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DISCOVER THE QUESTIONS THAT MATTER TO YOU Bennington students use a unique structure called The Plan Process to design and evaluate their education. This process involves close collaboration with your faculty advisor, guidance from faculty panels that regularly review your work, and a series of reflective essays that you write over the course of your time at Bennington.

Your Plan helps steer your work in the most compelling directions—short-term, long-term, in and out of the classroom.

If you do not know what you want to study, the Plan Process is a particularly powerful way to discover it. If you know exactly what you plan to study, the process allows you to immerse yourself while still making room for surprise and new discoveries.

THE PLAN PROCESS AT A GLANCE The Plan Process is a shared structure—one that all students use—and is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate each student’s individual trajectory, which often takes an hourglass shape.

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EXPLORATION FIRST YEAR—You take a variety of courses—subjects you know you love, ones you have always wanted to explore, others you never dreamed of trying. You begin to identify the questions that will determine the direction of your studies.

IMMERSION SECOND AND THIRD YEARS—You dive into a particular discipline, a cluster of disciplines, or a question, discovering the power and limitations of immersion. You propose a formal plan for your studies and work with your faculty to determine specific requirements that will ensure depth, rigor, and mastery of your subjects.

OPENING OUTWARD FOURTH YEAR—Your final year is an opening outward, when you explore how your own work relates to others’ and how your deepening understanding of a subject or a craft might matter to the rest of the world. You may choose to conclude your work at Bennington with a senior project or thesis paper.

EXPLORE HOW YOUR WORK MATTERS IN THE WORLD BEYOND CAMPUS…

SANTIAGO, CHILE

FT. COLLINS, CO

ECUADOR

KAMPALA, UGANDA

LONDON, ENGLAND

CHIMBOTE, PERU

GRAND CAYMAN

LARNACA, CYPRUS

LACONIA, NH

JERSEY CITY, NJ

NEW YORK, NY

BATTLE GROUND, IL

Every winter Bennington students spend seven weeks working off campus during an internship period called Field Work Term (FWT). FWT makes it possible for you to pursue jobs and internships that complement your studies and clarify your interests—before you graduate. After four years, you graduate with a résumé as well as a diploma.

SOME RECENT FIELD WORK TERM EXPERIENCES ABC News, New York, NY Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Foundation, New York, NY American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA Beggars Group/Matador Records, New York, NY The Boston Herald, Boston, MA Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston, MA Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, Cleveland, OH Catholic AIDS Action, Windhoek, Namibia Children’s Rights Council, Washington, DC China Care Foundation, Beijing, China City of Albuquerque Planning Department, Albuquerque, NM

Compas de Nicaragua, Nicaragua Democracy for America, South Burlington, VT Drawn and Quarterly Publications, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Eric Corey Freed, organic architect, San Francisco, CA Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York, NY Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY Harvard Medical School, Southborough, MA Human Rights Watch, New York, NY Lennen Bilingual School, Paris, France Jim Henson Company, Hollywood, CA Law & Order: Criminal Intent, New York, NY

Marc Jacobs, New York, NY McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, San Francisco, CA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY MTV Communications, Santa Monica, CA National Economic Research Association, White Plains, NY National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC NBC, New York, NY Reuters, Nairobi, Kenya Sundance Institute/ Film Festival, Park City, UT WGBH, Boston, MA Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT

7 WEEKS. 50 STATES. 195 COUNTRIES. u

Since its founding in 1932, Bennington College has been a place where people come to collaborate and create, to make something new, to do what has never been done before.

1930s

1940s

1950s

Chart the course of modern dance

Pioneer a new school of thought

Engineer a new idea

Martha Graham and fellow modern dance greats attracted leading dancers to premier daring new work at Bennington.

DO SOMETHING YOU NEVER, OR ALWAYS, IMAGINED…

Peter Drucker, the “father of modern management,” released his groundbreaking General Motors study while at Bennington.

Inventor R. Buckminister Fuller tested his Dymaxion House at Bennington, a model for his geodesic dome.

1960s

1970s

1980s

Transform the visual arts

Make new music

Take the literary world by storm

Bennington was a gathering place for leading abstract expressionists: Jackson Pollock, Eugene Goosen, Jules Olitski, Sir Anthony Caro, David Smith, and Helen Frankenthaler ’49, among them.

Pioneering musicians and composers —including Pulitzer Prize–winning spacial composer Henry Brant and percussionist/jazz scientist Milford Graves—found fertile ground at Bennington for new forms of music.

Bestselling authors Michael Pollan ’76, Jonathan Lethem ’86, Donna Tartt ’86, and Bret Easton Ellis ’86 all got their literary start at Bennington—Ellis, in fact, published his runaway hit before he graduated.

1990s

2000s

2010s

Pose the most elegant solution

Make theater history

Change the world

A math solution developed by two Bennington students trumped entries from Princeton and Williams for the most elegant proof of “a certain inequality concerning the area between a circular arc and a chord.”

In 2007, Alan Arkin ’55 (one of only six actors to win a “Best Actor” nomination for his first screen appearance) won an Oscar for his supporting role in Little Miss Sunshine.

