Parents and Families

Bowdoin College held its 16th annual Honors Day ceremony to recognize publicly the college-wide academic and extracurricular achievements of Bowdoin students and faculty. The ceremony was held May 9, 2012, at Kanbar Auditorium, Studzinski Recital Hall.

Sarah Siwak '13, of Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., has been selected for a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) to study intensive advanced Russian during the summer of 2012.

Associate Professor of Government Michael Franz weighs in on the role of superPACS in an NPR piece looking at how these funding machines are tied into the apparent increase in negative campaign ads. Franz is part of a team examining the political ads on broadcast TV and national cable.

Juniors Mariya Ilyas and Amar Patel, as well as Sustainable Bowdoin, have received awards from Maine Campus Compact, a consortium of 18 higher education institutions dedicated to promoting community service, civic engagement and service learning in higher education.

Jesus Navarro ’13 started out playing video games as a kid. Then he began fixing the video games when they broke. Then he became interested in building computers. Today, he’s breaking new ground in computer security.

Senior Sarah Glaser has set up an import/export business to help Ghanaian artists sell their work in the United States.

Books on the history of the College, long out of print and rarely available outside the confines of the Bowdoin College Library, are now freely accessible on the Web from anywhere in the world thanks to Bowdoin’s participation in the LYRASIS Mass Digitization Collaborative, a Sloan Foundation grant-subsidized program that has made digitization easy and affordable for libraries and cultural institutions across the country.

Valuable lessons abound in Bowdoin’s Chemistry Department, but rarely are those pearls of wisdom actually worth their weight in gold. A 24-karat gold bar, likely the subject of scientific experiments long ago, lay inert in the old chemistry stockroom in Cleaveland Hall for decades, and was moved to a new storage area when Druckenmiller opened.

The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, with help from students, is organizing a mass dance event to show support for saving Polar Bears and the Arctic. Set for noon, Saturday, April 28, folks are invited to wear white and get their groove on in what is hoped to be a giant dance party that also includes a T-shirt giveaway.

President Barry Mills welcomed almost 100 admitted high school seniors who were visiting campus recently for the Bowdoin Experience.

Watch as Trevor McDonald '15 bests the world record for the longest self-tossed grape catch.

Fifty teams and 419 participants came out for Bowdoin's Relay for Life last Friday, raising a total of $45,750 for the American Cancer Society.

Alexi Robbins '14 is close to launching a beta site for an online start-up he says will improve on other music sharing sites, including Pandora, Onesheet, Myspace and YouTube.

Last Friday, members of the 207-year-old Peucinian Society — a literary group and Bowdoin's oldest student organization — read the complete Iliad aloud from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art steps.

Bowdoin will host the 2012 RoboCup U.S. Open for the Standard Platform League Saturday and Sunday, April 21 and 22. For the fourth straight year, the event will be held in the Sidney J. Watson Arena.

Bowdoin celebrated a beautiful spring day last week with its first annual chalk walk on the main quad.

Earth Day, now in its 42nd year and celebrated in more than 175 countries around the globe, is April 22; it began as a way to increase awareness and appreciation of the Earth’s natural environment. Five years ago, the College deepened its commitment to sustainability by taking the proactive step of pledging to become carbon-neutral by 2020 and building new academic pathways for addressing sustainability issues.

Bowdoin students distributed $17,825 in Common Good Grants among nine local nonprofits this year.

Since Bowdoin magazine reported it in a Fall 2009 story about WBOR, we've heard from many alumni who have been eagerly awaiting the release of the Pete Seeger album The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. We're happy to say the wait is over—Smithsonian Folkways Recordings officially released the album April 17.

Five sophomores have received Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellowships, which will support them as they pursue independent research for the next two years, both on and off campus, while being mentored by a Bowdoin professor.