’s in English from Mount Holyoke in 2007. She worked as a writer after graduation, first in Massachusetts and then in Delaware, which is where she learned about Loyola University Maryland’s graduate program in pastoral counseling. A pastoral counselor, she explains, is a licensed clinical counselor who’s received additional training that includes spirituality and cultural diversity—just the thing for a former monastic who needed more personal contact and

Following a meandering career path? Here’s some advice, and reading recommendations, from sister alumnae who have done likewise. Visit alumnae. mtholyoke.edu/meander. Mou n t Ho lyo k e Al u m na e Qua r t e r ly

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alumnaematters Mountain Day Goes Viral! India

Ice Cream Celebrations Pop Up Around the World

Australia

South Korea

Egypt

England Determined not to give up the excitement of cancelled classes or an excellent excuse for an ice cream treat, members of the youngest alumnae class of 2011 organized a series of simultaneous mini-reunions on Mountain Day, which this year was celebrated October 6. They were met with a mega-sisterly response from fifty-one groups on five continents. International gatherings were held in Australia, Bangladesh, Egypt, England, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and South Korea.

In addition to those who gathered for ice cream, plenty of alumnae posted to the Alumnae Association’s Facebook page to say they headed to a nearby mountain or took a walk in a local woods or simply stopped to look at fall’s terrific display.

on foot to join President Lynn Pasquerella ’80 and Dean of the College Cerri Banks at the summit. More than 850 Mountain Day caps were handed out by the Alumnae Association, since it’s never too early to grab the interest of those soon-to-be alumnae.

First celebrated in 1838, Mountain Day this year saw vanloads of current students head to the base of Mt. Holyoke and then proceed

Nelson said the global organizing experience and stunning alumnae response gave her an “overwhelming sense of support and community,” as

she and other planners recognized how far and wide the influence of Mount Holyoke extends. “We look forward to carrying on the tradition every year,” she vowed.—M.H.B. For more photos and lots of Mountain Day reminiscences, go to alumnae.mtholyoke. edu/2011mtnday.

“We were thrilled with the overall enthusiasm that we felt from alumnae across the world throughout the planning process,” said Meredith Nelson ’11, who helped to spearhead the global effort along with members of her class board. “As usual, it feels like there is something about Mount Holyoke and our shared experiences that allows us to transcend limitations of time and space.” In New York City’s East Village, thirty-five alumnae celebrated the big day at Sundaes and Cones.

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Women’s Academy for International Leadership Development Do you know an outstanding young woman who is interested in applying to college in the United States? Then nominate her to apply for the Women’s Academy for International Leadership Development, to take place July 23–August 17, 2012, at Mount Holyoke. Building on MHC’s long tradition of educating women as global leaders, this competitive program prepares students from around the world for admission to highly selective US colleges. The academy’s curriculum, designed to prepare students for future academic and career success, includes college-level coursework and visits to some of the top colleges and universities in the region. Additional highlights of the program include visits from prominent leaders in business, government, the arts, and other fields, and a series of interactive workshops that will inspire students to achieve personal and professional goals. Students will return home with a polished portfolio, access to online assistance during the college application process, a global support network of mentors and peers, and the confidence, skills, and knowledge to become future leaders.

Golfers Hit the Links to Aid Student Athletes Mount Holyoke’s fourteenth annual Friends of Athletics Golf Tournament took place at MHC’s bucolic Orchards Golf Club in early fall. This year’s field included seven alums: Jane Zimmy ’74, Audry Longo ’05, Liz Gross ’79, Melinda Mann ’79, Claudia Krimsky-Key ’79, Martha Hicks-Pofit ’73, and Sally Lemaire ’68. All net proceeds generated by the tournament support intercollegiate athletics at Mount Holyoke. Funds are used primarily to assist student athletes on annual training trips.

As an alumna, you are most welcome to join in as we prepare to launch this innovative program. Please contact us for more information or to explore ways that you can participate at WAILD@mtholyoke.edu or mtholyoke.edu/ cpd/waild.html.

the quality of the athletic experience for the college’s student-athletes. The financial support generated by this fund has been extremely important to the success of each program over the past twenty years. The next tournament is slated to take place on September 10, 2012. —Mike Raposo Participants at an earlier MHC conference on leadership.

