Bowdoin’s many connections to ARCTIC research and exploration made hosting the Governing Across the Waves workshop a natural. This September gathering of scholars and policymakers, who discussed the challenges of effective maritime governance, included representatives from the Russian Ministry of Transportation, the US Coast Guard Academy, and coast guards from around the globe.
With an admit rate of 13.5 percent, the incoming BOWDOIN Class of 2021 is the College’s most selective ever. Other highlights: it’s the most diverse, with 34 percent students of color; 16 percent are first generation; 52 percent will receive financial aid; and students come from forty-three states and twenty-nine different countries.
Bowdoin’s CURLING team is growing fast and making news—they were featured on WCSH’s 207 in Maine and they’ve grown from just five players four years ago to nearly twenty on this year’s team.
Jeopardy featured Bowdoin as a correct answer for the third time in recent years. It may not have been a DAILY DOUBLE, but knowing that Bowdoin is home to the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum earned the player Rob in the March 1 game $600.
Bowdoin faculty EARNED honors and grants across the full spectrum of disciplines, departments, and programs over the year—from organizations like the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others.
In January, the women’s ice hockey team played Connecticut College during FROZEN FENWAY, a two-week series of hockey and ice skating events—the first-ever NESCAC women’s hockey game to be played at Boston’s Fenway Park, it was won by Bowdoin 3-0.
Hosted by Keith Shortall ’82, Maine Public Radio’s Maine Calling show broadcast live from Sills Hall in April, in a program discussing the advantages GAINED from Bowdoin’s interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environment and our extraordinary location for research in Maine’s complex ecosystem.
The College awarded four HONORARY degrees at Commencement 2017 in May—to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr ’95, eminent scholar and university president Hanna Holborn Gray, founder and executive director of the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine Fatuma Hussein, and conservationist and musician Charles Leavell.
Bowdoin’s Marine Science Semester enrolled students in an IMMERSIVE program of three four-week course modules taught at the Coastal Studies Center and punctuated with field trips to Hurricane Island in Penobscot Bay, Kent Island in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, and the Gulf of California, Baja California Sur.
With a 2,000-year-old mummy mask, the oldest public collection of works on paper on the continent, a New York Times-described “notable museum opening,” Winslow Homer’s watercolor box, a rare photo of Lincoln’s first inauguration, and World War II drawings by JAPANESE schoolchildren from Hiroshima—the Bowdoin College Museum of Art made news all year.
This year, Bowdoin’s men’s basketball team celebrated seventy-five years on the court; a cappella group Miscellania marked forty-five years on stage; and the volleyball team, including senior KATIE Doherty, who became the first three-time winner of NESCAC Defensive Player of the Year, notched thirty years at the net.
Dave Fogler ’90, a visual arts major from Maine who has spent twenty years working with Industrial LIGHT & Magic on movies like Avatar, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and The Matrix Reloaded, talked to the Bowdoin community about what it takes to succeed as a visual effects artist in the movie industry.
Hundreds of MATHEMATICIANS visited campus in September for the American Mathematical Society’s Fall Eastern Sectional Meeting. During the two-day conference, nearly twenty-five locations hosted three plenary speakers, eighteen special sessions on varying research topics, and thirty-five undergraduate student presentations—including five Bowdoin students.
A legend on campus and in his profession turned NINETY-FIVE in February. Mike “Link” Linkovich joined the College in 1954 as athletic trainer. A member of the Bowdoin staff for forty years, Link can still be seen almost daily in the athletic facilities, at sporting events, and in the dining halls.
Dating back more than twenty years, the African American Society’s campus-wide Ebony Ball in February gives students the OPPORTUNITY to dress their finest and laugh and dance the night away.
Para Nordic skier Jake Adicoff ’18 won the first race of his career at the PyeongChang 2018 PARALYMPIC Winter Games Test Event and World Cup, in the cross-country skiing long distance, visually impaired event, beating Sweden’s World Championships silver medalist Zebastian Modin.
The papers of Oliver Otis Howard—Bowdoin graduate, civil war hero, and public servant—were the subject of a mammoth digitization project, which saw the library scanning and publishing some 80,000 documents of archival material—including an 1865 letter from David Remick, treasurer of the Chicago Burlington and QUINCY Railroad, with a gift of railroad passes.
Accomplished alumni RETURN to campus often to lecture, perform, or simply speak with students. This year, legendary investor and philanthropist Stanley Druckenmiller ’75, H’07; former diplomat Christopher Hill ’74, H’14; celebrated NBC correspondent Cynthia McFadden ’78, H’12; and Dave and Charlotte Willner, both Class of 2006 and specialists in tech, Dave as head of community policy at Airbnb and Charlotte as safety manager at Pinterest, were among the many.
Bowdoin librarians created a research guide called “Fake or Fact,” designed to help students distinguish between reliable sources and fake news when SEARCHING for information for their papers and research projects.
A series of campus conversations organized by students and the McKeen Center for the Common Good sparked dialogue about difficult TOPICS like ideological and racial diversity.
New construction projects got UNDERWAY with the groundbreaking for the new Roux Center for the Environment and improvements slated for the Magee-Samuelson Outdoor Track, Whittier Field, and Hubbard Grandstand.
Bowdoin was lauded in February for once again being a top producer of Fulbright scholars, an honor it has often held, and for being among the top producers of Peace Corps VOLUNTEERS for the third year in a row.
The campus hosted several events promoting WIDESPREAD debate and discourse, featuring guests such as NYT journalist Nicholas Kristof and WSJ journalist Jason Riley, liberal theorist Noam Chomsky, and conservative author and political analyst Yuval Levin.
This year’s expanded annual student research symposium included those in the humanities and social sciences as well as “hard” sciences. Thus, posters featured work on migrant health and lyric poetry alongside an examination of “possible 2-D materials of the form MX3 where M represents transition metals surrounding Zr in the periodic table and X includes the three chacogens S, Se, and Te.”
During its fourteenth YEAR in existence, the Bowdoin College Hall of Honor—founded to perpetuate the memory of those who have brought distinction, honor, and excellence to the College through their accomplishments in athletics—welcomed six new inductees during an October ceremony in Thorne Hall.
The Career Planning Center’s Tech Trek program offers students a literal foot in the door for careers in technology. In the fall, fifty students traveled to Boston and over Spring Break, forty students headed to San Francisco to visit technology companies and meet alumni who work in the sector—including Mitch ZUKLIE ’91, CEO of Orrick.
A year to celebrate, by any measure—and there’s more to come!
Case in point: the new Roux Center for the Environment.
Learn more and catch a glimpse of the building here.
