A Supportive Community

College has not gone the way Isabelle Farber ’26 expected it to go.

She planned to major in biology or environmental science, but even in her first year she was starting to adjust her goals to become a history major. 

Although she started at Washington College right out of high school, Farber did not take the traditional four straight years to a degree. Instead, she took a gap year between her first and second years to live on her own and take over a business, Middletown Valley Beagles, a hunt club founded by her grandfather and based on her family's farm. 

Now that she is back in the classroom, she is still returning home to Frederick County every weekend to run the business, arriving back on campus at 5 a.m. Mondays to start the next week of class.

But through it all, Farber has found that professors, staff, and her fellow students have been understanding and supportive, and that community of kind people has ended up defining her Washington experience.

“Everybody in college grows into a different person, which I think is fantastic. The way that the College supports you and helps you grow into that person is very important,” Farber said. “College can be very overwhelming and very stressful. Being able to give yourself your own time to take a deep breath is very important. That's really hard to learn and do. But I think this campus has a really great support system for that. The professors are very understanding of that here.”

The history professors, in particular, have shaped Farber's academic experience, starting her first year when she realized that not only did she find the subject matter interesting, she was retaining it well and enjoyed later sharing it with others. In high school Farber had participated in the Teacher Academy of Maryland, serving in a middle school science classroom her senior year, and she sees herself becoming a social studies teacher at some point after graduation. 

Her secondary education minor will help prepare her for that, and the history department and Washington College Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience both focus on public history, which is dedicated to engaging the community with history in different ways to understand the past and its impact on the present and future.

Beyond academics, Farber's extracurricular activities have been driven by the combination of history and the strong Washington community. She has served as the dramaturg for two Washington College theatre productions, providing historical context to student writers, directors, and actors for Author of Memories, a student-written play set in World War II, and Bon Iver Fights a Bear, a comedy for which Farber's research has centered around the personal life and story of the title character.

As she starts in on her own senior capstone experience paper dealing with the Nuremberg Trials, Farber knows she will serve as the dramaturg for at least one more production, a play her roommate is writing for her capstone, to be staged in the spring. That experience has been more in-depth than either of the first two plays she worked on because she was consulting as the script was being written. In all, Farber has had the opportunity to see three different sides of dramaturgy and contribute to the success of her fellow students' work.

“I am very much a backstage gal, but I definitely have had fun doing it. It's been very community oriented,” she said. “The community building here is very supportive and very diverse and very inclusive of every type of group. And I think you can easily see that even just walking around here for an hour." 

 — Mark Jolly-Van Bodegraven