Jesse Lytle

In 1991, Mount Holyoke Director of Athletics Laurie Priest created the Friends of Athletics fund to enhance

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Need a Good Read? Try These Alum-Approved Books MHC book clubs are everywhere and their members are reading everything. Check out these latest “alumnae-approved reads” from Baltimore to Phoenix. Then let others know what you’re reading on our Facebook page (facebook.com/ aamhc). For more ideas, contact the book club leaders at the bottom of the list.

Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City by Antero Pietila

Most Read

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage by Kirstin Downey (It’s about Frances Perkins, class of 1902.)

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (This was also MHC’s 2011 “common read” selection.) Brain Food

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins (MHC’s 2010 commencement speaker)

Women-Centered

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier

The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History by Gregory Zuckerman

House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne

MHC-Related

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn Bossypants by Tina Fey By Alums or Daughters of Alums

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand, daughter of Elizabeth Dwyer Hillenbrand ’50 A Discovery of Witches by Deborah E. Harkness ’86

Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan Finding Nouf: A Novel by Zoë Ferraris Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky and translated by Sandra Smith

Fiction and More

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow

Sister: A Novel by Rosamund Lupton

Caucasia: A Novel by Danzy Senna

Fools Rush In: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption by Bill Carter

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

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The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

AA Treasurer’s Report Now Online

Maura Hurley Brackett ’58, Southern Arizona (brackett3@q.com) Mary Bozza Wise ’90, Greater Baltimore (machex3@verizon.net) Betsy Kennedy Console ’75, Greater Bridgeport, CT (econsole@sbcglobal.net) Alexis Lewis Trocki ’05, Chicago (alexis.trocki@ gmail.com) Jane Pollard Mayo ’71, Dallas/Fort Worth (janepmayo@aol.com) Nicole Shanklin ’98, Houston (nmshankl@ yahoo.com) Jennifer Wirth Symington ’87, Los Angeles (Jennifer_symington @ahm.honda.com)

Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry Little Bee by Chris Cleave Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay A Free Life by Ha Jin The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene Sword and Blossom: A British Officer’s Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman by Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Willliams Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser Empty Family: Stories by Colm Toibin

Abigail Wasserman ’96, New Haven, CT (abigail.wasserman @janussystems.com) Kristin Ringdahl Seltzer ’88, Phoenix (krizona @gmail.com)

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Diana Marston Wood ’58, Pittsburgh (dmwood@pitt.edu)

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

Joanne Hiratsuka Petersen ’71, San Francisco Peninsula (joanne@ alumnae.mtholyoke.edu)

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

alumnaematters

Alumnae Book Club Contacts:

The Alumnae Association Treasurer’s Report for the fiscal year July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011 is available online at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/10_11treport. The association’s assets, liabilities, and net assets for the year are included in the report as the Statement of Financial Position. Paper copies of the annual report are also available on request; contact Karen Northup-Scudder, senior director of finance and administration, at 413-538-2736.

Looking for a Few Good Women The Alumnae Association is governed by a board of directors. These dedicated alumnae volunteers play a crucial role in planning, programming, policy formation, and outreach to the greater alumnae body. Each board member serves a three-year term and sits on one or more committees that also include nonboard members. They are the Classes and Reunion, Clubs, Communications, External Achievement Awards, Finance, Internal Achievement Awards, Nominating, Quarterly, and Volunteer Stewardship Committees. Alumnae interested in serving on the board of directors and/or committees should send their names to the current Nominating Committee chair, Antoria HowardMarrow ’81, at marrowadh@yahoo.com or to Jane Zachary, executive director of the Alumnae Association, at jzachary@mtholyoke.edu. For more information, see alumnae.mtholyoke. edu/about/governance/ governance_comm.php.

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Spring in South Hadley means three things: glorious trees at their budding best, graduating seniors in their best dress whites, and returning alumnae eager to revisit some of the best years of their lives. Reunion I takes place May 18–20 (for the classes of 1937, 1942, 1962, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007, and 2010; Reunion II is May 25–27 (for the classes of 1947, 1952, 1957, 1967, 1972, 1977, and 1982.)

