I go to Williams College. It’s a tiny school—about 2,000 people—in the middle of rural Massachusetts. It’s very outdoorsy, and it’s a very close-knit community. My friends and I do a lot of hiking. We have a lot of traditions around that.

In the classroom, I’m a political science and Spanish double major. Political science was planned. I think that’s what I wanted to do going into school. Spanish was not.

I’m coming off a fantastic semester abroad where I signed a language pledge to speak only Spanish. All of a sudden, my Spanish abilities really took off. I’ve only been back on campus for two or three weeks for senior year, so I’m still saying hi to everyone because I haven’t seen a lot of people in almost a year.

 Madrid. I was staying with a host family. There’s this stereotype that people in Spain don’t work very hard. What I learned from my experience in Madrid is that, in the big cities, people may stay up late, but they also wake up super early to go to work. My host dad was just the most energetic person I’d ever seen. He was always saying, “Levántate, levántate,” in the morning when I had class at 8:30, even though we’d had dinner at 11:00 p.m. the previous night.

I have to ask: do you like jamón ibérico (Spanish ham)?

 I had a bad experience. I was really, really hungry, and jamón is obviously super common in Spain. I ate basically a full package of it. It’s super salty and oily, and my stomach did not forgive me.
So I learned that I need to eat food that’s more saludable—healthier.

 So you had this awesome semester abroad. Now you’re a senior, so I have permission to ask you this question: do you have plans for after school?

 If you’d asked me this question a couple of years ago, I would have told you I wanted to do something Foreign Service-related. Now I’m super into the campaign space.
This summer, I was doing a lot of work looking at how corporations build giving plans and how corporate relationships operate on the Hill. I was spending one or two days a week on the Hill.
I really like the fast-paced, hectic environment that campaigns have to offer. I’m currently working on something in Georgia. I’m looking at transitioning to something in Iowa later on.

 That’s really exciting. Do you have any prognostications, as a political science major, for the November elections?

 I’m very scared to make predictions because I don’t think I’ll be rewarded much for being correct, and I’ll be heavily scrutinized for being incorrect. I will say that I have a lot of interesting observations about how the campaigns are being run.

We’re seeing a weird political moment where, with regard to certain issues, both parties are saying extremely similar things in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen in this era of hyperpolarization—especially over the last ten or twenty years.

Both parties are saying very similar things about data centers. Both parties are trying to say similar things about corruption. Both parties are trying to build affordability and healthcare platforms, and to a lesser extent, education platforms. All three of those issues are very salient.

I think it’s creating an interesting environment where the charisma of the candidate is going to matter more. But paradoxically, I also think partisanship is going to matter even more in this election. If both candidates in a given race are saying similar things and voters lack some of the cues they would otherwise use, they’re going to fall back on what I would argue is the number one cue in this environment: partisanship.

That’s an acute observation.

I’m going to move backward in time a bit now, to when you were a freshman. What was it like coming from BASIS Independent McLean and starting at Williams?

I’ll answer this in two different ways: socially and academically.

Socially, first. At BIM, I graduated in a class of 29. You knew everyone. Williams has about 500 or 550 students per class. All of a sudden, there were so many more people. It was overwhelming at the beginning. But as time went on, I truly got to know people.

I’ve also enjoyed the greater diversity of people. Williams has a lot of international students—about ten percent. We have students from all across the country. Hearing a greater diversity of perspectives and academic interests was fascinating.

Academically, honestly, I was a lot more prepared than many of my peers.

I think BIM taught me to be a self-advocate in a way that some of my peers from other schools weren’t prepared for. Office hours in particular—or Student Hours, as they’re called at BIM—made me comfortable walking into a professor’s office hours in week one or week two of freshman year. That was not the case for some of my peers. They were terrified. I was ready to sit down and talk with a professor, maybe even disagree with them a little bit if it helped my own learning.

So academically, I think I was ready.

That’s great to hear. You seem really happy there. I’d love to hear how you found that fit. When you were applying to college, what made Williams feel like the right place for you?

I knew I wanted a small community where people, by and large, knew one another, even if it wasn’t as small as BIM. I wanted to take the teacher relationships I had at BIM and translate that into relationships with professors. I also wanted something outdoorsy, where there was a lot of backpacking, hiking, or skiing.

So naturally I applied to Williams. I applied to Middlebury. I applied to Amherst. I also applied to schools that were somewhat liberal arts-oriented even if they weren’t technically liberal arts colleges, like Dartmouth. I was ultimately deciding between Williams and Dartmouth.

Each school had an accepted-students day. There would be one or two hours devoted to some kind of academic expo. At Dartmouth, all the academic expos were separated by department. I went into the government building, and there were only students there. I said, “Can I talk to a professor?” That’s what high-school-senior me wanted to do. I was told, “No, none of them are here.”

A week later, I’m visiting Williams. The Academic Expo is all inside one giant gymnasium. There are one or two tables for every department or concentration. I approached the global studies table, not even knowing what global studies was, and a professor and I started talking about my weird theory about Iran for 30 minutes. Eventually, he sent me one of his syllabi.

I later did some research on him and realized that this professor is one of the most respected scholars at Williams. He’s got six degrees. And he took all that time to talk with me when I hadn’t even committed to the school yet.

That kind of community—and especially that academic commitment to being there for students and peers—was something I was really looking for.

 I love that.

Now I want you to go even further back into the mists of time, to when you were a senior at BASIS Independent McLean going through the college application process.

Our seniors are currently in the thick of that right now. So on their behalf: is there anything you wish you’d known or done differently when you were applying to colleges that might help them?

 One thing I remember from my senior fall was having trouble figuring out what actually distinguished one school from another similar school. I’d log onto the website and read the mission statement and think, “Okay, what actually makes Williams different from Swarthmore, for example?”

I think there are a couple of ways to solve that problem. One is to talk to current students. You can do that digitally. You have an amazing network of BIM students currently at schools and alumni, and you can start there.

I also think you should make the most of your visits. A lot of people do college visits over the summer or during winter break, and if the college isn’t in session, you’re not going to see the students. Same for weekends. A wasted visit is one where you go at nine in the morning on a Sunday, don’t ask any questions of the tour guide, and then just leave.

You want to see students in action. You want to ask: Does what students actually do day-to-day line up with what I want to do? And cold-approach students. Just ask them, “Hey, I’m a senior in high school. I’m looking at this place. Can you tell me what it’s really like?” Tour guides are great, but they’re going to give you the tour-guide version of things. You’ll get a more candid answer if you approach ordinary students.

 I think that’s exactly right.

Is there anything else you’d like to add? One final piece of advice for current BIM students?

 The final thing I’d add is that I think most people tend to view high school through two lenses: knowledge and college. You’re learning facts, and you’re also trying to get good grades and create an application that will help you get into a good school.

But I also think high school is incredibly important for developing skills. It’s where you learn how to write, how to communicate, how to present and how to do group work.

So if you look at your high school experience not just as a “knowledge and college” opportunity, but also as an opportunity to develop skills, I think you’ll take greater advantage of what BIM has to offer.

 That’s great advice. Thanks so much, Benjamin. And thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

Thank you!

Have a great senior year and keep us posted. I’m excited to hear what you do next!