A year later Scott Lehrer, Bennington faculty member, won the first ever Tony Award in sound design.

Bennington is a hub for innovators in every field who want to apply their individual talents to addressing global issues of urgent concern.

Revolutionary Iran’s first ambassador to the United Nations Mansour Farhang and anti-apartheid leader Mac Maharaj are among those who came to Bennington to teach.

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PUT YOUR INTELLECT AND IMAGINATION TO WORK FOR A BETTER WORLD...

Bennington’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) invites you to put the world’s most pressing problems at the center of your education, or to incorporate it into your work in other disciplines. Poverty, war, the environment, public health crises, a weakening democracy, even the failure of education itself—imagine an education where the problems of the world are your subject matter and doing something about them is your aim.

That’s the idea behind CAPA. Students, faculty, and staff come together with people whose lives are dedicated to working on pressing public needs—scientists, policymakers, business leaders, journalists, activists, artists, entrepreneurs—not just to study the issues, but to collaborate on solutions.

You can choose to focus your work at Bennington on public action. Under the guidance of your faculty, you develop a Plan that integrates course work and field work, drawing on the full breadth of Bennington’s curriculum as well as a range of interdisciplinary courses that explore the complex variables that define critical public issues and build the capacities necessary to effect lasting change.

STUDENT AS CITIZEN

CAPA’s state-of-the-art, green, academic facility morphs the studio of the artist, the laboratory u of a scientist, the workshop of a craftsman, and the think tank of a policy wonk.

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Bennington students live in houses, close-knit communities of about 30 students each. All houses have kitchens and living rooms—most with fireplaces.

The classrooms are designed for discussion and hands-on learning—from the seminars to the labs to the studios.

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BEST COLLEGE DORMS ”

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“ STUDENTS “CLASS BEST DISCUSSIONS CLASSROOM STUDY ” ” EXPERIENCE THE MOST ENCOURAGED” —The Princeton Review

AREAS OF STUDY

Bennington’s campus is known for its expansive beauty, critically acclaimed architecture, and rich history. Routinely named one of the most beautiful campuses, by The Princeton Review, the College is also celebrated for its vibrant intellectual community and distinctive classroom experience.

MOST BEAUTIFUL CAMPUS”

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Acting Animation Anthropology Architecture Astronomy Biology Ceramics Chemistry Chinese Computing Conflict resolution Dance Design Digital arts Directing Drama Drawing Earth science Environmental studies French History International relations Italian Japanese Languages Literature and writing Mathematics Music Painting Philosophy Photography Physics Playwriting Political economy Political science Printmaking Psychology Public action Science Sculpture Social science Spanish Video Visual arts

AT A GLANCE At Bennington, your education is unified and fueled by your intellect and imagination, guided by a rigorous and ongoing conversation with your faculty, and shaped by your experience working in the world each year. A Bennington education invites you to explore how the questions that matter to you and the questions that matter to the world come together.

DISTINCTIVE PROGRAMS u The Plan Process is the unique structure Bennington students use to design and

evaluate their education. u Field Work Term, an annual, seven-week winter internship period, allows students to

pursue jobs and internships that complement their studies. u The teacher-practitioner model means that students work in close collaboration

with faculty members who themselves are actively practicing in their fields. u The Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) invites students to study

the world’s most pressing problems, confront what it means to make lasting change on any one of them, and make that the focus of their academic work.

FACTS & FIGURES Student/faculty ratio.............................................................................................................................. 9:1 Average class size..................................................................................................................................... 13 Total enrollment.....................................................................................................................................755 Tuition & fees .............................................................................................................................$48,220 Room & board ........................................................................................................................... $14,200 Bennington College offers full and partial four-year scholarships. The College is committed to making a Bennington education an affordable option for students and their families. bennington.edu • 800-833-6845 • admissions@bennington.edu

Top 12 Non-Traditional Colleges

“...what Bennington students have in common is self-motivation and a real thirst for knowledge.”

—The Huffington Post

–Fiske Guide to College

Top 10 Brainiest Colleges

“Scattered across the country are colleges where an actual education is paramount, and obtaining that education is often a rigorous and inventive process.”

—Unigo

#6 Bennington College #7 Pitzer College #8 Hampshire College #9 Sarah Lawrence College #10 Grinnell College

#1 Reed College #2 Wabash College #3 University of Chicago #4 Whitman College #5 Swarthmore College

Antioch College Bennington College Brown University College of the Atlantic Evergreen State College Hampshire College Naropa University New College of Florida The New School Sarah Lawrence College St. Johns College Wesleyan University

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LOCATION Located in the buzzing and picturesque southwestern tip of Vermont, Bennington borders New York’s capital region and the Berkshire region of western Massachusetts. The College is a short drive to its southern neighbors Williams College, The Clark Art Museum, and MASS MoCA and to the shopping, outdoor adventure, and literary offerings just to its north in Manchester, Vermont. Saratoga Springs, upstate New York’s cultural hub, is 45 minutes away.

40 miles from Albany International Airport (ALB) 40 miles from Amtrak’s Albany-Rensselaer train station (commuter train to NYC) 40 miles from Albany’s Union Station (bus to Boston, NYC, DC, and other metro areas)

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