The project will also launch a multimedia website to share news, events, and stories of women who are developing new and innovative global solutions, such as Mount Holyoke alumna Sadiqa Basiri Saleem ’09, cofounder and board member of the Oruj Learning Center in Afghanistan, who works to educate Afghan women and girls and promotes access to education, healthcare, and civic participation; and Mary Hughes ’74, founder of The 2012 Project and a soughtafter campaign manager and advisor for political candidates at the state and national levels. Kavita Ramdas ’85 chairs the committee planning the first summer institute for The Women in Public Service Project.

Empower Yourself at Reunion 2012

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Back-to-Class, the popular Friday series of mini-classes, this year takes as its theme “Empowering Women Makes a World of Difference,” loosely paralleling the intentions of the

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Ben Barnhart

Kavita Ramdas ’85

Featuring women leaders from around the world, the inaugural event set the stage for the first training institute slated for this summer at Wellesley. Shaping The Women in Public Service Project Summer Institute are Kavita Ramdas ’85, former head of the Global Fund for Women; Suzanne George ’90, a principal of the global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge; Mona Sutphen ’89, former White House chief of staff and current appointee to the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board; and Vincent Ferraro, Ruth Lawson Professor of Politics at MHC.

college’s common reading, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Professors and alumnae will offer classes in everything from international development to the role of women in science. The association is still also planning a roster of “electives” that will include sessions on lifetime physical fitness, the survival tactics of plants, and the ever-popular session on international politics by Professor Vinnie Ferraro. Visit South Hadley this spring and be amazed. For details, go to alumnae. mtholyoke.edu/reunions/ 2012.php.

alumnaematters

The infrastructure for a worldwide network of women leaders and change agents is moving ahead following the December 2011 colloquium for the Women in Public Service Project hosted by the US Department of State. A collaboration among MHC, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges and the State Department, the project aims to equip women around the globe with the tools to improve government, expand civil rights, and combat corruption.

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Academic “Sisters” Dream of Just World with Women at the Helm

thank you for giving Mary

a reason to smile.

Keep her smiling by donating to the Founder's fund today. Visit alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/ff or send a check, payable to Alumnae Association Founderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fund, to Mount Holyoke College, 50 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075-1486

offtheshelf

Words Worth a Second Look

Nonfiction Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India BY EUGENIA W. HERBERT

(University of Pennsylvania Press) During the colonization of India, British expatriates feeling homesick for their country estates began constructing gardens that replicated the English model. Eugenia Herbert uses period illustrations to trace the practice as a part of Britain’s relations with the subcontinent it considered an untamed land, ripe for “civilized” landscaping. Eugenia W. Herbert is profes-

sor emeritus of history at the college. She is the author of several books including Twilight on the Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa. So Far Away: A Daughter’s Memoir of Life, Loss, and Love

years, Christine fought to change her mind. Christine’s father suffered a series of debilitating illnesses that her mother wanted to avoid at all costs. This memoir illustrates the complexities of a family’s separate yet interwoven journeys. Christine W. Hartmann ’87 is a research health scientist at the Veterans Health Administration and holds a faculty appointment at Boston University’s School of Public Health. I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim EDITED BY MARIA M. EBRAHIMJI AND ZAHRA T.

BY CHRISTINE W.

SURATWALA

HARTMANN

(White Cloud Press) This book features the stories of forty women who were born in America and are part of the Muslim faith. The editors and contributors hope to break down stereotypes of what it means to be a Muslim

(Vanderbilt University Press) Christine Hartmann’s mother valued control so much in her own life that she chose the moment it would end. For twenty years she planned for her death, and for twenty

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American, as well as to increase the dialogue between Muslim Americans and their fellow citizens. Sarah Kajani ’09 is a contributor to this book and a graduate student at New York University. Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights BY JUAN E. MÉNDEZ WITH MARJORY WENTWORTH

(Palgrave Macmillan) Firsthand experience as a prisoner of war led Juan Méndez to a long legal career as a defender of human rights. Intertwined with an analysis of the current state of human rights is the personal story of a man who prevailed over his time as a political prisoner to take up a life of activism. Marjory Heath Wentworth ’80 is the author of four books. She has extensive experience in human rights and has worked for the UN High Commission for Refugees.

