Before and Beyond Boyce: Reflections from a PIM Alumna (Eirene Chen)

From the day I pulled into the gravel driveway off Kipling Road in August 2003, I knew I was in for an unforgettable experience at SIT. It looked more like a summer camp or a retreat center than “a real graduate school.” I had packed way too many books to fit into my corner room at Janeway Dorm. And what was there to do for fun in Brattleboro? Was it me or did the main drag seem to shut down after 9pm? What did that mean for people without cars? It was too early to even wonder about what kind of job I could get after completing my degree, but that too lurked in the back of my mind as I unpacked my bags.

Choosing to undertake graduate education at any time in one’s life represents a significant investment on many levels, and many prospective SIT students understandably want to be assured of promising career and life prospects were they to participate in SIT’s Program in Intercultural Management (PIM). As a former PIM student, I definitely had many questions about these very things! But I also suspect that, just as my path towards SIT’s intercultural management program has been full of interesting surprises, so have many of your own paths, and aren’t our explorations so compelling precisely because they continue to offer us richly unexpected turns even after graduation?

In this post, I’ll share a little about my own journey to SIT and beyond. I hope it will help you clarify your own choices as you consider SIT.

‘Before and Beyond Boyce: Reflections from A PIM Alum’ continues… 

I am a first-generation Chinese-American woman, born to an immigrant family of modest means. I grew up in the same part of the US south that produced the two Jesses (Helms and Jackson). My parents were educators and encouraged me to develop a strong intercultural awareness and political consciousness. They also encouraged to me to pursue academic success in traditional learning institutions. While growing up, I avidly read the writings of human rights visionaries like Martin Luther King, Jr and MK Gandhi. However, as an undergraduate comparative literature and philosophy student, I hadn’t even heard of SIT’s stellar study-abroad programs at that time. At 22, my fantasy of adulthood involved not public community service but visions of faculty appointments in metropolitan universities while perfecting my tan on Aegean beaches during summers off. Needless to say, I never anticipated that I would one day be enjoying “nuts-and-bolts” courses like Organizational Behavior One at a small graduate institute in southern Vermont!

In college, I loved absorbing the theories of philosophers like Marx, Foucault and Said. But I was unable to digest their recommendations on a deep, cellular level. Their social visions felt abstract and disembodied, and the top-down pedagogical style in which much of this information was transmitted to me had virtually sanitized the energy for authentic transformation out of them. In contrast, the professors whose classes most inspired me were inevitably mavericks with very creative teaching styles and substantial commitments to community development work, whether in the US or in other countries. The theories they taught had grown out of their own life experiences. They ran their classes as community organizers and infused the philosophers’ ideas with vitality and meaning. And they cared about their students. They were, in short, like the classmates and faculty mentors I would later meet at SIT.

Like many people who are drawn to SIT, I value learning from direct experience as much as I do from theories. After college, I wanted to experience how relevant these cultural theories were to the actual lives of people on whose behalf the philosophers were ostensibly advocating. So, upon graduation, I began working as a community literacy educator in North Carolina. My first mentors in the field of English-language education were alumni of SIT’s Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program. Through them, I learned how to engage many aspects of a student’s rich life experience and innate creativity so that they could direct and enhance their own learning experience. The MAT alumni also emphasized the importance of interacting with learners as peers and not as superiors. This is a crucial assumption which distinguishes both MAT and PIM programs at SIT from their counterparts at other universities.

My first exposure to SIT’s educational philosophy proved to be immediately and immensely helpful when I subsequently accepted a university teaching assignment as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Uzbekistan. My students, many only a few years younger than I, were training to become future schoolteachers, and we enjoyed learning from each other. They expected me to maintain some distance as a teacher, but due to our closeness in age, expressing some humility as a guest instructor only made sense. The university was ethnically mixed and I managed to incorporate some topics about assumptions, stereotypes, inter-group dynamics, and prejudice reduction into our classes. The students were very nervous and very excited about them. Once they warmed up to me, my older colleagues began to try them out as well. They also shared the ingenious strategies they’d developed to circumvent the usual obstacles that plague public institutions of higher learning anywhere – eg, funding cuts and late paychecks. These talented students and teachers helped me appreciate the unique challenges that they face as educators in a pluralistic, politically transitioning society with many competing social paradigms. They also inspired me to begin exploring international development as a vocational path. Little did I know that the same topics my students had enjoyed so much in our language classes would show up again later when I began studying peace education curricula as a PIM Conflict Transformation student!

