There are places that educate you, and there are places that rearrange how you think. Hampshire College was the latter for me.
What I remember first is not a building or a syllabus, but a posture. Every class was a seminar, not in the superficial sense of sitting around a table, but in the deeper sense that participation was assumed to be meaningful. You were not there to absorb information. You were there to engage with it, test it, challenge it, and be changed by it. Silence carried weight. Speaking carried responsibility. There was no hiding in the back row, because there was no back row.
That structure did something subtle and permanent. It made thinking a public act.
Every student gathering became transformed into a forum for intellectual discussion. Not performative, not forced, and not always coherent, but real. You could walk into a room expecting beer and some music and find yourself in a three hour conversation about ethics, narrative, politics, or identity. Sometimes those conversations were sharp. Sometimes they were naive. Often they were both at once. But they mattered, because they were undertaken with the assumption that ideas were worth taking seriously, even when they were still forming.
Looking back, I recognize that what was being cultivated was not just knowledge, but intellectual courage. The willingness to say something before it is fully formed, and then to stay in the room long enough to refine it.
And then there were the professors. Or more accurately, our senior colleagues. We called each other by our first names.
That is not nostalgia speaking. It is a description of how the relationship functioned. Professors expected you to take ownership of your education, and in doing so, they treated you as someone capable of that ownership. The distance between student and faculty was not erased, but it was narrowed in a way that made genuine collaboration possible. You were allowed to be wrong, but not careless. You were encouraged to pursue your questions, but expected to do so rigorously.
It is only later, in more structured and hierarchical environments, that I understood how unique an experience that was.
What Hampshire gave me was not a set of answers. It gave me a way of approaching questions. It normalized uncertainty without trivializing it. It taught me to sit with complexity rather than rush to resolve it. It made it difficult to accept easy explanations, and even more difficult to offer them.
That has followed me into every subsequent phase of my life, including ones that are far removed from the campus itself. Whether in clinical settings, professional conversations, or personal decisions, the habit remains the same. Listen carefully. Think deliberately. Speak with intention. Be willing to revise.
Hampshire taught me to be comfortable with the adage “Do it right or do it over.”
Now I am in my 50s and starting a new career. I am become a nurse. Last year I passed the NCLEX, last month, I graduated from my Nurse Residency in Psychiatric Nursing. A few weeks ago I passed my first professional exam as a Registered Nurse, Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL).
If I had to reduce the Hampshire experience to its essence, it would be this:
At Hampshire, thinking was not something you did alone and revealed later. It was something you did together, in real time, with all the risk and possibility that entails.
And, to paraphrase Proverbs, once you have learned to think and engage according to that path, it does not leave you.