 The Colby Entrepreneurial Alliance hosted a start-up business competition that awarded $15,000 to students. Nine groups presented their ideas to a panel of five judges. First place and $10,000 went to My Fresh Company LLC, a website to connect Maine farmers with buyers, proposed by Marcus Josefsson '13, Danny Garin '13, and Noah VanValkenburg '13. Second place and $5,000 went to Benjamin Weinberger '11 for a nonprofit urban gardening start-up in Chicago called Our Homegrown Collaborative. Read the Colby magazine story »
The annual spring Career Connections Weekend (April 7-9), sponsored by the Colby Alumni Network and the Alumni Council, drew more than 60 alumni and parents to campus to network with students about their careers and the post-Colby transition. Alumni, parents, and students participated in mock interview sessions, class visits, a presentation by Ha Le '10 and Alene Gelbard P'03 titled Company Community Partnerships for Health, a student-alumni trivia night, and the first annual Business Competition. The Alumni Council, Parents Executive Committee, and Board of Trustees also conducted their spring meetings over the weekend. For more information or to express interest in participating in future Career Connections Weekend events, please contact Randi Arsenault '09 in the Office of Alumni Relations at rlarsena@colby.edu.
 Hundreds of students present projects or perform at the annual Colby Undergraduate Research Symposium. The symposium was established in 2000 as part of a National Science Foundation AIRE (Award for Integration of Research and Education) grant that recognized Colby's ambitious research agenda as a model for undergraduate education and helped to expand it. Keynote presenters on April 27 are professors Catherine Bevier (biology), Debra Barbezat (economics), and Steven Saunders (music). A full schedule of the presentations, abstracts, and more is online.
 Tory Gray '11, a psychology-neuroscience major and captain of women's track and field, was featured in the Morning Sentinel. Gray, who does lab work on rats at Colby, will be doing research on mice at Massachusetts General Hospital to study concussions and brain trauma following graduation, thanks to a grant from the NFL. "It's such a hot topic right now, so it's really, really cool to be at the forefront of it," said Gray, who hails from Farmington, Maine. A football fan herself, she is torn between her concern over the brain damage caused by head trauma vs. her concern for retaining the integrity of the game of football.
 Seniors Meredith Fast, Ramsey Meigs, and James Violette were awarded prestigious Fulbright fellowships and will put their German language skills to use teaching in Germany and Austria after graduation. Fast, from Wilton, Maine, will teach at a school in Mattersburg, Austria, about 40 kilometers from Vienna. Meigs, from Newton, Mass., has not received his school assignment but said he will teach English in a public middle or high school and hopes to be placed in Berlin. Violette, from Waterville, Maine, will teach at a high school just outside of Innsbruck, Austria. More »
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 As executive director of the Afghan Scholars Initiative (ASI), which he cofounded with Qiamuddin Amiry '09, John Campbell '09 has helped bring seven students from Afghanistan to top-flight secondary schools in the United States and India. The first two, Meetra Ameni and Sikandar Ahmadi, won scholarships to Smith and Williams, respectively, after graduating from Gould Academy last year. Amiry, now finishing a master's at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, dreamed up the scholarship program; Campbell went to work to create a formal structure. "By the end of senior year it was a big part of what I was doing every day," said Campbell. More »
 The New York Times "DealBook" reported on Christina Feng '08, who uses Wall Street deals to teach finance in her Synergy M&A class. Feng's New York City students, many from low-income families, had little exposure to corporate finance and investment banking before this class. "It's a field that traditionally not a lot of my students would feel they could break into," said Feng. The class hosted guest lecturer Bob Diamond '73, head of Barclays. "What really impressed me was how knowledgeable kids with no background had become in this subject area. To me, that's what teaching is all about," said Diamond, who invited the entire class to the Barclays headquarters for a tour of the trading floor and offered to reserve several Barclays internships for graduates.
 Volunteering with the nonprofit Pine Tree Legal Services in Portland was supposed to give Thomas Cox '66 an opportunity to gingerly dip his toes back into the legal profession 10 years after abandoning it. Instead it led to the most rewarding event in his career. Cox helped ignite an uproar over the mishandling of foreclosure cases by some of the nation’s most prominent lenders, which triggered a foreclosure investigation by all 50 states' attorneys general into heavyweight mortgage lenders and servicers including GMAC, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase. More »
 This year's Alumni College, July 24-28, focuses on the Italian Renaissance, a nodal point for the transmission of antique ideas and art forms into modern Europe and the world as well as a foundation for many modern developments. Faculty members in history, Italian, government, Jewish studies, art, and music will explore the period from a variety of perspectives. Sessions, presenters, and registration are online.
 Beginning next year students will be able to minor in cinema studies. In 2004, with an institutional initiative to bolster teaching of visual arts underway, faculty members from departments that incorporated film studies in their curricula met to discuss a formal program. They found more than 50 courses, many with high enrollments, that used film study. The College's first introductory film studies course was offered four years ago, and Assistant Professor Sarah Keller, who focuses on film, joined the English faculty in 2008 to teach that course and others. This year saw the arrival of Associate Professor of Cinema Studies Steve Wurtzler. More »
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Bob Burke comes from a Colby family and has stayed involved with his alma mater throughout the decades in a multitude of ways. In June he will return to campus to celebrate his 50th reunion, and he plans to contribute to his class's 50th reunion gift via an IRA. "I believe that the IRA rollover gift option is an excellent way to make a gift to Colby and not have to pay taxes on the amount you withdraw from your IRA," said Bob. 