When I returned to the US, I resumed working with immigrant and refugee communities as an educator and program manager. I was interested in pursuing advanced studies in international refugee assistance from an interdisciplinary perspective, and the positive experiences I’d had with my MAT mentors led me to apply for admission to SIT. Although I felt initially unsure whether to focus on the MAT or PIM program, I eventually decided on PIM, because the Conflict Transformation course titles listed in the catalogue excited and energized me the most. It turned out to be the right choice! I still remember my first meeting with my advisor and our advising group one of the Boyce conference rooms. She asked us to close our eyes and imagine in vivid detail how we saw ourselves working professionally five years from then. I wrote out my vision, turned it in and forgot about it…until I realized mid-way through my field practicum a full year later that I had created exactly what I had visualized on that sunny September afternoon.

As PIM coursework is described comprehensively in other blog entries, I will keep my summary brief. The residency portion of the PIM program is generally a year or two shorter than what you might experience at a comparable program elsewhere, but, due to the intensity, rigor and quantity of the coursework, you will learn a lot. The program is quite unique in that it integrates both conceptual and experiential learning approaches and requires a considerable degree of active self-reflection from students. While it is true that the PIM program may not have the same kind of resources available in larger, urban research universities, it does provide the opportunity to learn alongside some of the most creative, visionary and dedicated practitioners active in contemporary civil society movements. The small size and camaraderie of the PIM student body encourages friendships with experienced colleagues and development practitioners from many parts of the world. And, as many classmates are already established or emerging social change leaders, you can expect some heated exchanges on campus from time to time!

Southern Vermont and nearby western Massachusetts offer breathtaking natural beauty and culturally vibrant, socially progressive communities. And yes, Brattleboro does have a number of cafes, bistros and gathering places for those seeking rest and recreation after 9pm! Caveat: As with many other progressive mountain enclaves, this region is primarily Anglo-American and more ethnically homogeneous than other parts of North America. Living here may not always be comfortable for members of minority ethnic groups, especially if one is accustomed to a more culturally or ethnically diverse urban social base. However, there are a number of local community organizations that actively focus on promoting intercultural understanding as new populations move into these mountain communities. SIT has strong partnerships with these organizations and many students are at the forefront of diversity education initiatives in southern Vermont and in the Pioneer Valley. 

What students learn on campus at SIT is often immediately applicable during the practicum phase. I completed my field practicum as a project officer and technical advisor with a prominent Afghan peacebuilding and development NGO based in Kabul, Afghanistan. My training at SIT had prepared me well for the real-life organizational dilemmas that awaited me the moment I got off the plane. For example, during the ride into Kabul from the airport, my colleagues announced that they had a grant proposal due in three hours and asked if I could help them draft a community conflict analysis and logical framework for their proposed refugee reintegration project. Logical frameworks are program planning tools widely used by multilateral and bilateral funding agencies in foreign assistance programs, and I was quite thankful to have learned how to write one during my spring semester at SIT. Furthermore, as a significant degree of work in the PIM program is done in teams, I found that my experience in articulating group dynamics helped us improve our work performance, especially in re-framing and shifting misunderstandings between donors and implementing field staff. And, during regular field visits to the rural villages with whom our organization worked, I also found that what I had learned at SIT about participatory community mobilization was effective and meaningful for many of the refugee families who wanted to rebuild their communities with the peace education services that our organization offered. Lastly, my colleagues, local and international, were impressively resilient, dedicated and talented. They helped me understand that grassroots community leaders already have many sound ideas about how to improve their own communities, and that as their visions and practices are further incorporated into established social development initiatives, these programs have a greater chance of succeeding over time. Although rebuilding societies in the wake of violent conflict comes with many, many challenges, what I witnessed in Afghanistan has given me hope about its future.

While many CT students continue their field involvements in the international relief and development industry upon graduation, I decided to first relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area to complete a post-graduate fellowship at a leading international development NGO and to undertake further training in community conflict resolution. At that time, northern California seemed as exotic to me as other destinations had been when they were merely spots on my dreamscape years earlier. Still heady from having just completed my graduate degree during the fall capstone seminar, I packed up my car and began the long drive westward. Fortunately, there is a supportive network of SIT alumni in the Bay Area and I was warmly welcomed to the “Left Coast.”

See the second exciting installment of SIT Alumna Eirene Chen’s blog entry for stories of ‘life after SIT’!

About the Author:
Eirene Chen is a PIM/CT 63, currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area as a freelance writer, community mediator and consultant to peacebuilding and community development NGOs.

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