Thanks. I'm wearing all black today, so it's not really --

Hi, I'm gonna show you inside Fels and where I live in Up Quad.

I live in this apartment kind of space with, right now, two, but normally you live here with three friends. So I'm going to show you around.

So this is our common space. You can kind of personalize the space how you like it. We've added a mini fridge and a toaster oven, and we have our own table that a friend built us, and this is where we keep our dishes and stuff. This is my room. It kind of feels like being in a treehouse, which is nice. I like my bed up very high, and that way I have a nice view of the mountains over there. And this room has really good light. That's probably my favorite part about it.

We do a lot of like dancing here.

Yeah, I think this is the space when a lot of people want to get together. This is where people come because it's such a big private space. Sometimes we project movies.

We play some games here.

Sometimes study.

Yeah.

Study parties.

Totally.

Tulsi plays her banjo.

Yeah.

This is Stu's. It used to be our dining hall. This is also where we have Trivia Thursdays. That's like a big thing on campus.

This is like a skateboarding situation. I've seen a lot of people make some foursquare games. That's been really fun. Some roller skating happens in here.

I got Marley because her birthday is really early in the year, which is really hard your freshman year if it's in September because you're just starting to meet people. But she had a birthday party outside on the Woolley lawn and invited anyone who wanted to come, and I just thought that was really nice. And I remember just thinking she was so open and friendly and

It's working out.

Yeah!

At like 11pm on some inconspicuous night, very inconvenient, normal, stressful night. Everyone's stressing out. The bell rings, and you know that it's time to go to Midnight Breakfast, and Midnight Breakfast is like the sweetest thing ever. It is where our professors and other faculty and staff kind of hang out and serve us breakfast at midnight. And all the music faculty kind of like make a band, and they all perform like classic hits. It's really fun, and we all just like dance on tables and like sing along.

They went til like 2am this last year. We forced them to keep playing. So fun.

We're gonna take you to Tishman, which is our movie theater.

It's kind of like an auditorium-esque space.

One of my favorite memories here is there was a really big snowstorm one night, and Marley and a bunch of our other friends screened The Shining here. And that was really, really fun, just to be cuddled up here. And this space, like most spaces, up running 10 or 24/7. So if you want to come watch a movie, or screen a debate, or be part of a PowerPoint club, you can come here at any time.

I can't take you into the room right now because there's a meeting going on, but this space is the editing studio where I spend a lot of time editing my videos. So like I said, a lot of spaces here are 24/7. So since I'm in video classes, I can rent a key whenever I need to, and I go in here to edit videos. So there's a lot of late nights in there, a lot of early mornings, but it's really nice the night before a video is due for a class, a lot of people are in there working on their own videos, and you can kind of be like, "Hey, check mine out," and you check someone else's out. It's just a nice bonding experience.

This is kind of my safe haven. There's supposed to be a class in here, but they're not here right now. So we'll just sneak in. This is D207. It's where most intro theater classes happen. Directing classes happen in here. My favorite thing, and what really struck me on my tour, is that we have like five black box theatres, and every theater is up for grabs at anytime. So I'm directing a piece kind of on my own, away from the faculty, right now, just for fun, and I get to use an actual professional space to be able to do that. We've got a great lighting rig. Also in here, sound system. Behind this curtain is like all of the props you could ever wish for.

Slowly but surely all of our friends became friends, and then we were all friends, and we hung out a lot over the summer after freshman year and we've been inseparable ever since.

Hi, I'm Emma, and I study Visual Arts and Politics.

Hi, I'm Rohana, and I study Performance Arts and Science. Behind us is VAPA, the Visual and Performing Arts building. We're gonna give you a tour, so come with us.

I've always wanted to do a little tap dance routine in this area, but I don't know how to tap dance.

This way.

To the Costume Shop. We're about to enter the Costume Shop.

Hello, hello.

Oh my god.

There's so much stuff here.

I know. It's like every nook and cranny is filled with some sort of cloth.

Oh, this is my favorite part. It's just a big closet full of clothes, and shoes and wigs and

Look at this dress. That would be a good color on you.

They made this devil for the seagull and that's what it looks like.

Welcome to Lester Martin Theatre! I can project in here.

This is one of our black box theatres. We've had the Midsummer Night's Dream here. And for that they actually had -- those doors were open up there, and people can enter from there and come down these sttairs. And then there was a big trampoline right here. And all of the nymphs and Puck would be on the trampoline, and that was in this area. They had projections. It was crazy. One of my friends, who was playing Bottom, was playing a Taiko drum. It was wild and crazy.

This is a music performance space, so concerts and choirs and musicians perform here. We also have some student wide assemblies here like convocation, and we'll have speakers up here.

It has amazing acoustics. Amazing acoustics.

This is Martha Hill, our dance theater.

Do you like to dance?

I like to dance.

Pop a squat. This is where we dress. This is great lighting, actually.

This is Printmaking. I like to make prints.

So this class is a Design class, and they made some furniture. So these are some chairs and shelves.

Look at this chair. It's like a wheel.

So much for good posture.

Triangle within a triangle. What is that?

That's incredible.

There's some hand building in there and some wheels in here.

I took a potter's wheel class once, and it was really intense, really fun. We made all our own clays. We could make glazes and test out different clays and glazes, and it was really hard but really fun.

Have you taken a Visual Arts class?

No. I've taken Ceramics, Drawing, Architecture, Glaze and Kiln Technology, Lighting Design. I don't know if that counts as Visual Arts. And I've taken Metalworking, which is really fun. We have a great metal shop.