So Far Away A Daughter’s Memoir of Life, Loss, and Love Chri Stine W. hArtMAnn



Fiction Murder in Lascaux BY BETSY DRAINE AND MICHAEL HINDEN

(University of Wisconsin Press) The caves of Lascaux, famous for their Paleolithic cave paintings, are closed to the public; but five scholars a day are allowed in. Art history professor Nora Barnes has snagged a coveted spot, along with her husband Toby. When one of the other visiting scholars is murdered, Nora and Toby are pegged as suspects. The pair must work to solve the crime and clear their names. Betsy Draine ’67 is professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She cowrote the memoir A Castle in the Backyard: The Dream of a House in France.

Robert McCloskey: A Private Life in Words and Pictures BY JANE MCCLOSKEY

(Seapoint Books) Robert McCloskey’s illustrated children’s books brought coastal Maine into homes all across the country. In this book, the author’s youngest daughter invites readers to examine more than fifty rarely seen illustrations from the family archive and to learn more about the man who created such beloved literature for children as Make Way for Ducklings and Time of Wonder. As a child, Jane McCloskey ’70 appeared as a character in many of her father’s books. She lives in a house she built on Deer Isle, Maine, near where she grew up.

Eat Smart in Norway: How to Decipher the Menu, Know the Market Foods, & Embark on a Tasting Adventure BY JOAN PETERSON

(Ginkgo Press) The latest installment in the Eat Smart series provides a guide for food lovers travelling in Norway. The book looks at culinary history, culture, regional dishes, and

recipes and offers a shopping list for outdoor markets. Peterson encourages her readers to consider what food can teach us about a country’s culture and national identity. Joan Lamprey Peterson ’59 has written nine Eat Smart guides, leads culinary tours in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and is a founding member of CHEW, the Culinary History Enthusiasts of Wisconsin.

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Children’s Books Sita’s Ramayana BY SAMHITA ARNI AND MOYNA CHITRAKAR

(Groundwood Books) The Indian epic Ramayana is a classic story reimagined in this graphic novel. Two kingdoms war over a beautiful queen, who, though imprisoned by her enemies, is given a voice through Samhita Arni’s retelling of the ancient tale. The book’s original illustrations include the epic’s snake-eating bird deity Garuda, and the monkey hero Hanuman. Samhita Arni ’06 is a freelance writer based in Bangalore, India. Her latest project is a thriller based on the Ramayana. Claude, the Clumsy Clydesdale BY MARION E. ALTIERI

Poetry Improbable Music BY SANDRA KOHLER

(WordTech Communications) With her third collection of poems, Sandra Kohler explores the human experience, delving into everything from domestic scenes to the consequences of war. Bringing wisdom from the natural world, Kohler offers a collection rich with complexities. Sandra Iger Kohler ’61 is also the author of The Ceremonies of Longing. Her poems have appeared in the New Republic, the Colorado Review, and the Prairie Schooner.

(Caballito Children’s Books) Claude is a young horse who exemplifies the Clydesdale breed, but— compared with the other animals on the farm—he feels ungraceful. He retreats to his stall to hide in comfort, but when Mother Goose and her goslings are in trouble, he must find a way to overcome his doubts and save the day. Marion E. Altieri FP’88 is a horse racing writer and handicapper for Saratoga Today newspaper. She is working on a book about Iraqi Arabian horses.

MORE BOOKS

For a description of this book, go to alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/morebooks_w12. One Mom’s Journey to Motherhood: Infertility, Childbirth Complications, and Postpartum Depression, Oh My! BY IVY SHIH LEUNG ’86 (Abbott Press)

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Her Name Was Bette offtheshelf

An Illuminating Account of Disease, Family, and Forgiveness

celebrate her tenth wedding anniversary in 2007, Sherri VandenAkker ’87 and her husband, Malcolm, drove west from Boston to retrace the events of that memorable day. They had married in Abbey Chapel and VandenAkker wanted to savor, once again, a sunny, fall day on campus. They had just begun their walk when she got the call. It was the police, telling her they were about to break into her mother’s house. No one, including VandenAkker, had been allowed inside for sixteen years. Bette VandenAkker had lived as a virtual recluse; her days spent drinking Canadian Club whiskey, her mind, body, and household crumbling around her as she refused all visitors. What police found that day was a scene that no daughter should ever have to witness. Her mother was dead, her body badly decomposed, and her house literally filled to the rafters with garbage and excrement and empty bottles of booze. It took a hazmat unit three weeks to clean the premises. The few personal effects Sherri now cherishes had to be decontaminated before they were given to her to keep.