Okay, speaking of metal shop, let's go check that out.

Metal shop. There's a wood shop too.

I want this. Look at it. So pretty.

This is the CNC Mill.

what does it do?

So basically you can get a block of like foam and wood and design something, make a 3D model of something and upload it to the computer and this will carve out that design. So it's kind of the opposite of a 3D printer where the machine will build it up. This machine cuts it away. I've made site models on this machine.

For your Architecture class?

Yeah. This is the metal shop.

Have you taken Metal Workshop?

I took Metal Workshop my first term, and it was terrifying but really fun, and I learned a lot. Things I never thought I could do. You kind of learn about all the different levels of gas that you have to put in to make the welding work. Usually it's a little more clean in here.

Looks like my room.

Can I ask you your work? I'm here from the Admissions Office.

Yeah, sure.

What are you making?

Well, I'm doing a whole lot of stuff. How long do you want this answer to be?

30 seconds.

Okay.

I'm making a bunch of signs that I'm gonna install around insignificant looking places on campus. It's just kind of a joke to add a lot of alarms, you know what I mean? Like this thing that's not at all scary or dangerous.

The Architecture Studio. Look, it's Architecture students. Look, it's an Architecture teacher.

So the design of VAPA is really about the stressing the interdisciplinary nature of how Visual Arts is studied here. So just from standing here, you can see all the different disciplines, and you can move through the spaces really easily. And one of the great things about VAPA is that you really get interaction to all the different mediums, which is a really important part of a Liberal Arts education.

I love that Google one.

Thanks for coming on this tour with us.

We're having a conversation.

Oh, hello.

I'm Emma.

I'm Rohana, and we just so happened to be going to VAPA. Let's go give them a tour of the Visual and Performing Arts Center.

Let's do it.

We're not gonna do it in the Admissions Office.

I think it should be like we open the door, and you're already outside.

I'm Emma.

And I'm Rihanna.

And we're going to VAPA, the Visual and Performing Arts Center.

Come on.

Here, you can see the mountains.

I don't see any mountains. You have to take us to the mountains, Emma.

Come on. Let's go, guys. We're going on a hike.

Oh, there they are.

As you can see, people like to hang out here. There's always someone to talk to at any time of day, whether it's the people that pull all nighters, and they're doing homework in the common room, or it's the people that are having a sit outside, playing music in the common room, cooking their ramen. There's always people everywhere, someone to talk to, it's like hard to be bored here.

This is our common room. We have some leftover decorations from one of our coffee hours. Our theme this year is leaves. Get it? The houses Lee. Every house in Bennington has a weekly meeting called Coffee Hour, where the whole house or whoever wants to come together to talk about announcements for the school to talk about any house issues, stuff going on. And different houses do differently, but at Leigh, we always have a theme and an activity. There's been stuff like we've had talent shows, we've had bobbing for apples, which is really fun.

Juniors and seniors are eligible for singles in houses, if there's enough room providing, and I got my first single. Welcome to my room. This is the Leigh card room, which I'm really excited about because in previous terms, I've been upstairs and like in corners and really far away from stuff, but I'm literally like feet from the main door, so I can like hear people coming in, hear what they've got going on. This is my my Elvis. Welcome. I would leave him outside in the hall to welcome people to the room, but he's so beautiful that I just know someone's gonna steal him. And that would make me really sad. But yeah, Leigh is an exciting place.

I've been working on farms for such a long time. And I've been thinking like, you know, you guys should be doing it differently. And they all told me like, you're crazy, and in a lot of ways, I didn't know what I was talking about. And now after having all of that experience, I'm here, and I'm able to actually kind of implement things that I've wanted to do before with past experience. And it is a developmental process because I'm finding out that I do need to kind of check myself, or I'll be in over my head, as far as expanding more and making things always bigger and stuff.

I think people don't give farmers credit for that. And I didn't certainly didn't understand before I started working on a farm, how much you have to juggle.

One of the different things about this farm versus what a lot of these other colleges offer in terms of sustainable agriculture is that we are mostly student driven and student operated. And so we make the farm plan, we decide what's planted, and we have support from faculty whenever we need it, and we have support from administration. Every once in a while, there's a class. That might be like History of Food and Farming, something like that. But for the most part, it's all coming from just our passion towards it. Which makes it very special in some ways.

So we start things in seed trays. These we started yesterday. And then we wait and see what comes up.

Being out in Vermont, it's almost impossible to be a farm and not have a greenhouse. Because basically, by the time that you can get vegetables out, then you're already pretty far into the season, and you don't have much time to grow food before it freezes over again.

We recently had a student who wanted to work on mushrooms, and he had this whole plan he, you know, figured out how many logs we'd need and where we could get the mushroom spores from, and then it became a project that we did one weekend. But people come down and say, "Oh, we really want," you know, "we want strawberries," or something, and then that's a thing that we'll do.

That's what we want most is to kind of not just be like our own little group with our agenda, but to open it up to people as much as they can to bring in their own projects. And then there's a huge amount of people that are willing to participate and resources to help you get those projects further. I think, yeah, it seems like this year has been a big one, because we're gaining this momentum as a farm. So we want to be able to keep growing and be able to kind of continue. It's kind of the best advertisement that you can give to the college, is throwing all of the food into the dining hall. You know, but I think another thing that we really want to get is community involvement, have more students come out here, you know, and so we want to have experimentation. We want to have student involvement, and we want to have education.