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The horrific circumstances of her mother’s death and the complicated feelings that VandenAkker experienced afterward led her to make an hourlong documentary, My Name Was Bette: The Life and Death of an Alcoholic. A professor of literature at the School of Human Services at Springfield College in Boston, she teamed up with Boston University film major Josh Hays to coproduce the film. Through interviews with Sherri, her sister Krystyn White, and their mother’s best friends, the film lovingly outlines Bette’s personal journey as an independent woman of the 1960s and ’70s who was derailed time and again by circumstance, depression, and chronic substance abuse. Photos of Bette as a vibrant, young woman are contrasted with a numbing picture of her bloated face taken following her arrest for driving an unregistered, uninsured car near the end of her life.

But the film is also intended as a broad examination of the effects of alcohol on women, specifically, who are 50 percent more likely to die of the disease than are men, because of their slower metabolism, hormonal system, and social tendency to drink in secret. VandenAkker’s mother also had problems with her eyes, her heart, her balance, her stomach, and her sense of smell, and she had panic attacks. Sherri VandenAkker ’87 displays her mother’s photograph.

“I wish I had understood earlier that it’s a disease” that affects every system of the body, Sherri VandenAkker said. “One of my goals is to make sure this is well known; not to proselytize about drinking, but to make people aware.” By the end of Bette’s life, VandenAkker had come to the realization that “whatever pain she caused people, [Bette] was suffering so much more profoundly.” Now a joyful mother of two herself, Sherri has come to “a profound forgiveness and appreciation” of the person her mother was before alcoholism, she says. “I’m so sad at what she missed.”—M.H.B.

Find out how to see the film by contacting thebettefilm@gmail.com.

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bulletinboard Calling All Math Teachers

Summer Math, a professional development institute for K–12 math teachers, coaches, and school administrators, will offer two programs in July 2012 at Mount Holyoke: Developing Mathematical Ideas ( July 16–20) and Mathematics Leadership Program ( July 23–27). For more information, please visit mtholyoke. edu/go/smt.

These nineteenth-century engravings—The Sentry’s Thoughts of Home (right) and Waiting—are among the Civil-War-era artifacts on view at the Skinner Museum.

Civil War “Lives” Through Skinner Museum Exhibition Experiencing the Civil War: From the Battlefield to the Home Front marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and will be on display at MHC’s Joseph Allen Skinner Museum until the 150th anniversary of the war’s end in April 2015. Experiencing the Civil War examines the lives of soldiers on the battlefield, women managing the home front, and the role of communication in bridging these

sectors. It also explores how both Civil War-era soldiers and civilians commemorated the war by accumulating relics from battlefields including Fort Sumter, Antietam, and Gettysburg.

and the last edition of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. A scavenger hunt helps visitors locate and explore additional Civil War-era objects throughout the museum.

Highlights of the exhibition include a rebel hand grenade from Fort Sumter, a piece of torn bunting from a US flag picked up on the field after the battle of Antietam, a photo album of South Hadley area soldiers,

The Skinner Museum houses the diverse collections of Joseph Skinner (1867– 1946), a local manufacturer and philanthropist.

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Help us help you put together the best application possible. Alumnae who think they may apply to health-professions schools in 2012 (for 2013 admission) are urged to contact the Office of Pre-Health Programs by the end of March for important information. E-mail David Gardner, dean of pre-health programs, at dgardner@mtholyoke.edu. MHC Class and Club Products

Lots of MHC-related class and club products are for sale. For details and photos of many items, please visit alumnae.mtholyoke. edu/shop/alumgifts.php or phone the Alumnae Association at 413-538-2300 to request a printed copy of the information on the website.

Skinner Museum; photogr aphs by L aur a Weston

Considering Applying to Medical School?

Join in.

When you consider your charitable giving this year, we hope you will make Mount Holyoke College a philanthropic priority. Please join our community of giving. Every gift matters. Thank you!

www.mtholyoke.edu/giving

Join the parade!

Make your plans now to join the alumnae parade this May! For more information, visit alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/reunion.

Get the whole gang together again for reunion! Invite your friends with a free class e-card. Go to alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/ecards and send a memory from your last reunion or senior yearbook.